new acquisition SAVING AN IMPORTANT STOCKADE

Saving An Important Stockade

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.

In 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 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

fort to attract tourists, and in 1935, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, a replica was built about 200 feet from the railroad tracks. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960. The replica and the stone structures constitute the Fort Gibson Historical Site, which is managed by the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Historians and the site’s staff have wanted to find the location of the original stockade for decades, but the 1934 building survey produced no information about it and the archaeological work done in the area was inconclusive. In 2003, Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) researchers conducted test excavations inside the replica, finding no evidence of the original fort.

Lee Bement of the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey took 30 core samples from within the replica and beyond it in 2006. The samples contained cultural materials that dated to the time of the original fort. The locations where the samples were taken, as well as an 1835 map of the stockade, were superimposed on a modern aerial photograph.

Guided by that photograph, Steve DeVore of the National Park Service’s Midwest Regional Archeology Center directed a remote sensing survey later that year. The survey revealed anomalies that could represent buried remains.

In 2007, the anomalies were excavated by Bement and a team from the OHS, who discovered portions of the original fort’s foundation adjacent to the replica. During another excavation later that year, Bement, assisted by the OHS and the Oklahoma Anthropological Society, found other intact sections of the foundation on two vacant residential lots owned by longtime Fort Gibson residents Adam and Angela Mason. The OHS approached the Conservancy about acquiring the lots to preserve the foundation remnants, and the Conservancy in turn approached the Masons, who generously agreed to donate their land. Fort Gibson is the Conservancy’s fourth preserve in Oklahoma.—Michael Bawaya

Lee Bement of the Oklahoma Archaeological Society holds a bottle recovered from the stockade privy in 2009.