Devol Calaboose, and not much else

The Devol calaboose

When I first learned about Devol, Cotton County, Oklahoma, I thought its name derived from "Loved" spelled backwards. This is not an idea without precedent, as the community of Retrop (Washita County) is simply Porter spelled the other way.

But I was wrong: Devol was named after a land owner. It began as a railroad town (Wichita Falls and Northwestern Railway) in Comanche County at the turn of the 20th century, but then became part of Cotton County in 1912. Devol mushroomed by the 1920s as its proximity to Grandfield and Burkburnett led to oil and agricultural booms on the Big Pasture. However, the town did not fare well during the Great Depression and has continued to shrink.

Beside the calaboose, there's not much else in Devol to explain the town's former industriousness, which in its early history consisted of oil refineries, a bank, a few grocery stores, at least one mercantile store, a gin (or two), a school with a good baseball team, two hardware stores, a photography shop, a newspaper, and a few hotels. The one vestige of old Devol remains behind its trailer-housed post office: its two-cell calaboose. This little concrete jail still boasts its iron doors, too: a reminder of a time when Devol was a busy, if not always peaceful, place.

Male genitalia are preferred artistic renderings inside abandoned buildings. Banksy would probably like to have a word.