unincorporated community
An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...
Oklahoma
Oklahoma ( ; Choctaw language, Choctaw: , ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Texas to the south and west, Kansas to the north, Missouri to the northea ...
, United States. It is located south of
Fort Cobb
Fort Cobb was a United States Army post established in what is now Caddo County, Oklahoma in 1859 to protect relocated Native Americans from raids by the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne. The fort was abandoned by Maj. William H. Emory at the begin ...
at the junction of County Road 1380 and County Street 2550.
History
According to locals, the community got its name from the community of Pine Ridge, Arkansas, that was the setting of the radio show ''
Lum and Abner
''Lum and Abner'' was an American network radio comedy program created by Chester Lauck and Norris Goff that was produced from 1931 to 1954. Modeled on life in the small town of Waters, Arkansas, near where Lauck and Goff grew up, the show pr ...
'' which aired from 1934 to 1952. Legend says that the owner of the grocery store named it "Pine Ridge" after the radio show and over time the name was adopted as the name of the whole community.
During the community's heyday in the 1940s there was a hub of activity at the main junction of the Ozark Trail and the Fort Cobb road, with a grocery store and two churches, Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church and Pine Ridge Church of Christ (founded on May 1, 1949 but later merged into the Fort Cobb Church of Christ. By the 1950 and 1960's the community went into a time of decline with the grocery store closing and eventually the closing of the churches, sometimes by way of merger with congregations in the neighboring communities of Fort Cobb, Apache and Carnegie. And in at least one case, an entire church building was moved from Pine Ridge to Saddle Mountain, a distance of approximately 25 miles.
By the 1980s, the only visible signs of the community were the Pine Ridge Electrical sub-station, the remains of a church building and the Pleasant Valley Cemetery, but this changed in the late 2010s when the 3 Megawatt Pine Ridge solar generation facility was constructed at the Pine Ridge corner. "Oklahoma Electric Cooperative is a solar power generation leader" ''The Oklahoman'' (April 3, 2018) /ref>
In 2022, the Caddo Wind Farm (a 300 Megawatt system) was completed at Pine Ridge, with more than 90 GE-powered wind turbines operating in the Pine Ridge area. Much of the electricity generated by the facility is being purchased by McDonald's, Hormel and OshKosh. According to the power generating company, the site will "avoid more than 697,048 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide emissions that would have been produced if the electricity had been generated using fossil fuels - the equivalent of taking 149,261 cars off the road for a year." According to another source, the site creates enough electricity to power 110,000 households.
Present
Pine Ridge is located at the junction of the blacktop road going directly south from Fort Cobb and the old Ozark Trail.
The Pine Ridge community mostly consists of land dedicated to wheat and hay farming and cattle ranching, as well as the Pine Ridge solar generation facility. There was also a winery east of Pine Ridge on the Ozark Trail (Woods and Waters Winery and Vineyard) until its closing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Public school students in Pine Ridge attended school at Broxton until the school district was consolidated with
Fort Cobb
Fort Cobb was a United States Army post established in what is now Caddo County, Oklahoma in 1859 to protect relocated Native Americans from raids by the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne. The fort was abandoned by Maj. William H. Emory at the begin ...
in the 1990s. Telephone numbers for the Pine Ridge area are split between the Fort Cobb and
Apache
The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...
prefixes. Electric service is provided by CK Energy Electric Cooperative (merged from the former Caddo and Kiwash electric cooperatives in 2016).
Pine Ridge is in State House District 56 and in State Senate District 26.