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    Wagoner
    Wagoner
    Wagoner
    Ebook160 pages44 minutes

    Wagoner

    By Liz McMahan

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    About this ebook

    Wagoner, the first city incorporated in Indian Territory, was established in 1896 on the dividing line of the Cherokee and Creek Nations and at the intersection of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railway and the Kansas & Arkansas Railway. For the first half of the 20th century, Wagoner's economy was driven by agriculture, and it became known as the "Queen City of the Prairies." In the 1950s, when the Grand Neosho River was turned into Fort Gibson Lake, the door opened for the establishment of a number of resort enterprises. Wagoner has thrived as a visitors' destination ever since. Today, the only remaining evidence of the earliest civilization is the Norman Site--a small island slightly north of Highway 51 and east of Wagoner at Taylor Ferry--which is home to some of Oklahoma's most prominent Indian mounds.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateAug 24, 2015
    ISBN9781439652909
    Wagoner
    Author

    Liz McMahan

    Liz McMahan, a lifelong Wagoner resident and retired journalist, has collected Wagoner photographs and history for three decades. McMahan is a member and past officer of the Wagoner County Historical Society. For this collection, she features the works of professional photographers Cradow Smith and Harvey Hunter and other images culled from personal collections, including her own and that of Jerry Hickman.

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      Book preview

      Wagoner - Liz McMahan

      you.

      INTRODUCTION

      Wagoner began as a railroad stop. But from the earliest time of civilization on this continent, people traveled through the area that would become Wagoner. The Caddoan Indians left as evidence of their presence here the small island just north of Highway 51 at Taylor Ferry. Today called the Norman Site, it is one of the most prominent Indian mounds in the state, dating to about AD 600.

      The Osage Indians trapped and traded in this area in the early 19th century but were forced out when the Creek Indians were removed from their homes in Mississippi and Alabama and resettled in Indian Territory. Wagoner was in the new Creek Nation.

      Confederate and Union soldiers were stationed throughout this region during the Civil War and met in a skirmish just north of Wagoner on September 15, 1864. Just after the war, huge herds of cattle were driven north from Texas up the Texas Road—the East Shawnee Trail—right through the heart of this area on their way to markets in Kansas and Missouri.

      And then the railroad came in 1871. The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (MKT or Katy) built its way south from Kansas to Gibson Station, just south of the future Wagoner, and beyond. About 12 years later, Henry Samuel Bigfoot Wagoner, who was stationed at Parsons, Kansas, with the Katy Railroad, decided a switch was needed to load cattle and lumber from the area between Gibson Station and Flat Rock Creek. When the switch was completed, Katy roadmaster Perry telegraphed company officials that Wagoner’s Switch is ready. The spot on the prairie had its name. The Kansas and Arkansas Valley Railroad’s announcement in 1883 that it too would be running tracks through this area put Wagoner in a unique position: it would be a crossroads of rail service.

      Wagoner got its first permanent residents on June 5, 1887, when William H. and Sallie H. McAnally moved their family to Wagoner’s Switch. He had been an MKT employee who had worked at Wagoner’s Switch. Eventually, McAnally quit his job with the Katy and built a wooden structure that railroad employees called the Cottonwood Hotel.

      In less than a year, a number of enterprises had sprung up in the prairie community. On February 25, 1888, the town’s request for a post office was granted and William W. Teague, a native of Indiana, was named the city’s first postmaster. Cattlemen, hay dealers, business- and professional men flocked to the new community from surrounding states, seeing the possibility that the Indian Territory soon would be divided and available for private ownership. The people who came here brought in fine lumber to construct business buildings and beautiful homes. While the original businesses were destroyed by fire, many of the original homes still stand as the pride of Wagoner citizens and the delight of city visitors.

      Businessmen were not the only ones to visit Wagoner in its earliest days. So did some of the most infamous bandits of the day. On September 15, 1891, members of the Dalton Gang robbed a train at Leliaetta, just north of Wagoner.

      By 1892, Wagoner’s population had grown to 400. It boasted five general mercantile stores, two drugstores, a cotton gin, gristmill, two blacksmith shops, a livery stable, a newspaper, a church, and four hotels.

      In 1895, a group of Wagoner citizens met in the office of Capt. William Jackson, an Englishman married to a Creek woman, to discuss the possibility of establishing a city government. On December 3, 1895, a petition signed by 283 heads of families was filed in the federal court in Muskogee. A hearing was set for January 4, 1896. Later that month, Judge Springer granted the petition, making Wagoner the first town in Indian Territory to incorporate. The city’s population that year was reported at 1,500. The new city quickly established the first free public schools for white children.

      Wagoner is described in an 1899 Twin Territories magazine as having more and finer buildings than any other town in the Indian Territory. The residences of Wagoner are the handsomest in the Indian Territory while the society is refined and cultivated. The editor of the Wagoner Record would have disagreed. In 1901, that newspaper charged that two gambling halls have been running ‘wide open’ in Wagoner for the past year.

      In its earliest years, Wagoner was surrounded by a fence, according to a history by longtime Wagoner librarian Kate Hersman. She writes in a 1957 Record-Democrat article that when her father, Dr. S.D. Lyles, first came to Wagoner in 1898, the town was enclosed by wire fences on all four sides to keep cattle from the huge herds on area ranches out of town. There were four or five

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