State's Earliest Oil Refinery

Muskogee's plant was the first of a great many. The OHS encyclopedia estimates that more than three hundred small, inexpensive fractional-distillation refineries have operated in Oklahoma. By the time the Cushing field was found in 1912 the Oklahoma and Kansas region had thirteen, and at Cushing's 1915 peak it had fifty-five, as producers built their own plants close to the wells. Most ran for fewer than ten years. Larger companies absorbed them as production waned in the 1930s, catalytic cracking in the 1950s favored big plants, and refining drifted toward the Gulf coast.

What the plaque says

State's Earliest Oil Refinery Muskogee Oil Refining Com- pany, organized in March 1905, built a "finishing plant" near this site in November 1904. It soon was producing lamp kerosene, lubricating oil and industrial fuel - the beginning of oil refining in Oklahoma, a leading industry today. Oklahoma Historical Society 73-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Gibson Historic Site — 10.0 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.
• Honey Springs Battlefield — 15 mi
  The July 17, 1863 battlefield on the Texas Road, the largest fight in Indian Territory, where Cherokee and Muscogee regiments fought on both sides and the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry held.
• Cherokee National History Museum — 27 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.

More markers nearby

• Fort Davis — 5.5 mi
• Wigwam Neosho — 7.2 mi
• Chief Pushmataha — 7.2 mi
• Tullahassee Mission — 7.2 mi