Boley Historic District

Boley was built to be self-sufficient. Named for J. B. Boley, an official of the Fort Smith and Western Railway, it grew on Muscogee (Creek) Freedmen land, and its weekly paper, the Boley Progress, begun in 1905, was sent through the South with advertising that drew former slaves to the new town. Booker T. Washington came that year and called it the most enterprising and in many ways the most interesting of the Negro towns in the United States, and in 1908 he wrote it up for Outlook magazine. The town ran its own electric plant, water system and ice plant, supported two colleges, Creek-Seminole College and Methodist Episcopal College, and around 1912 the Masonic Grand Lodge finished a temple said to be the tallest building between Okmulgee and Oklahoma City.

The new state pushed back. The legislature passed Jim Crow laws right after statehood in 1907, and by 1911 white farmers in Okfuskee County were signing oaths never to rent, lease or sell land to anyone of Negro blood within a mile of a white or Indian resident. Dependence on cotton, the Depression, failing railroads and closed credit did the rest. Boley fell from 1,154 people in 1920 to 874 in 1930, and the town declared bankruptcy in 1939.

It came back slowly, to more than 1,100 people by 2000. The downtown business district is a National Historic Landmark. Boley is a town where people live and work, not an open-air museum.