Transcribed by Kurt Anderson, Ph.D.
1-a
Where the Run Started
Miles Rice: SW ¼ 34 20N 4W with piece of SE ¼ Sec 3 19N 4W
Sylvan Rice: NW ¼ Sec 3 19N 4W
This was the line. South of it was land the government had brought from the Creek Indians and was opening it to homesteaders. North it belonged to the Cherokees. They had leased it to cattlemen and it was fenced in great ranches. The line stretched east to 12 miles beyond Stillwater, west to the Cimarron. People came down from Kansas and waited on the border. Not a solid string of people; they gathered in bunches. It was a lovely spring day, April 22, 1889. Soldiers watched the line. At high noon they gave a signal and the race started. Sylvan Rice and his uncle, Miles Rice, waited here. “Uncle Miles” staked the first claim, Sylvan the next one. The next thing was to hunt the cornerstones, and find out the description of the land. Then they rode to Kingfisher (or Guthrie) to file. Remember no roads, no bridges, just empty land with other home seekers scattered over it. Kingfisher was on the Chisolm cattle trail. The government had built a frame structure there for a land office, and people were staking off lots and putting up tents and shacks all around it; at Guthrie there was a railroad, the land office, and a little railroad station and people putting up tents. After filing, most homesteaders went back home to get ready to move. They had six months to settle. Probably Mrs. Fox is the only living person who was on the border that day.
1-b
The Strip Run
We’ll skip what the settlers were doing and jump over 4½ years to another Run on this same line. While the government was trying to persuade the Cherokees to sell, people waited in the settled area – “Old Oklahoma.” They made dugouts in creek banks, lived with relatives, got jobs on farms, any way to stay. The government forced the cattlemen to vacate and finally persuaded the Cherokees to sell. Then the President announced that it would be opened on September 16, 1893. All the home seekers gathered on the border and all the settlers in “Old Oklahoma” were there to watch. It was a terrible day – wind, heat, dust, the beginning of one of the worst drought cycles we ever had. At noon the soldiers gave another signal and again the people ran in and staked claims. It was Saturday, so they had to wait till Monday to go to Enid to file. There was a government land office there and people were staking lots and putting up tents and starting to build houses and stores and offices. And again, we had a land of homes.
2-a
Rice’s Corner
Now we’ll go back to April 22, 1889. After Mr. Rice and his uncle staked their claims they went to Kingfisher and filed. Then they went back to Caldwell, Kansas, to get their families. The Sylvan Rices had a nine-year-old daughter, Mabel, who later became Mrs. Roy Cromer, and grandmother of Joe Cromer and Roy Beeby. Sylvan Rice had more money than most homesteaders. The families came in May in two covered wagons and a surrey. A relative or friend, George Ewing, came along. The first night they camped on the creek east to have water. The men soon dug a well and put up a tent. Mr. Rice built his store first. And on the Miles Rice claim they built a house, part sod, part dugout. Both families used the house, but at night the Sylvan Rice family slept in the tent until the store was built; then they slept in the back. About two years later they built the house you see there now. Mr. Rice sold his first bill of goods July 25, 1889. As long as he lived he kept the record of that transaction; perhaps the family has it now. The grass grew tall that summer; the men used to braid it over the backs of the horses to show how tall it was. The government put in a post office March 1, 1890, railed off in one corner of the store. Mr. Rice named it Marshall after his home town of Marshalltown, Iowa.
2-b
Rice’s Corner
Customers were the settlers that were coming in. Everyone stopped at the store, everybody was friendly, talking about the different states they came from, the claims they staked. Cowboys from the Circle Ranch across the Strip line came in. Also Indians came, Cheyennes and Arapahos from the west visiting Poncas to the east. Once the Daltons came. They had been robbing trains and banks in Kansas and Indian Territory to the east. Their mother lived on a claim near Kingfisher and they used to visit her. They never stole from the Marshall settlers – they had nothing to steal! Once they woke up Mr. Rice and bought some goods, paid for them, apologized for waking him, ad rode off into the darkness.
2-c
Then as people started to come in waiting for the Strip to open some of them started a business at the corner. “Frenchy” Loycon put in a blacksmith shop just west of the store. Mr. Rice didn’t sell him any land, just let him build there. And diagonally across was a small drugstore run by two doctors, Townsend and Stevens. And just north of the little drug store was a lumber yard run by a man named Villeroy. He was a French Canadian, but Mary Cooper says he was of the French nobility and came originally from France to Canada. He had a house near the lumber yard. All of these men took claims in the Strip when it opened, except Dr. Townsend. Probably he didn’t succeed in getting one; anyhow he soon left. I think Villeroy moved his house to his claim. They all continued as Marshall business men after the town started.
3-a
Early Churches and Businesses
SE ¼ Sec. 33, T20N, R4W
When the Strip was settled that doubled the trade territory, so a number of people who got claims wanted to start a town. They platted the lots that fall. Villeroy drew the plat, but he forgot to connect it with the road, so people had to drive across the farm to get in. Mr. Rice loved his land too much to lay it off in town lots, so they got land from Mr. Joseph Cromer and Uncle Miles Rice. Because their land was only 100 rods wide, their claims were more than a ½ mile long. The place where they came together was Main Street, only they named it Marshall Avenue. The land was turned over to a town company January 29, 1894, and they sold the first lots on February 1. Mr. Rice moved his store there, as did Loycon, Villeroy, and Dr. Stevens.
3-b
(Missing)
3-c
Early Churches and Businesses
The Baptists had organized a church at a log schoolhouse in the country. I’ll show you the place later. Now in the fall of 1894 they bought lots and soon after they built a church, the first church building in the community. It was used for everything – the only meeting place in town. The Methodists also organized a church on April 19, 1895, and they used the Baptist Church in the afternoon for their services. Some of the people attended both. Soon the Methodists built the same church they have now. See the steel bar put in there when it was moved? The Christian Church also organized at a schoolhouse built in Marshall. Marshall was a lively town. You’ve seen the picture. A band was organized as soon as the town started. There was a newspaper, The Marshall Record, several stores, a millinery shop, barber shop, butcher shop, lots of business. But everything had to be hauled from the railroad at Orlando, and the people needed a railroad. They got it in the summer of 1902, and the station was placed where it is now, and the town moved the following fall and winter to its present location. You can see pictures of the Fourth of July parade on the new town site in 1903.
4-a
Marshall’s First Public School
NW ¼ Sec. 9, T19N, R4W
Marshall’s first public school was called Barr School, and it was located in the northwest corner of Clyde Beeby’s place in a triangle above the creek. There had been a subscription school with six or eight pupils in a building where the house is now, but this was the first public school. The territorial legislature passed a school law on December 5, 1890. Congress appropriated money as there were no taxes yet, and people worked together on the buildings – dugouts, sod, or log. There was a 4 ½ months term in most districts in the late spring of 1891, and I suppose that was true here. It was well built of hewn logs, chinked. Mrs. Ruth Cromer has pictures of shabbily-dressed, but healthy looking children. Mabel Rice – Mrs. Roy Cromer – described the first day of school: The children came over the hill, some walking, some in wagons, and carrying chairs. I attended till 1896, then the Baptist Church for two years, then Antioch in 1898.
4-b
The Christian Church
For some time, a flourishing Sunday school had been meeting in the Barr schoolhouse. [At Union Sunday school, the Cromers were leaders.] Then the Christian Church was organized there. Charles Hazelrigg, a minister of that denomination, was living in Sheridan. In his diary for October 25, 1891, he wrote: “A Bro. Lee of Dexter Kansas began a meeting at what is known as the Barr school house four miles [he should have said six miles] northeast of Sheridan, the latter part of the week.” On November 1 he wrote: “I attended Bro. Lee’s meeting a few evenings during the week. . . . It is expected that he will organize a congregation today.” He did organize it, and that was the beginning of the first church in Marshall.
5-a
Antioch, Marshall’s Second School
NE ¼ Sec. 9, T19N, R4W
Built 1898
The legislature passed a new school law in 1893 and changed the district boundaries, putting the schools two miles apart east and west. The Antioch school was a big, bare, one-room building painted white. (The districts could vote bonds and buy lumber under the 1893 law.) The Marshall children attended there. Then when the new town site was laid out and the town boomed, a new room was added at one end. Then a four-room brick building was provided at the present school site. The classes moved there December 5, 1904. Because one year of high school work had been added that year, over the entrance was the name “Marshall High School.”
5-b/5-c
Antioch, Marshall’s Second School
At one time the Catholics used the Antioch schoolhouse for worship. Priests from Hennessey, Mulhall, or even Guthrie had been coming when they could and celebrating mass in the homes – the John O’Neill home, the homes of the Murphy brothers, Bill, Jim (Mrs. Newell’s father, same house where dale Newell lives now) and Bart, and in the McAuley home where Clyde Beeby lives. When Father De Grasse, rector of St. Mary’s at Guthrie, baptized Hugh De Grasse O’Neill May 22, 1892, he made out the certificate giving the location as “Otter Creek,” because that was the only way he knew to designate the place. When a priest announces services at a home, the family would send the boys around on horseback to notify all the Catholic families. Then in 1900, or perhaps earlier, they began to hold services in the Antioch schoolhouse. Mary Cooper was baptized there, and Wenceslas Simrod with some other children received their first communion there. Then after the present town was laid out they built the little frame church that many of you remember. I believe this was in 1904.
This may be as good a time as any to say that the German Evangelical Congregation also built a frame church in Marshall in 1904. It had been organized the previous year. A number of German families came to the community at the turn of the century. Nobody knows when and where they started meeting for services; it is known that in February, 1903, they had services in the afternoon in the Christian Church. Then in August that year they organized a congregation of ten families. Matilda Burchardt Bruhn, now 83, remembers that the place where they organized was in the Bruhn home on the farm north of where Paul Schler lives [NW ¼ Sec. 21, T20N, R4W]. After that they held services Sunday afternoon in the Methodist or Christian church until they built their own church in 1904. This is the beginning of St. Paul’s United Church of Christ.
6-a
Union School
This also was a log building built by the men of the community, and the first term probably started in May, 1891. It was a lively community center and there was an active Union Sunday school there. After the Christian Church was organized in the Barr school, it was decided to hold half of the services at Union, and the members at both schoolhouses were enrolled in the same congregation. The Union Sunday school was more active than the church; it comprised the whole neighborhood, and the church had its own small membership. When the pastor came to hold services everybody attended, glad to hear a sermon. Then on February 25, 1893, a Baptist Church was organized there. The Union Sunday school continued as before to be supported by everybody. When the Christian preacher or the Baptist preacher held a service, they were careful to use alternate dates, and everybody turned out to every service. In fact, the people were so active in the Union Sunday school that they hardly believed that two small groups of people were organized into congregations.
7-a
Sunnyside School
NE ¼ Sec. 26, T20N, R4W
This was the first school on the Strip side of Marshall. The settlers who staked claims on September 16, 1893 moved in the following spring. They probably organized the district that spring of 1894. Then the men worked together on the building, and it was probably opened for a three month’s term in the fall of 1894. Several of the pupils are still living around Marshall. It was the beginning of the Possum Holler school. The Strip settlers organized church services at Sunnyside. The Christian congregation meeting at Union included its people on the same membership roll and held alternate services, the people driving to both in their wagons with all the kids loaded in. But soon the Possum Hollow school was built a mile west and ½ mile south, and the building fell down. Also by this time, there were churches in Marshall for a community meeting place.
New Stop After 7
Half a mile south of here on the bank of Otter Creek was the school that succeeded Sunnyside. All the schools on the south side of the Strip were on the half mile line, so this had to be put there although it was a hard place to reach, for this section line was never opened. There was no bridge across Otter Creek except the one ahead of us at the Murphy place; and so all the children on the east side of the creek had to go all the way around by the bridge when the water was too high to jump across. The school was named New Hope, but it was never called anything but Possum Holler. It joined the Marshall district in 1911. A bus with two long facing seats was constructed to transport the children to Marshall. It was drawn by horses and was universally known as the kid wagon.
New Directions
[After Possum Hollow]
After visiting the site of the Sunnyside school, you go west and make a stop to point out the direction of the Possum Hollow school. (Dirt road, perhaps will have to be omitted.) Then you continue west another mile and turn south to come into Marshall (still on a dirt road). Here you should be telling the history of the move to the new townsite because there will be no stops in Marshall. You will just drive past and point them out.
Here is the story:
By 1902 Marshall had two saloons, two real estate offices, eight or ten stores, two restaurants, a livery stable, and probably 150 population – all packed close on the little townsite. It had no railroad. Everything the merchants sold had to be hauled from Orlando at a cost of 15 or 20 cents per hundred pounds and this was added to the price. The merchants bought the women’s produce, eggs and butter, but it got pretty bad in hot weather before it could be hauled to Orlando and the price suffered. Eggs sold for 3 cents a dozen sometimes and the merchants sometimes threw the butter away because it was so bad. The farmers had to haul their wheat, hogs, etc. to Hennessey or Orlando, a hard day’s trip for horses and sometimes the hogs died from the heat. A railroad was literally life and death for a town.
In 1902 some Enid promoters planned to build a railroad through to Guthrie, probably intending to sell it to the Santa Fe (which later they did). Instead of putting up the money they planned to make the towns it reached pay a bonus. It was really a form of blackmail, for if the town didn’t pay they took another route and the town died.
Stop 8
Site of Old Sheridan
You can tell how the town started. Then if Billy Conaghan is on your bus, you can have him describe the town as he remembers it. Then you can tell the story of the “outlaw” chase.
This was a lively town when Marshall was only a crossroads store and a blacksmith shop. It was located on the corner one mile west of the Mewheters on all four quarters (Sections 14, 15, 22, and 23, T19N, R5W). It got a post office June 28, 1890 at a store owned by a young homesteader named George Rainey. A Christian (Disciples) Church was organized there very early, and in 1890 the members built what was probably the first house of worship by that denomination in Oklahoma. It was made of cottonwood lumber sawn by a small sawmill on the creek. The shingles were purchased, and the seats were made of pine boards. A small table served as pulpit. In 1891the congregation had 42 members. The Baptists also organized a church on Saturday, April 19, 1890 at the home of a Mr. Sowers, with ten charter members. In July the Sheridan town council offered the congregation eight lots for a building site. The building was finally constructed, and on November 14, 1891 the congregation worshipped there.
Besides the two churches, Sheridan had several stores, a lumber yard, and other businesses. It had a number of very talented people, who gave programs using one of the churches as a meeting place.
But the town died because it failed to get a railroad.
8-b/8-c
Sheridan – Battle with supposed outlaws
After the people began to accumulate some property the country became infested with outlaws. Some specialized in train and bank robberies; others in horse stealing; some in robbing the small stores scattered over the country. The Doolin Gang had hideouts in the hills and timber east of Stillwater. They cooperated with Dick Yeager and his pals who hid out in the Gyp Hills and Glass Mountains west of Okeene and Fairview. Yeager’s parents had a claim between Guthrie and Marshall; Yeager was a wild teenager who soon took to outlawry. He had a confederate named Ike Black and another named Watson. Two women helped: Black’s wife (Billy Fox said “she was awful pretty”) and Yeager’s girlfriend, whose parents lived southeast of Sheridan, where there were several dugouts on the creek bank. Everybody was sure it was an outlaw hideout, for the two gangs used to cross the country to work together, and stopped there. Everybody believed that it was Yeager and his pals who killed the storekeeper at P.A. Todd west of Hennessey and robbed the store. On April 3, 1895 bandits robbed the Rock Island train at Dover, and Yeager was recognized as one of the gang. They fled to the blackjack country on the Cimarron near Ames. Then in July officers got word that they were going to rob the store at Columbia four miles south of Sheridan. Men were up guarding the two towns all night. Then they went into the Gyp Hills, but people didn’t know that. On Tuesday, July 23 a farmer came to Sheridan and reported that he had seen a heavily armed man (Winchester on saddle, revolvers in belt) and a spring wagon with a cover crossing the Skeleton bridge at the present Mewherter place and turn south toward the hideout. Everybody supposed it was Dick Yeager and his gang. Actually the rider was a young man named Johnny Willett, and in the spring wagon was his brother Billy Willett and a young man named Henderson. The Willett boys lived near Kingfisher. Henderson was a friend of theirs from Kansas. When the news came to Sheridan that Dick Yeager and his gang were on their way to the hideout several farmers who happened to be in town were deputized to arrest them. Billy Fox and two other farmers got guns and rode two miles south and a mile east to head them off. Others went one mile south, and then east to come up behind them. We’ll follow Billy Fox and the other two to the corner where they planned to intercept them. (Sections 25, 26, 35, and 36, T19N, R5W).
Stop 9-a/9-b/9-c
Battle with supposed outlaws
At that corner a dim trail led across the quarter southeast to several dugouts in the creek bank, believed to be the outlaw hideout. The three farmers barely had time to hide their horses in a field of tall corn and find cover for themselves when Johnny Willett came over the rise. They called on him to surrender and he jumped off his horse and began shooting. Then the spring wagon came in sight and the two boys jumped out and began shooting. They said afterwards that they thought the farmers were outlaws. Several shots were exchanged. Johnny Willett was killed and the other two wounded. One of the posse exposed himself and was wounded. Henderson started back up the rise, but other Sheridan men had turned east after going one mile south. Now they came up and he was between the two parties. The Willett boys were both lying on the ground. Billy Fox and the unwounded farmer held their guns on him and walked towards Billy Willett. He said, “Did you kill Johnnie?” Billy said, “I don’t know. He said, “Help me up; let’s go and see. My God, he surely ain’t dead. You fellows surely made a bad mistake.” Billy said, “We tried to get him to throw up his hands and he didn’t.” They helped him t where his brother lay. He leaned over the body, kissed him, and cried, saying, “Poor boy, poor kid.” The farmers still thought the dead man was Dick Yeager. They loaded the body and the wounded men in the spring wagon and went back to Sheridan. In the spring wagon was a regular arsenal, guns of all kinds, and a big candy pail, a wooden pail about the size of a half bushel, filled with ammunition to fit them all. They took the men to Hennessey, had a doctor dress their wounds, and put them on the train to Kingfisher. They put Billy Willett and Henderson in jail, and buried Johnny. But the Willett boys were well known and had a good reputation in Kingfisher. They dug up the body of Johnny Willett and found he wasn’t Yeager. Charges against everybody were dropped. There was no evidence against any of the supposed outlaws, though one does wonder why they were on that road and why they were so well armed. (They stopped at the present McGuire [?] house to fill a water jug. They wouldn’t have done that if they were near their destination.) And the farmers who shot Johnny were cleared because he was resisting arrest. Meanwhile the real outlaws were far away west in the Gyp Hills.
On the road after stop 9
This was the homestead of Charlie McCully. He did not stake it in the Run, but came the following fall and bought out the homesteader, traded two scrawny ponies for it. His family grew up there. Here is the sight of the house, a neat story-and-a-half house.
In the early 1920s Owen Acton leased it for oil. They signed the lease in the living room. They didn’t have a pen, so Mrs. McCully brought out a goose quill pen more than eighty years old that had belonged to her mother. They joked about it, said a lease signed with a pen like that should bring in an oil well. I suppose they got fifty cents an acre. The Roxana Company, now called the Shell, bought the lease and started drilling.
Stop 10
Site of the well, McCully No. 1, the discovery well.
It was drilled about 6,000 feet. I suppose it was the deepest well in the world at that time. It came in with a rush June 29, 1927. Oil men and newspaper men from all over the Midcontinent Field rushed there. The Daily Oklahoman had a whole page about it, predicted it would be another Seminole. Men worked feverishly building tanks and a pipeline, and locations were made all around it for other wells. It ran 3,000 bbls. a day at first, then settled down to about 2,000 bbls. and kept it up for two years, also 3 ½ million cubic feet of wet gas a day. This could be liquefied to 6,800 gals. of natural gasoline, a volatile gasoline that could be mixed with other gasoline to give quick starting qualities to motor fuel. The Roxana Company put in a plant west of the schoolhouse to condense it to gasoline by compression; and built bungalows to house their people. By the end of that first year there were 5 producing wells, 4 drilling wells, 2 rigs up ready to start, and more locations being made. Besides the gasoline plant there was quite a town named Roxana.
The field continued to boom, and by the middle of 1929 there were fourteen wells drilling and two new locations, and five natural gas plants scattered over the field. The McCully No. 1 was still going strong, but McCully No. 8 the biggest producer, with a daily flow of almost 7,000 bbls. Altogether the McCully lease was producing 12,000 bbls. daily, and Shell was building a portable gasoline plant on the farm. The production for the whole field was 200,000 bbls.
Stop 11-a/11-b/11-c
The farmers west of Okeene and Fairview were surrounding Dick Yeager and his pals. There were several battles, but the gang slipped into the canyons and timber. They did capture the two women and put them in federal jail in Guthrie. Somehow Watson got through the encircling bands and escaped, although he was later captured and put in prison. On August 1 in the blackjacks on the North Canadian near Canton the posse came up with Yeager and Black, killed Black and wounded Yeager, but he escaped and came east, stealing horses to ride. The last one was from Will Blakely, a brother of Sam Blakely, father of Jennie Kirkendall and Mrs. Lena Carroll. He came south, perhaps trying to make it to the home of his parents who lived between Guthrie and Marshall, or as Billy Fox thought, to the outlaw hideout southeast of Sheridan. He got as far as the cornfield on the farm of Alvin G. Ross, but he couldn’t go any farther. He took the bridle off his stolen horse and hung it on an ear of corn or possibly on the fence. He turned the horse loose and it grazed by the side of the road. The corn rows ran north and south. Yeager went in only 7 or 8 rows and lay down exhausted. Billy Fox and some others had been trailing him all night, also the Garfield County sheriff and some Enid deputies. When they got to the Roxana community some farmers joined them. The Blakely brothers also followed to get their horse back; they rode in a spring wagon, had no arms. As Billy Fox told the story, when they trailed him to the cornfield it was 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning. The road south of Roxana was not opened at the time, just a dim trail to the creek, and then through the Ross farm to a ford. “We were so hungry we went home for breakfast. The corn was higher than a man’s head. . . He was probably 100 yards inside the field. The woods were full of people hunting him. Tom Smith, who lived on the farm across the road west of the old Schaefer farm, and a deputy from Enid crawled up and shot him. When I got back they had him lying under a tree.” They put him in the Blakelys’ spring wagon, stopped at the Wright home, where the Haraks live now and a woman there gave him some coffee (Ross farm NW ¼ Sec. 29, T19N, R4W; Wright house on northeast corner of farm NE ¼ Sec. 30, T19N, R4W). Then they took him to Sheridan. It was Sunday, August 4, 1895. Sam Blakely held an umbrella over his head as they drove, stayed in the back of the wagon with him. Will Blakely and the sheriff of Kingfisher County rode in the seat. Quite a crowd was following thirsting to hang him. They got to Sheridan while Sunday school was still going on. They went into one of the churches, took the Sunday school blackboard from the wall and laid it on top of the benches, and the two Sheridan doctors probed for the bullets. “He cursed terribly there in the church,” said Billy Fox. It pained him so badly they gave up trying to find the bullets. Said Billy Fox, “Mrs. Sowers, a good Baptist woman, sent home and got a mattress to put under him,” and they took him to Hennessey and put him on the train and took him to Enid, and put him in jail. He had a good time at first. Marquis James said he told him to shake hands with the biggest outlaw in Oklahoma. But his wounds got worse and he died in about a month.
Stop 12
Here was the center of the lively oil town of Roxana. It was started in 1927 after the first oil strike. There were business places extending from this corner along the roads south and east and houses not as far as the Skeleton on the south and beyond the little creek east. The gasoline plant was west of the schoolhouse, and several company bungalows were there. There was a drug store on the corner north of the Sebranik (Harak) house, and a picture show east of the schoolhouse. Then on the hill on the east part of the Scott Rouse farm there was quite a residence section laid out. The town had electricity from a high line brought from Marshall. Perhaps Roxana had 1,000 people counting the ones scattered over the leases. Vint Ross’s children delivered newspapers to 125 customers.
The town boomed all through 1928 and 1929. But by the beginning of 1930 it was evident that the field was small. There were a few good wells, but all around them were dry holes. The producing wells began to decline. The discovery well stopped flowing; others went on the pump. The drilling stopped, and the oil crews were moved to the new Oklahoma City field. Roxana started to die with the beginning of 1930; in a few years it was all gone.
The Shell Gasoline Plant exploded in February 1929. I think it was February 8. It destroyed the plant and two company residences and threatened to destroy all of Roxana. A terrible blizzard was raging at the time. All the children ran out of the schoolhouse and everybody ran from their homes. Nobody was killed, but three were injured. One of the three injured was from exposure from the terrible cold. The property loss was estimated at $200,000. They started rebuilding immediately. The plant was destroyed by another fire, but I do not know about that one. Also, the newspaper account said nothing about the drug store on the Sebranik farm.
There was a second explosion, exactly four years to the day from the first one. There was deep snow on the ground, and it came about six o’clock in the evening. People ran away from it. Mr. Musgrove fought fire all night. When one of the tanks would blow up, it looked as though it would hit you wherever you were. It was later rebuilt, but later blown away and that time not rebuilt.
After Stop 12
First school in Roxana district
Under that 1890 law the schools were three miles apart. The first school in what later became the Roxana district was three miles south of the Barr school. It was on the west bank of Horse Creek on the Charles Cassiday farm (SW ¼ Sec. 21, T19N, R4W). Fred Goodwin is probably the only one who remembers attending school there. Mrs. Christian, the mother of Katherine Christian’s husband, Roy, described it as she saw it about 1892. It was a sod building with a dirt roof and she thought it had a dirt floor. Inside it was plastered with gypsum dug out of the creek bank. She said, “The walls were as white as snow; it really was a nice building.” They were having Sunday school and church services there in 1892.