History Of Grant County

A word about the following information. The following information is not a complete transcription of the book. .Due to the size of the book, I have chosen certain bits and pieces of the book to put on this web site. You may e-mail me for additional information at awise120@cox.net

This book is out of print, I found my copy on line through a bookstore that specializes in out of print books.

"History of Grant County Oklahoma

by Guy P. Webb

1811 to 1970"

Once owned by the Cherokee Indians, but never occupied by them, Cherokee Outlet was the first and formal name of what later became popularly known as the Cherokee Strip. Boundaries of the Outlet were established in a treaty in 1828 between the western Cherokees and the United States, The term Cherokee Strip appeared in the name Cherokee Strip Livestock Association, formed in 1883 to lease the pasturelands of the Outlet en bloc from the Cherokee Nation. The word Outlet indicated an expansion area, if needed, for additional tribal reservation space. (Final removal of the Eastern Cherokees from Georgia, who were being relocated in the Cherokee Nation began in 1835. A small colony fled to North Carolina and gained permission to remain there.)

President Grover Cleveland on August 19, 1893, issued a proclamation declaring the Outlet, including the Pawnee and Tonkawa lands, would be opened for settlement on September 16, 1893. The proclamations specified that five registration booths should be on the northern border of the Outlet, and four on the southern border. Alfred P. Sanford, Inspector of Survey's General and District Land Offices, designated booths locations as follows:

No. 1 north of Stillwater

No. 2 north of Orlando

No. 3 north of Hennessey

No. 4 south of Goodwin and a mile north of Higgins, Texas

No. 5 at Kiowa , Kansas

No. 6 south of Cameron, Kansas

No. 7 near Caldwell, Kansas

No. 8 near Hunnewell, Kansas

No. 9 south of Arkansas City.

Swineford was working under Silas W. Lamoreaux of the General Land Office in the Department of Interior, is credited with the division of the Outlet lands into counties. Letter designations were given the counties as follows:

K for present Kay County

L for Grant

M for Woods

N for Woodward

O for Garfield

P for Noble

Q for Pawnee

Swineford selected and recommended Pond Creek station, location of the old stage station, as the county seat of L County. The Rock Island RR had laid out a townsite near the proposed location chosen by Swineford and named it Round Pond. The proposed county seat location was near Jefferson. Lamoureaux rejected this recommended location and submitted his own choice to Secretary of Interior Hoke Smith. The location approved by Secretary Smith, was south of Salt Fork, and was the present town of Pond Creek.

Any citizen age 21, or head of a family (including widows, was eligible to register. Minor and Wives accompanied may of the claim seekers. Instant eligibility was accomplished by some young men under 21 by marriage on or near the state line

Each person who made the run was supposed to have a registration certificate but the number of applicants simply overwhelmed the registration machinery. By September 14, it was realized that not all applicants would be able to register. About 115,000 certificates were issued although only 40,000 claims were available.

Firing of gun shots by patrolling troopers at 12 noon of 16 September 1893 along the borders of the Cherokee Strip signaled the start of the race of thousands of land-seeking settlers to stake claims for a quarter section of land in the Strip. The 100,000 participants in the race gambled on staking one of the 40,000 claims in this area over 6,000,000 acres. Many settlers who failed to locate claims on first try were able later to obtain quarters released through relinquishments, abandonment's, and lands sale of claims for various reasons.

The Enid land office, to prove a claim, required evidence indicating that basic improvements of a permanent nature had been made, such as digging a well, or erecting a house. Many settlers satisfied this requirement by digging a dugout or erecting a sod house. One group of imaginative settlers proved their individual claims by transporting a shanty 14x16 from Kansas onto a claim, proving up, and repeating this procedure three times with the same shanty.

Some twenty-five thousand hungry settlers, adventurers and opportunists on September 16, 1893, found quarter sections found lots which formerly been occupied for 15 to 20 years by cattle barons fattening their beef cattle. Here and there settlers found remains of old camps. The cattlemen had been ordered by presidential proclamation to get out of the Cherokee Outlet in 1890. There are some who found ways to stay longer. The grazing lands of the Outlet, with its big and little bluestem and buffalo grass, had been admirably suited to the needs of fattening cattle.

Once a sod or frame house had been erected, the settlers were immediately concerned with planting and harvesting subsistence crops which would supply food for the table and feed for livestock. Every farmer had a horse or two, or maybe only a mule, and perhaps a milk cow. Some of the settlers brought in pigs and chickens on a second trip from Kansas. The second trip was fairly revealing because the farmer generally hauled in his totally property, furniture, farm implements, seed grain and personal belongings. Most of the settlers had on thing in common-they had very little cash. One thing was certain-hard times were ahead for two or three years.

In the late 1890's and early 1900's black smoke spiraling into the sky from a wheat field marked the location for neighbors and townspeople of steal-powered threshing under way. These lumbering machines moved very slowly, about five miles and hour, if they were fast in their class. Early operators of threshing machines in the county, to mention only a few names, included Lee Lemon, of Nash, Albert Tomsu, of Medford, Settergreen of Lamont, and C. H. Horning, of Wakita. Among well known steam-powered thresher engines in use were: Aultman-Taylor, Huber, Nichols and Shepherd, Avery, Buffalo Pitts, Minneapolis, J. I. Case, Port Huron and Frick. Nostalgic feeling for these old steam-powered thresher engines is manifested in annual threshing bees held around the country.

These steam-powered engines were tested as tractors but they were never very successful, at least not in Grant County. The gasoline-powered engines, which furnished belt-power for separators, really introduced the use of tractor farming in the county.

Population: Seven years elapsed after The Run in 1893 before enumerators of the Strip's first U. S. census recorded a population in Grant County in 1900 of 17,273. By 1910, the county's population had increased to 18,700, its all-time-high. During the next five decades, there was a steady decrease, down to 8,140 in 1960, a falling off of 22.2 percent from 1950 to 1960.

Church Groups: Not long after the Run, settlers built many small communities, complete with school, post office and church. A cemetery was added, as soon as needed, usually close to the church. Now (1970), only a cemetery or church foundation marks the site of where this or that settlement once stood. The Littl4e Red Schoolhouses, which were usually whit, once numbered about 125. In 1970 a few of the frame buildings wee still standing, ghost- reminders of the early days. Early Post Offices such as Belleville, for example, established in 1895 with Charles F. Geier as postmaster, closed in 1898. Surviving old, old-timers who once lived in one of these early church-post office-school communities numbered only a few in 1970. Two of the last post offices to close were Gibbon in 1945 and Salt Fork in 1951 Remaining towns in the county in 1970 were Pond Creek, Medford, Lamont, Wakita, Manchester, Nash and Renfrow.

Church-going settlers, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant, established congregations as early as the fall of 1893 and began worship in union groups. Rev. W. C. McCune,, a Congregational preacher, wasting no time, used the back end of a farm wagon as a pulpit and preached a sermon in Pond after the run on Saturday. Some of the early Protestant ministers rode a circuit, and preached in places with names now almost forgotten, as Hurley, Satchell Valley and Osborne.

Roman Catholic priests began in 1895 to search out Catholic families who me in small groups in homes to attend mass. One of the earliest priest to be active in the county was a Father Beck who came from Hennessey. Catholic church dedications were occasions for ceremonial visits by high ranking churchmen who rode in colorful cavalcades from the train to the church. Descendants of participants in those cavalcades cherish memories of particular roles enacted my their grandfathers.

Mennonites, whose ancestors had moved from Switzerland to South Germany to Russia before immigration to the U. S. formed a third religious group in the county, divided into the General Conference and the Brethren. The latter sect, which had published a German language religious periodical in Medford, the Zion's Bote, dissolved its congregation in Medford in 1909. Nettie Junghanns, resident of Medford, recalled in 1969 how she worked as a typesetter on the Zion's Bote under J. F. Harms , the editor. General Conference churches in Deer Creek north of Medford were continuing active in 1970.

Ethnic Minorities: There were two principal ethnic minorities among the county' settler, the Czech-Americans, who located and still live around Medford and Renfrow, and the German-Americans, who are scattered throughout the county. A German Methodist church, four miles east of Jefferson, provided a focal community point for the German-Americans around Jefferson.

Czech-Americans formed a colony-like group, intermarried, spoke Czech in early days, and developed a cohesive, transplanted ethnic culture. These music-loving hard-working settlers who became prosperous wheat farmers and businessmen, founded fraternal lodges and gymnasium halls. Their lodges were called Zapadni Ceska Bratovska Jednota (ZCBJ), in which in English is Western Bohemian Fraternal Organization. One of these lodges was still active in Caldwell, Kansas in 1969. Their gymnasium halls, called Sokols, stressed physical fitness and their development of gymnastic skills by both men and women.

Numerous Grant County Czech-Americans attend "Czech Days," most going to the festival in Yukon, Oklahoma, but some also to Crete, Nebraska, the first American home of the ex-Austrian Army captain, Mathias Soucek, who settled near Lamont. Four Grandson of Mathias became graduates of the U. S. Naval Academy, two of who, Apollo and Victor, are buried in Arlington cemetery.

German-speaking people among the settlers in the early days were the German immigrant families, Mennonite Families who spoke Low German, and scattered families headed by men who had fled German territory, conquered in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), in order to avoid conscription by the German army. Among the German names on stones in the old German Methodist cemetery are Dahlem, Scheurmann, Staatz, Volkmann, Schmitz and Kircher. Earliest birth date is that of Gertrude Kircher (b.1829, d. 1909, wife of Conrad. Gertrude Kircher, b. Gertrude Blumbach, first married coal miner Schuermann who was killed in a coal mine accident in Ruhr Valley.

Opera House Era: Across the Strip, the erection of numerous town opera houses began around 1900, enabling communities to attend performances my touring stock companies and musical organizations, and provided a town hall for local meetings, entertainments, dinners and dances.

Saloons and Liquor Dealers: Saloon keepers and liquor dealers moved in fast to quench the thirst of newly located settlers, townsmen. and fly-by-night land-opening adventurers and opportunists. Within 17 days after claims were struck on September 16, 1893, the first liquor bond was issued on October 3. 1893. The saloons spread quickly across the county.

The town of Wakita at various times between 1900 and 1907 supported four saloons. Statewide prohibition be came effective November 16, 1907.

Grant County once supported 18 banks until the decade 1910-920 when the population began to decrease from its peak of 18,700 in 1910.

Early bank founders, able to establish a bank with a capital of $5,000, included a variety of settlers such as a stud barn operator, an ex sheriff, elevator owners, prosperous farmers, storekeepers, a surveyor, a newspaper editor and a physician to name a few examples. Among early absentee bank presidents, were: W. A. Miller, of Anthony, Kansas, (Citizens Bank of Wakita); John T. Stewart, of Wellington , Kansas, (Medford State Bank and the Bank of Deer Creek); Dennis T. Flynn, territorial delegate to Congress (Grant County Bank of Medford).

The first banks were organized in 1895 and 1896, the Grant County Bank and First National Bank (formerly Medford State Bank, in Medford, followed by :

Lamont-Salt Fork: State Exchange Bank1901

Wakita: State Bank of Wakita 1901 name changed to First National Bank of Wakita, 1904 and Citizens Bank of Wakita, ,1901,

Gibbon: Bank of Gibbon and Farmers State Bank of Gibbon

Manchester: Citizens bank of Manchester

Deer Creek : Bank of Deer Creek 1902,

Jefferson: The Bank of Jefferson 1903 and the Farmers State Bank of Jefferson 1907

Pond Creek: The Walton Bank, the First National Bank, the National Bank and the Farmers Guaranty Bank.

Nash: Bank of Nashville 1908., The Farmers and Merchants Bank, First National Bank of Nash 1919.

Numerous early communities in the county were built around a school, a church and cemetery. In the shift of population through the decades, some schools and churches were abandoned and razed or moved. The cemeteries remained, mute reminders and symbols of once active settlements. Some families provided their own burying plots in early days, as the McKeenans. The Czech-Americans around Renfrow provided an ethnic burying ground. The county has one fraternal cemetery, the Manchester I. O. O. F The town cemetery associations maintain well-kept grounds and plat records. The county DAR chapter erected a memorial stone in Pond Creek cemetery, inscribed with the names of soldiers of this county that died in World War I.

I have chosen to only list the Post Offices in this chapter.

Some 14 years before the Cherokee Strip was opened to settlement, a post office called Pond was opened November 1879, on the Malaley cattle range, southeast of present Medford. Pond was stop on mail route No. 32018, extending southward from Caldwell, Kansas to Fort Sill, over which mail was carried six times a week under a contract held by John M. Peck.

Pond post office served cattlemen, cowhands, freighters, horse wranglers, travelers and visitors on ranches in the area around Pond Creek Stage Ranch.

Post offices:

Bellville June 16, 1895

Bethel March 12, 1895

Clare November 12, 1896

Clyde October 14, 1897

Cruce December 19. 1903

Dayton February 11, 1895

Deer Creek February 27, 1899

Elmpark July 12, 1895

Florence November 30, 1895

Gibbon March 26, 1896

Gilbert November 5, 1901

Golden July 6, 1894

Hawley March 13, 1894

Honeyville February 4, 1895

Jefferson January 12, 1894

Lamont December 15, 1893

Lyle October 1, 1896

Manchester January 25,, 1897

Medford October 31, 1893

Moran March 13, 1894

Nash (ville) February 14, 1894

New Hope August 4, 1903

Numa April 20, 1898

Orie January 5 ,1894

Osborne February 6, 1894

Parks March 25, 1895

Pequot January 20, 1896

Pond November 13, 1879

Pond Creek September 29, 1893

Prairie June 28, 1894

Renfrow May 25, 1894

Salt Fork February 4, 1902

Sand Creek June 5, 1895

Tilden April 25, 1894

Wakita November 14, 1893

List of Early Settlers

The list of earlier settlers is long and all settled between 1893-1906 , with the majority settling in 1893-94. If you "know" that your family member maybe included in that list, e-mail me and I will gladly look it up.