Oklahoma

Oklahoma is a small rural community located on Farm Road 2978 about thirty miles northwest of Houston and thirteen miles southwest of Conroe in southern Montgomery County. Settlement began in the area by the late 1800s, and local farmers constructed the first Oklahoma Community School around 1880 on land donated by the G. V. Leslie family. The one-room structure functioned both as a school house and church. A cemetery adjacent to the site was started sometime later, and the earliest marked graves date to the 1890s. A two-room school was built on property purchased from the Hirsch family in 1923. After that building burned in 1930, a new school was built in its place. During the 1930s highway maps showed the school, a church, and numerous dwellings in the area. The school closed in 1944, when students were transferred to nearby Magnolia. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century the school building functioned as an important community center for Oklahoma. Though no population estimates were available in 2000, the region's proximity to the Houston metropolitan area signified increasing commercial and residential development in the vicinity. The Oklahoma School received a Texas Historical Marker in 2003.