Bellevue

Bellevue is on U.S. Highway 287 seventeen miles southeast of Henrietta in southeastern Clay County. Although there were a few settlers in the area in the late 1870s, the community developed in 1882, when the officials of the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway selected the site as a shipping point for its rail line. A surveyor named the new community after Bellevue Hospital of New York City. Postal service to the community began that same year. The presence of the railroad established the town as a farm-market center for southeastern Clay County. In 1902 the 300 residents voted to incorporate. The community's promising future was almost swept away by a tornado that hit the town on April 26, 1906. Fourteen residents died, and the destructive winds left only three or four buildings standing. But within a year or two the Bellevue News claimed that the town was rebuilt. The population subsequently renewed its growth and surpassed 700 by the middle 1920s. But in the Great Depression residents left in search of work. In the early 1930s the discovery of oil on nearby Worsham Ranch did little for the town. Over the next three decades the population continued to decline, from 546 in 1936 to 289 in the middle 1960s. Over that same period the number of businesses also decreased, from twenty-six to ten. Bellevue had a population of 378 in the late 1980s and 333 in 1990. In 2000 the population was 386.