Euchee Mission Boarding School

The Yuchi, who also spell their name Euchee, speak a language isolate, related to no other known language. From homelands in the present Southeast, the United States forced them west with their Creek neighbors in the 1830s. At the end of the twentieth century their three towns were Duck Creek near Hectorville, Polecat near Sapulpa and Sand Creek near Bristow, each led by a town chief and holding a midsummer green corn ceremony at its square ground. The Yuchi are not enrolled separately within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and have long sought recognition as a distinct people.

What the plaque says

Euchee Mission Boarding School In 1891, the Presbyterian Mission Board began plans to establish a school among the Euchee Indians in this area. Much credit for founding the school is due Samuel Brown, Noah Gregory, Henry Land and William Sapulpa. Their work influenced the Creek council to appropriate money for the school from tribal funds. Build- ings were constructed, and the school opened in the fall of 1894, with about fifty students. At first the school was co- educational and had only two dormitories and a three-room schoolhouse, all located on 40 acres of tribal property about a mile east of Sapulpa. The council appointed a Euchee and Methodist minister, Noah Gregory, as the first superin- tendent. Henry Land and William Sapulpa served as second and third superintendents, respectively. The school was improved, enlarged and maintained by appropriations from the Creek council until 1928, when it was taken over and supported entirely by federal appropria- tions under supervision of the United States Indian Office. In 1947, the school closed. The land and buildings were sold to School District No. 33 for use by the public schools. Oklahoma Historical Society #233-1998

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Philbrook Museum of Art — 11 mi
  Waite Phillips's 1927 Italian villa and its Villa Lante-inspired gardens, given to Tulsa in 1938 and open as an art museum since October 1939, strong in Native American art.
• Creek Nation Council Oak Park — 11 mi
  The oak on a south Tulsa hill where the Lochapoka Muscogee lit their fire in 1836 after removal from Alabama, the ceremonial ground from which Tulsa took its name.
• Woody Guthrie Center — 13 mi
  The archive and museum of the Okemah-born songwriter, in a 1922 paper warehouse in the Tulsa Arts District, holding more than 10,000 items including his notebooks.
• Greenwood Rising — 13 mi
  The history center at Greenwood and Archer that tells how Tulsa's Black Wall Street was built, how white mobs burned it in 1921, and how its people rebuilt it.

More markers nearby

• Sapulpa — 0.7 mi
• Glenn Pool, World's Greatest Oil Pool — 5.5 mi
• First Oil Well, Tulsa County — 8.5 mi
• Booker T. Washington High School — 13 mi