Koweta Mission Site

About this property

Koweta Mission Site is a site near Coweta, Oklahoma, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The mission was started in 1843 by Presbyterian minister Robert Loughridge at Coweta, then the capital of the Creek Nation, Indian Territory. He named the mission "Koweta", after the Creek capital. The school operated until the American Civil War, when Loughridge and most missionaries left the territory. For a time the Creek people had resisted Protestant religious missions and their related schools, outlawing Christianity and preaching because it disrupted their traditional culture. But in 1842, Robert Loughridge, a Presbyterian missionary, had traveled to Coweta to meet with the Creek Council, who gave him permission to open a mission, because the Creek wanted to have their children educated. Loughridge made the school dependent on the mission. "Although the old chief at first had a manifested some fears of our religious influence interfering with their old customs, yet he gave us a cordial welcome, and requested me to locate the mission in his town. This I did and called the station Koweta, after the name of his home town. It was situated about 24 miles northwest of Fort Gibson, and one and one-half miles east of the Arkansas River. There was on the place selected a vacant Indian cabin 14x24 feet, with a dirt floor and covered with clapboards. Connected with it was a small unfenced field and a few fruit trees. For the whole premises, I paid the owner ten dollars. As planks could not be hauled a great distance, I had hired some men to split out 'luncheons' and floor the house. In this little cabin we lived happily for more than a year, and in this cabin our first child was born. As by agreement I could only preach at the Mission station. My first object was to build a log house to answer the double purpose of school and church. As soon therefore as it was ready for use, my wife commenced teaching a school of fifteen or twenty children, and the neighbors were invited to attendance at the Mission, while the most of them were devotedly attached to their old customs and superstitions. The outlook was very discouraging." The school operated for about 3 months until sickness and a lack of adequate accommodations resulted in Loughridge temporarily closing it. After a while, more Creek began attending Loughridge's services. His wife Olivia gave birth to their second child on September 5, 1845. But the nearest physician lived in Fort Gibson and was not in the area. Olivia developed puerperal fever on September 17, and died at the age of twenty-nine. One year later, on September 26, 1846, that second child also died; it was buried next to Olivia Loughridge, in what is known as the Bruner Family Cemetery. This was on the Hopping Farm, a mile and a half southeast of Coweta. Today the site is marked only by a cemetery.

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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.

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