Union Agency

The stone building on the hill did not hold the agency for long. Merchants and Native people complained about the isolated site three miles west of Muskogee, and the next year the agent rented rooms in a downtown hardware store. A fire in 1899 destroyed the agency and all of its records. Allotment made the office a seller of townsite lots and allotments, approver of leases and payer of royalties, and by the 1920s grafters, lease hounds and swindlers overwhelmed it. Today the 1875 building houses the Five Civilized Tribes Museum.

What the plaque says

Union Agency Established July 1, 1874 Consolidated U. S. Indian office for Five Civilized Tribes. Cor- nerstone of old stone building here laid Aug. 18, 1875, in cere- mony led by Agent G. W. Ingalls, with address by Wm. P. Ross, Chief, Cherokee Nation; first Masonic cornerstone laying in the state, led by Rev. J. S. Murrow, Acting Grand Master in Indian Territory. Oklahoma Historical Society and State Highway Commission 1950

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Gibson Historic Site — 9.5 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 — 17 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

• State's Earliest Oil Refinery — 2.7 mi
• Wigwam Neosho — 4.6 mi
• Chief Pushmataha — 4.6 mi
• Tullahassee Mission — 4.6 mi