New Springplace

The Civil War reached this mission in 1862. A party of Pin Indians and federal troops killed James Ward, a Cherokee missionary, left his wife with their eight-month-old twin sons in her arms twenty miles from the mission, and took the Moravian minister Gilbert Bishop to Fort Scott, Kansas. The mission stood abandoned until after the war and was rebuilt slowly. In 1902 Niels Nielsen of the Evangelical Danish Lutheran Church took over the church and school, and in 1926 his successor, Christian Adolphus Vammen, began a children's home, Oaks Indian Mission, which still operates.

What the plaque says

New Springplace Cherokee mission established by Moravian Church, 1842, was out- growth of mission begun by Springplace, Ga., in 1802. Church members were from noted Cherokee families named Adair, Fields, Hicks, McNair, Ridge, Vann, Ward, Watie. New Springplace mission transferred to Danish Lutheran Church in 1902. Oklahoma Historical Society 152-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Saline Courthouse Museum — 8.8 mi
  The one Cherokee district courthouse of nine still standing, an 1884 building near Rose that the Cherokee Nation bought back and opened as a museum in 2019.
• Cherokee National History Museum — 21 mi
  The Cherokee Nation's own history museum, in the brick capitol it built on Tahlequah's square after the Civil War, a short walk from its 1844 supreme court and its 1875 prison.
• Cabin Creek Battlefield — 25 mi
  The Texas Road ford in the Cherokee Nation where Stand Watie twice struck at Union supply trains for Fort Gibson, losing in July 1863 and winning 130 wagons in September 1864.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Locust Grove — 17 mi
• Fort Wayne — 17 mi
• Chouteau's Post — 18 mi
• Baptist Mission — 19 mi