After moving to Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, we discovered we weren’t the first family members who lived here.
In December 2015, I accepted a new job in Shawnee, Oklahoma and in March 2016, my wife and I purchased a home here.
Shawnee is a nice little town in Pottawatomie County with a population of about 32,000. After the Civil War, several Indian tribes were relocated to the area to include the Sac and Fox, followed by the Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Pottawatomie, who continue to reside here. During the Land Run of 1891, white settlers staked claim to surplus lands of the Sac and Fox, Pottawatomie, and Shawnee east of the Land Run of 1889. During the Land Run of 1895, settlers moved further west into Kickapoo territory.
The early settlers of 1892 initially called the new town they started “Brockway” but later changed it to Shawnee after the tribe who lived here. Between 1892 and 1895, the population grew from 250 to 2500 and rivaled Oklahoma City. Primarily an agricultural community, the area was well suited for growing potatoes, peanuts, peaches, and cotton with seven cotton gins and two cotton compresses by 1902. Between March 1901 and March 1902, 375 railroad cars of cotton products were shipped out of Shawnee, along with 150,000 bales of cotton. Cotton production dropped in the 1920’s due to a boll weevil infestation. In 1930, an election moved the county seat in Tecumseh five miles north into Shawnee.
Today, Shawnee is known for Shawnee Mills’ flour and the birthplace of Sonic, the fast-food drive-in.
The area was also home to connections of several ancestors, which we did not realize until after we moved here.
The town of Asher is twenty-six miles south of Shawnee. Asher also thrived as a cotton farming community until the boll weevils decimated crops and fires destroyed the cotton gins. In 1927, oil was discovered and resurrected the town.
The town is named after George “Matt” Asher, the son of Dillon Asher of Clay County, Kentucky. Matt purchased land in 1892 to establish a farm but he never lived in Asher. George’s sister, Margaret, married on 17 March 1830 to my fourth great uncle James Farmer, the son of Stephen Farmer of Harlan County. She would later pass away in December 1830 during childbirth. When James remarried to Susannah Skidmore on 15 December 1841, their first son was named Dillon Asher Farmer, after Margaret’s father.
In researching my paternal grandmother’s ancestors, I found that Rosebell Baker’s aunt, Mary Jane Baker (1847-1922), the sister to Rosebell’s father James Madison Baker (1840-1915). This would make Mary Jane by fourth great aunt. Mary Jane married on 26 July 1875 to Lafayette Bingham (1827-1910) in Knox County, Kentucky, before they moved to neighboring Cleveland County, Oklahoma by 1895. Sometime before 1910, they moved to Tecumseh. Mary Jane is enumerated with her son Ramy Bingham (1880-1961) in the 1920 US Federal Census as living in Rock Creek Township – a small rural area in the country one mile north of our home. I may go do some digging at the local courthouse to see if we’re living on land once owned by them.
Mary Jane and Lafayette are buried in the Tecumseh Cemetery less than five miles west of our house.
I also came across a distant relative who moved with several family members to Bales Township near present McLoud, which is less than twenty miles northwest of Shawnee. I recall they moved there before 1900, presumably with one of the land rushes, but soon returned to Kentucky by 1910. Unfortunately, what I can’t recall is their name so I can include that information in this blog.
It is an amusing curiosity as to whether all of these Kentuckians who resided so closely to each other at the same time knew each other. And then when you add my wife’s family tree, it really gets interesting.
Her great grandfather was Wiley Green Haines (1860-1928), who for almost thirty years was US Deputy Marshal of Indian Territory. Before relocating his family to Hominy, Oklahoma near the Kansas border sometime around 1898, Wiley lived in Clifton – fifteen miles north of Shawnee near present Meeker.
Imagine all of these distant relatives on multiple family tree branches rubbing elbows at Shawnee’s general store, or helping to get a cart out of the mud, or gathering for a social function, and then going their separate ways back home, or to another town, or to another state.
For my wife and I, it’s all in reverse – coming from separate states, meeting in Oklahoma, and then settling where our ancestors once lived.
It makes the world a little bit smaller.
Looking for a unique Christmas present this year? Philip Farmer is the author and publisher of “Edward Farmar and the Sons of Whitemarsh,” a 500-page, 155-year biographical history of the Farmer family’s immigration from Ireland into Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Harlan County, Kentucky. Complete with bibliography and footnotes that supports the research.
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