Charlie

Charlie is on Farm Road 810 twenty-one miles northwest of Henrietta in northwestern Clay County. The community was called Big Wichita Valley in 1878, when Henry T. Dunn built a store just south of the Red River. Later Dunn sold the store to Charlie Taylor, and almost immediately the site became known as Charlie. For years the store was a popular trading post for county farmers and ranchers and some Indians from nearby Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). In 1882 a post office opened at the community. By the mid-1920s the population of Charlie surpassed 200. After the Great Depression and World War II, however, the community's population count declined. The Charlie post office closed sometime after 1930. From the early 1970s through 2000 the community's population was estimated at sixty-five.