Monogrammed Brick Stories
Forest Anderson
Submitted by David P. Lee
Forest Anderson was born in 1874 in Shelby, North Carolina. He became self-sufficient at an early age and made his way to Oklahoma in 1907. He settled near Earlsboro and began sharecropping, and later ended up purchasing the land where he sharecropped. Later, oil was discovered on the land. During school segregation, he built a school for the black children in rural Seminole County. After the bank in the All-Black town of Boley was shut down due to a failed robbery attempt in 1932 by Pretty Boy Floyd's gang, he bought the bank and paid off all of the depositors. In 1949 Ebony magazine listed him as one of the "Ten Richest Negros in America" with a worth of about $2 million. He owned more than 6,600 acres of land when he died in 1952.
