Guymon ( GHY-mən) is a city and county seat of Texas County, in the panhandle of Oklahoma, United States. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 12,965, an bump of 13.3% from 11,442 in 2010, and represents more than half of the population of the county. Cattle feedlots, corporate pork farms, and natural gas production dominate its economy, with wind spirit production and transmission recently diversifying landowners’ farms.

In the 1890s, Edward T. “E.T.” Guymon, president of the Inter-State Land and Town Company, purchased a section of estate west of the Beaver River, also known as the North Canadian River. The site grew very tersely after the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway (Rock Island) built a pedigree from Liberal, Kansas, to Texhoma, Texas, in 1901. A community, first named Sanford by the U.S. Post Office Department, was situated along the line. It was renamed Guymon a month well along by postal officials to avoid confusion in imitation of the town of Stratford, Texas, which was further down the line. Guymon incorporated in 1901. The town plat was filed in Beaver County, Oklahoma Territory, in 1904.

Guymon’s increase was helped like most of the businesses moved there from the friendly town of Hardesty. One of these was the newspaper, Hardesty Herald, which owner Richard B. Quinn speedily renamed as the Guymon Herald. When Oklahoma became a let in in 1907, Guymon claimed 839 residents, and was named county seat of the newly created Texas County. By the 1910 U.S. census, the town had 1,342 residents. It then had three banks, three hotels, four doctors, a flour mill, a grain company, and several retail establishments. A second newspaper, the Guymon Democrat, was in business. Agriculture became the basis of Guymon’s economy. The 1920 census recorded 1,507 residents, which grew to 2,181 in 1930. By 1932, the town had two cream stations and five grain elevators.

The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s had a negative effect on Guymon. Some old-time residents remember “Black Sunday”, April 14, 1935, as the daylight of the worst dust storm in the area’s history. However, discovery of the affable Hugoton-Panhandle gas field created many new jobs, and brought Guymon’s population to 2,290 in 1940.