Johns Valley, Oklahoma

Johns Valley in southeastern Oklahoma is an isolated mountain-ringed basin in the Kiamichi Mountains, named for Henry Amos Johns, a Choctaw Civil War veteran who settled there after the war, founded a Presbyterian church in 1865, and gave shape to its early community. Long remote and difficult to reach, it relied on logging and cattle ranching before losing most of its residents by the mid-1950s. The basin is also renowned for Rock Town, where enormous transported limestone boulders rest atop younger shale, creating one of Oklahoma’s most unusual geological landscapes. During World War II, two British training aircraft also crashed in the area, adding a wartime chapter to its history.

Oklahoma · United States