PARKS & RECREATION
Key Assets: Love County’s largest employer and most prominent attraction is genuinely WinStar World Casino and Resort in Thackerville, owned and operated by the Chickasaw Nation – at its 2009 expansion, the casino’s roughly 370,000 square feet of gaming floor made it, by measured square footage, the largest casino in the world at that time, and it remains one of the largest casino resorts anywhere, with well over 1,000 hotel rooms across multiple towers, numerous named restaurants, and full resort amenities; located just a few miles away, the Chickasaw Nation’s newer Border Casino, expanded in March 2025, adds another 80,000-square-foot gaming floor immediately adjacent to I-35, less than a mile from the Texas state line; Love County’s seat, Marietta, has a genuinely charming and disputed naming origin – the town’s first postmaster, Jerry Calvin Washington, whose brother Bill owned the largest cattle ranch in the historic Chickasaw Nation’s Pickens County, opened the Marietta post office on December 20, 1887, and by local legend named the town after either his wife, “Marie Etta,” or, in a competing local account, in honor of both his wife Mary and his sister Etta – historians note the sources genuinely disagree on the exact detail; Love County itself was created at Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and named for Overton Love, a prominent Chickasaw judge, entrepreneur, and Dawes Commission member; the 1907–1910 Love County Courthouse, a three-story Georgian-style building in Marietta, was genuinely the first county courthouse built in Oklahoma after statehood, and remains listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as does the separate 1910 Love County Jail and Sheriff’s Residence, a cruciform-plan building that combined jail cells upstairs with the sheriff’s living quarters below
Notes: WinStar World Casino’s genuine record as the world’s largest casino by gaming floor square footage, alongside Marietta’s disputed and charming namesake story, make Love County one of the more distinctive counties found anywhere in this project.