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, 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. |