Pauls Valley is a city in and the county seat of Garvin County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 5,992 at the 2020 census, a terminate of 3.2 percent from the figure of 6,187 in 2010. It was contracted by and named for Smith Paul, a North Carolina original who married a Chickasaw girl and became a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation previously the Civil War. The town economy is largely based on agriculture and oil production.

The area that eventually became the city of Pauls Valley was one of the archaic European-American settlements in what was next known as Indian Territory. Smith Paul, born in 1809 in New Bern, North Carolina, discovered the fertile bottom estate which is now Pauls Valley while a fanatic of a wagon train traveling to California. Paul described the estate as “a section where the bottom estate was wealthy and blue stem grass grew so tall that a man on horseback was with quotation to hidden in its foliage.”

The Tri-Party Treaty of January 1, 1837, ceded this part of what is now the State of Oklahoma to the Chickasaw Nation. When the Chickasaw people were relocated to Indian Territory that year, Smith Paul moved like them and married Ela-Teecha, a Chickasaw woman. In 1847, the Pauls expected a plantation upon the rich Garvin County bottom land, where Rush Creek associated the Washita River, which became known to locals as “Smith Paul’s Valley”. Mail to the Pauls was often addressed to “Smith Paul’s Large Farm”. By 1871, postal relieve was conventional in the area, although the proclaim office was designated “Paul’s Valley, Arkansas”, because the Indian Territory was living thing administered out of Arkansas at that time.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (a.k.a. Santa Fe Railway) shortened the post to “Paul’s Valley” when it built a track through the community in 1887, completing its connection between Kansas and the Gulf Coast. The railroad brought mass and material comfort to Smith Paul’s Valley. The first newspaper was published in 1887. The Pauls Valley town site was laid out in 1892, though the plat was not credited by the Dawes Commission until 1903.