Antlers Frisco Depot and Antlers Spring

About this property

The Frisco Depot and adjacent Antlers Spring are historic sites in Antlers, Oklahoma, United States. The sites are a part of the National Register of Historic Places, in which they appear as a single entry. Antlers owes its existence to the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad—also known as the Frisco Railroad—which opened in June 1887. The railroad, which was built north to south through the mountains and virgin timberlands of the Choctaw Nation of the Indian Territory, brought civilization to the wilderness—three passenger trains operated daily in each direction, plus two freight trains, making for a total of ten trains per day. To support this industrial infrastructure section houses were established by the railroad every few miles. The houses assumed responsibility for maintaining the railroad track and right-of-way in either direction of each location. A section house was established at the site of present-day Antlers, with adjacent station stops to the north at Davenport, Indian Territory—now Kellond, Oklahoma—and south at Hamden, Indian Territory—now Hamden, Oklahoma. Railroad officials chose Antlers as the site due to the presence of a well-watered spring of fresh water. Surrounding the spring were numerous pairs of deer antlers nailed to trees. The antlers had been placed there by hunters as hunting trophies, and constituted a local landmark. The station, originally called Beaver Station after nearby Beaver Creek, was soon renamed Antlers. Antlers, Indian Territory quickly became a bustling territorial town and was provided with a wooden railroad station. The downtown business district was wooden, too, and much of it went up in flames during a catastrophic conflagration in 1904. Town officials afterward passed an ordinance requiring fireproof buildings made of brick, stone or cement throughout the town limits. This ordinance prevented the Frisco Railroad from replacing the depot with a stucco building such as had just been built (and still exists) in Hugo, Indian Territory. In March 1913 the railroad company announced it would build a brick building east of the tracks. The first stakes went into the ground two months later and, on June 5, 1914, the new depot opened for business. The depot quickly became the most important building in the community. Crowds routinely greeted each arriving passenger train, from which many townspeople embarked and disembarked, and businessmen greeted the freight trains, which delivered or received produce and goods for sale or shipment. The depot was, quite simply, the busiest building in the county—for decades.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Pushmataha County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Pushmataha County.

More historic places in Oklahoma

Browse all historic places in Oklahoma.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Oklahoma history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.