Stillwater

The boomers lost the camp; the town that followed won most of what it fought for. After the 1889 run, Robert A. Lowry gave eighty acres of his claim and David Husband and Sanford Duncan forty each to meet the townsite rules. Stillwater set up a city government on June 11, 1889, beat Payne Center and Perkins for the county seat when the Organic Act passed on May 2, 1890, and soothed Payne Center by naming the county for David L. Payne. That December the territorial legislature chose Stillwater for the land-grant college.

What the plaque says

Stillwater Where Oklahoma Began! In December 1884, 200 Boomers led by William L. Couch settled near this site on Stillwater Creek. When ordered to leave, they defied the U. S. Cavalry. Lt. Mathias W. Day wired for reinforcements and added "They call this place the town of Stillwater." This was the first recorded reference to a town in the Oklahoma Territory. The Boomers departed in 1885, but at noon on April 22, 1889, thousands made the Oklahoma Land Run, and Stillwater was settled in the first hour. Its courageous pioneers were leaders in building Stillwater, Payne County and Oklahoma.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cherokee Strip Museum and Rose Hill School — 19 mi
  Perry's museum of the Cherokee Outlet, in a town that was a land office on bare prairie the morning of September 16, 1893 and held some 25,000 people that night.
• Pawnee Nation Museum — 21 mi
  The Pawnee Nation's own museum in Pawnee, keeping the Nation's objects and the record of a military tradition it traces from the Pawnee Scouts of 1864 to the code talkers of World War II.
• Oklahoma Territorial Museum and Carnegie Library — 26 mi
  The 1902 Carnegie Library in Guthrie where Oklahoma's statehood was proclaimed in 1907, saved from demolition in 1972 by adding a museum of the seventeen territorial years beside it.

More markers nearby

• Boundary Line 1889 and 1893 — 3.4 mi
• Outlaw Battle — 9.1 mi
• Oak Park Cemetery — 11 mi
• Iowa Chapel Cemetery — 16 mi