Skullyville

Skullyville also schooled Choctaw girls. The Methodist Church founded New Hope Seminary here in the mid-1840s, and it drew students from across the Choctaw Nation in the years when Fort Coffee Academy was teaching boys. New Hope closed during the Civil War, reopened afterward, and its building burned in 1896. The town's post office closed in 1917. W. B. Morrison, writing The Saga of Skullyville for the Chronicles of Oklahoma in 1938, offered Moneytown as the English for the name, and today Skullyville is a ghost town with little standing.

What the plaque says

Skullyville Skullyville was founded in 1832 while removal of Choctaws to what is now Oklahoma was in progress. First Choctaw Agency in the West was established here with Major F. W. Armstrong as agent. The name Skullyville was derived from Choctaw word "Iskuli" meaning a piece of money. It was here Choctaws received annuity payments hence referred to the place as "Money Town" or Skullyville. There were three districts in the Choctaw Nation with Skullyville being the capitol of one. Catlin, the artist, stopped here for a time in 1834. When Chickasaws moved west in 1838 many landed from boats at Fort Coffee and went through Skullyville to new homes farther west. The Seminoles also came this way going west. With establishment of Butterfield - Overland Mail route between St. Louis and San Francisco, 1858, one of the stations was at Skullyville and operated by Tandy Walker. This center of Choctaw culture and political life began to decline at close of Civil War and when old agency building was destroyed by fire in 1947, Skullyville became only a memory. Erected 1968

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center — 4.5 mi
  A Mississippian ceremonial center on the Arkansas River, about 850 to 1450, whose burial mound was mined in the 1930s, now run in consultation with the Caddo Nation and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes.
• Sequoyah's Cabin Museum — 19 mi
  The log cabin near Akins where Sequoyah, who gave the Cherokee language its syllabary, settled in 1829, kept since 2016 by the Cherokee Nation inside a stone shelter of 1936.

More markers nearby

• Walker's Station — steps away
• Fort Coffee — 0.7 mi
• Battle of Backbone Mountain — 6.6 mi
• Dwight Mission — 22 mi