new acquisition
Saving An Important Stockade
Bob Rea
Fort Gibson played an important role in 19th-century Oklahoma.
Oklahoma Anthropological Society volunteers excavate the stockade foundations in the shadow of an adjacent reconstructed stockade.
I
n April of 1824, the U.S. Army built a log stockade on the Neosho River in east-central Oklahoma.The stockade, known as Fort Gibson, was the first army outpost in Indian Territory. In the following decades it was a terminus for the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole who were removed from their homelands in the Southeast. By 1845 the deteriorating log buildings were replaced by stone structures that were built nearby. During the Civil War the fort was occupied first by Confederate, and
44
later, Union troops. After the war, during Reconstruction, U.S. Army troops were stationed there to prevent EuroAmericans from settling in Indian Territory. The army abandoned the fort in 1890, at which time it was acquired by the Cherokee Nation. By then nothing remained of the original log fort and a park was built on the site. In 1903, the Midland Valley Railroad Company was formed. The company built a 277 mile-long line to transport coal from mines in western Arkansas through northeast Oklahoma
to Arkansas City, Kansas. The line followed the banks of the Arkansas River, crossing the Neosho, a tributary of the Arkansas, just north of Fort Gibson.The railroad was built on an old roadbed that connected Fort Gibson to the adjacent town of the same name, inadvertently bisecting the area once occupied by the log stockade. In 1934, the National Park Service conducted a Historic American Building Survey of Fort Gibson’s stone structures. The local residents proposed building a replica of the original log
spring • 2010
