Hoot Owl was incorporated in 1977 by a family of three in order to "keep trespassing hunters and other towns from encroaching on their land." In 1992 the town filed to be dissolved after a bank foreclosed the property, and the town's two residents, mayor and founder William R. Bradley Jr., and his son, city clerk Robert Bradley, both voted in favor of dissolution. The foreclosing bank filed suit and successfully blocked the dissolution in 1993. The town was then sold to a Tulsa doctor, Thomas Robert, in 1994. Robert told interviewers he intended to use the town as a weekend home.[5]
Geography
Hoot Owl is in northeastern Mayes County, on the eastern shore of Lake Hudson, a reservoir on the Neosho River. It is 12 miles (19km) by road southwest of Spavinaw and 7 miles (11km) north of Salina. The town is 2.5 miles (4.0km) northwest of Oklahoma State Highway 20 at the end of what mapping services label "Hoot Owl Road," but the narrow dead-end road is simply designated as No. 443.5.[5]
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the site has a total area of 0.06 square miles (0.16km2), of which 0.001 square miles (0.003km2), or 1.67%, are water.[1]
Its population peaked at 5 in 1990; the 2000 census initially gave the town a total population of 0, but then revised the figure to 1. A census official explained "We don't have specific information that informs us that there is exactly one person in this town, rather our estimates production programs are designed to allocate fractional shares of the county population to its component place parts, and in this instance, a fractional share is rounded to one person as our estimated total for the town."[5] By 2010, the population had risen to 4.[7] By the United States Census, 2020 the population was back to zero.
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