Koweta Mission

The missionary was a Carolinian raised in Alabama. Robert McGill Loughridge, ordained in October 1842, married the teacher Olivia D. Hills that December and came to the Creek Nation, where both taught at Kowetah until she died of tuberculosis on September 17, 1845. He left to build the Tullahassee school in 1848, the Koweta school closed in 1861, and the war forced him into Texas. Over those years he became expert in the Muscogee language, translated parts of the Bible with Legus Perryman, and in 1890 published an English and Muskogee Dictionary with David Hodge.

What the plaque says

Koweta Mission Creek Indian school founded by Rev. R.M. Loughridge, Presbyterian Bd. Foreign Miss. 1843. Coweta, ancient Creek town in Alabama, re- established in this vicinity by Creeks who arrived Ft. Gibson on steamboat "Facility," 1828. This was home town of Roley McIntosh, principal chief, Creek Nation West to 1859. Oklahoma Historical Society 83-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Philbrook Museum of Art — 22 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.
• Fort Gibson Historic Site — 24 mi
  The army's first post in what became Oklahoma, built at Three Forks in 1824, where removed nations arrived; deeded to the Cherokee in 1857, it later housed the Dawes Commission.
• Creek Nation Council Oak Park — 24 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.
• Greenwood Rising — 24 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

• Red Bird — 5.2 mi
• La Harpe's Council — 10 mi
• Tullahassee — 14 mi
• Wagoner — 14 mi