Prominent Women of Oklahoma Architectural/Historic Survey

Geraldyn “Jerrie” M. Cobb

Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb (1931–2019) - aviation pioneer

Jerrie Cobb was born in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1931 to a military family. Encouraged by her father, she started flying as a teenager while attending Classen High School in Oklahoma City. She received a commercial pilot’s license on her 18th birthday. Establishing a career as a pilot was difficult for women, especially in a market flooded with qualified pilots coming home from the war; however, she persevered. Cobb became the first woman to fly in the 1959 Paris Air Show, was named pilot of the year, and was awarded the Amelia Earhart Gold Medal of Achievement. After working as an aviation executive and setting altitude and world speed records through the 1950s, Cobb was brought on to work at NASA, where she became the first woman astronaut trainee in 1960. She was one of the Mercury 13 women who took part in the physical and psychological testing for NASA astronauts. Cobb won many awards over the course of her career, including the Harmon Trophy and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale’s Gold Wings Award. In 1981 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian efforts in the Amazon.

Freda Ameringer

Freda Ameringer (1892–1988) - publisher and socialist activist

As a child in Arkansas during the turn of the century, Freda Ameringer was exposed to the realities of the mistreatment of poor people in the justice system, the abuse and exploitation of workers, the mass murder of striking labor organizers, and racial segregation policies. By 1914, she was the secretary of the Socialist Party of Arkansas, working on issues like women’s suffrage and organizing against America’s entry into World War I. Her socialist positions were influenced by Mother Jones, the Farmer’s Alliance in Arkansas, and the Populist movement. As a young woman, Freda and her husband Oscar founded the Oklahoma Daily Leader, an influential publication at the height of American socialism. After the Second World War and the end of the popular socialist movements in the US, she continued to edit the Oklahoma City Advertiser and advocated for causes such as desegregation, the reform of higher education, affordable healthcare, the protection of veteran’s benefits, women’s rights, and other progressive causes. She was a founder of Oklahoma City’s Urban League and helped build nine community centers to serve inner-city children. She was also one of the leaders of the Metropolitan Library System and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the only integrated community center at the time. She died in 1988.

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher was born in Chickasha, Oklahoma, in 1924. She graduated as valedictorian in 1941, and by 1945, she had graduated from Langston University with designs on law school. At the time, the state of Oklahoma had statutes making it illegal for Black students to attend white universities; Oklahoma would, however, provide funding for them to attend law school at Black schools out of state. Fisher, having informed her family and the NAACP of her decision to challenge the state of affairs, applied to law school at the University of Oklahoma in 1946. Upon rejection, she filed a lawsuit in the Cleveland County District Court. Thurgood Marshall, later the first Black US Supreme Court justice, represented Fisher in her case. The case went to the Supreme Court (Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma), and the justices ruled against the Board of Regents.

Fisher was eventually admitted to the University of Oklahoma Law School despite being required to sit and eat in segregated conditions. She graduated from the College of Law in 1952 and, in 1968 graduated with a master’s in history. She served as chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Langston University and as assistant vice president for academic affairs. In 1991 she was awarded the honorary degree doctor of humane letters. In 1992, Fisher was appointed by Governor David Walters to the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, the same entity that had once denied her entrance to its law school.

Hannah Diggs Atkins

Hannah Diggs Atkins (1923–2010) - first African American woman elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives (1968–1980)

In 1943, Hannah Diggs Atkins graduated with a bachelor of science from Saint Augustine’s College. She graduated with a bachelor of library science from the University of Chicago in 1949. Through the 1950s and 1960s, she worked as a law librarian and taught law and library science classes at the University of Oklahoma. In 1968, she was elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives and served as the first African American woman in the legislature until 1980. In the turbulent late 1960s, she used her position to advocate for child welfare, healthcare, tax reforms, mental health reforms, and civil rights.

In 1980, Atkins was appointed ambassador to the 35th Session of the United Nations by President Jimmy Carter. From 1987 to 1991, she served as both secretary of state and cabinet secretary of social services. She held positions in the NAACP, ACLU, and the Oklahoma Black Political Caucus, which she founded. She was a member of the National Association of Black Women Legislators and cofounder of the National Women’s Political Caucus. In 1998, Atkins received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, and in 2000, she received an endowed professorship from Oklahoma State University. She continued serving her community until her death in June 2010.

Vicki Miles-LaGrange

Vicki Miles-LaGrange (1953– ) - first African American woman to serve as United States Attorney for Oklahoma

Vicki Miles-LaGrange was born in Oklahoma City in 1953. She graduated from the University of Ghana in 1973 and cum laude from Vassar College in 1974. She earned a juris doctor from Howard University School of Law in Washington, DC, in 1977 and was an editor of the Howard Law Journal while working as a congressional intern. From 1977 to 1979 she served as a law clerk to Woodrow Bradley Seals of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Miles-LaGrange worked as a trial attorney and lecturer in women’s studies before returning to Oklahoma to serve as an assistant district attorney for Oklahoma County. In 1986, she and Maxine Horner became the first African American women to serve as an Oklahoma state senator. During her term as senator, Miles-LaGrange fought for legislation to improve the welfare of women and children. She was United States Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma from 1993 to 1994, having been nominated by President Bill Clinton.

Myra Yvonne Chouteau-Terekhov

Yvonne Chouteau (1929–2016) - one of the "Five Moons" prima ballerinas

Born in 1929 and listed as Shawnee on the Cherokee roll, Myra Yvonne Chouteau was the great-great-great-granddaughter of Major Jean Pierre Chouteau, a French merchant and explorer who established the first white settlement in Oklahoma at Salina. In 1943 she was the youngest dancer ever to join the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. At 18, she was the youngest person ever inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. She worked with world-class dancers and choreographers and, in 1956, married a principal dancer, Miguel Terekhov. In 1960, they founded the first fully accredited School of Dance in the United States at the University of Oklahoma. In 1963, they founded the Oklahoma City Civic Ballet (Oklahoma City Ballet) and ran it for ten years. She won many awards and accolades worldwide, including the National Cultural Treasures Award from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. She died in Oklahoma City at the age of 86.

Anna Emmaline McDoulet a.k.a “Cattle Annie”

“Cattle Annie” (1882–1978) - Old West outlaw

Anna McDoulet was born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1882. When she was twelve, her family moved to the Osage reservation near Skiatook, Oklahoma. There, she and her friend “Little Britches” began to get into trouble, inspired by tales of the Doolin gang and other outlaws. They stole horses, sold booze, and scouted for outlaw gangs. They were excellent riders and sharpshooters who wore men’s clothing and packed pistols. Contemporary newspapers in Oklahoma and Kansas took note. Cattle Annie was apprehended at the age of thirteen. Little Britches was also arrested, supposedly during a shootout with officers. They were both sent to the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women. Anna was released in 1898 and returned to Oklahoma, where she lived a quiet and law-abiding life with her husband in Oklahoma City until her death in 1978. Her exploits were made famous in the film Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981).

Rosalyn “Rosie" Coleman Gilchrist

Rosie Gilchrist (1910–1971) - Civil Rights activist

Rosalyn “Rosie” Gilchrist was born in Texas in 1910. In 1954, she, her husband, and their three boys moved to Warr Acres. In 1959, a housefire broke out, and Rosie was seriously burned over much of her body, leaving her permanently disfigured. Asked not to return to her family’s white church due to her appearance, Gilchrist was welcomed at Calvary Baptist Church with many of the Black nurses who had become her friends during her recovery. Rosie became committed to the Civil Rights Movement and was a chaperone for a trip to Washington, DC, for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, where she met a young Black doctor named West and agreed to sell her house to him. When her community in Warr Acres found that she intended to sell her house to an African American doctor, they had her arrested. Judge Harold Theus had her committed and sent to Central State (Griffin Memorial) Hospital in Norman, claiming she suffered from a “schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type.” After five years of confinement, one of her sons, along with journalist Paul Rahe and civil rights attorney and first African American Oklahoma state senator E. Melvin Porter, secured her release.

Edith Cherry Johnson

Edith Cherry Johnson (1879–1961) - journalist

Johnson was born in Ohio in 1879. She went to Ohio State University but left after a few years to help take care of her family following her mother’s death. After moving the family to Oklahoma City, her father died and left the family in further financial straits. In 1908 she was hired as a society editor for the Daily Oklahoman by E. K. Gaylord. Her women’s column appeared in the paper with her name and picture for fifty years. She published two non-fiction books, Illusions and Disillusions and To Women of the Business World, and some romantic fiction. She was one of the founders of Oklahoma City’s Goodwill Industries and was the first woman named as an honorary member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by Oklahoma City University and inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1935. She died in Oklahoma City in 1961.

Wanda Jackson

Wanda Jackson (1937– ) musician known as the "Queen of Rockabilly"

Born in Maud, Oklahoma, in 1937, Wanda Jackson became a country music star after Hank Thompson invited her to perform at the Trianon Ballroom. She signed with Decca Records in 1954 and began recording country Top Ten hits. While on tour with Elvis Presley in 1955-56, he encouraged her to start playing rockabilly instead of strictly country music, and she signed a contract with Capitol Records with the help of Jim Halsey. In 1958, she recorded “Fujiyama Mama,” which became a hit in Japan. She became popular in 1960 after a disc jockey began using her “Let’s Have a Party” as his theme song, and Capitol Records issued the tune as a single. It became a hit on the rock and roll charts. She went on to become a favorite on the Las Vegas nightclub scene. From 1954 to 1974, she recorded 30 country hits and was twice nominated for a Grammy Award. She was inducted 9into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2000.

Alice Lent Covert

Alice Lent Covert (1913-1986) - novelist who wrote about her experiences in the panhandle during the Dust Bowl

Alice Covert was born in Winfield, Kansas, in 1913. At the age of 13, the family relocated to the Oklahoma Panhandle. She went to school in Boise City and Forgan, where she found her love for writing. She was 16 when she published her first story in the Wichita Beacon. After studying journalism and psychology at Panhandle A&M College, she worked as a journalist in Lawton; there, she founded the Lawton Writer’s Club and published her first books. Drawing from her own personal experiences, Return to Dust (1939) and The Months of Rain (1941) are about farmers’ lives in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the Dust Bowl. Covert continued to publish books in the 1960s.

Caroline Henderson

Caroline Henderson (1877-1966) - teacher, farmer, and author.

Caroline Boa was born in 1877. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College in 1901, Caroline relocated to Texas County, Oklahoma, in 1908. Caroline married Bill Henderson, and purchased a 160-acre farm near Eva, Oklahoma. Her letters about the Dust Bowl were published in the Atlantic Monthly, Practical Farmer, and The Ladies’ World. Caroline and her work were prominently featured in the Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl. Her writing is based on personal experiences of losing crops and animals and weathering blizzards and dust storms in the Panhandle.

Laura Ella Crews

Laura Ella Crews (1871-1976) - Oklahoma centenarian, known as the last living participant of the Cherokee Strip Land Run in 1893

Laura Crews was born in Pierce City, Missouri, in 1871. The following year, the family relocated to Chautauqua County, Kansas. Her father died in 1873, which left the family in difficult financial straits. However, multiple family members had acquired land in the land runs of 1889 and 1891. At the age of 20, she came to Oklahoma to live with her mother, who had secured land east of Guthrie, and worked as a schoolteacher. In 1893, she and her brother made the land run in the Cherokee Outlet opening, staking a claim between Garber and Covington. Royalties from the Garber-Covington oil field allowed her family to move to Enid. She never married or had children but raised six of her brother James’ children after his death. “Aunt Laura” died in 1976 at the age of 105.

Elizabeth Maria Tallchief (a.k.a. Betty Marie Tall Chief, Maria Tallchief)

Maria Tallchief (1925–2013) - one of the “Five Moons” prima ballerinas, famously known as “Oklahoma’s Firebird” Elizabeth Maria Tallchief was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, in 1925. She grew up with traditional Osage culture, taught by her grandmother, Eliza Bigheart Tall Chief. By the time she graduated high school, she had already been dancing under famous mentors and moved to New York to dance for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. After a Canadian tour in 1942, the company asked her to change her name to Tallchieva, but she refused, only agreeing to change her name from Betty Marie Tall Chief to Maria Tallchief. In 1946, she married Russian choreographer George Balanchine. They worked together through the height of her career on ballets such as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. In 1954, on tour with Ballet Russe, she was making $2,000 per week and was the highest-paid prima ballerina of that period. She is depicted among the other “Five Moons” dancers in the mural Flight of Spirit, which can be found in the Great Rotunda of the Oklahoma Capitol building. She won many awards and served as the director of Chicago’s Lyric Opera Ballet in the 1970s and the Chicago City Ballet in the 1980s.

Moscelyne Larkin Jasinski

Moscelyne Larkin Jasinski (1925-2012) - one of the “Five Moons” ballerinas.

She was born in Miami to a Russian dancer named Eva Matlagova-Larkin, Moscelyne came by her love of dancing naturally. Training under her mother until her mid-teens, Moscelyne travelled to New York to study at an early age. At the age of 15, she joined the Original Ballet Russe and toured around the world. She married her husband, dancer Roman Jasinski in 1943, and they toured throughout the duration of the Second World War. She later joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and was often featured as the prima ballerina at Radio City Music Hall in New York. After moving to Tulsa in 1954, she and her husband later founded the Tulsa Civic Ballet and School (Tulsa Ballet Theatre). She is depicted among the other “Five Moons” dancers in the mural painting Flight of Spirit, which can be found in the Great Rotunda of the Oklahoma Capitol building. Among many accolades, she was inducted into the Oklahoma hall of fame in 1978. She died in 2012.

Buffalo Calf Road Woman

Buffalo Calf Road Woman (1844-1879) was a Northern Cheyenne warrior

Born in 1844, Buffalo Calf Road Woman (also known as Buffalo Calf Trail Woman) was a Northern Cheyenne woman known for her exploits in battle. In the Battle of the Rosebud, General George Crook’s soldiers were pursuing the Cheyenne and Lakota forces under Crazy Horse. At one point, they were forced to leave Buffalo Calf Road Woman’s wounded brother, Chief Comes in Sight, behind. She famously galloped back into the battlefield at full speed to pick up her brother and carry him to safety. This heroic act inspired the Cheyenne warriors to mount a counter-offensive in which they defeated General Crook. For this reason, the battle is known to the Cheyenne as “The Fight Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.”

Only nine days later, she was at the Battle of Little Bighorn, fighting alongside her husband Black Coyote. She is credited with landing the blow that knocked Custer from his horse before he died. After the battle, and their surrender to the US, Buffalo Calf Road Woman was with most of the Northern Cheyenne as they were relocated to the Southern Cheyenne Reservation in Oklahoma. She was later part of the famous Northern Cheyenne Exodus to Montana. She died in 1879.

Patience Sewell Latting

Patience Sewell Latting (1918-2012) - first female mayor of Oklahoma City (1971-1983).

Born in Texhoma, Oklahoma, in 1918, Patience graduated with honors from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938. She received her master’s in economics and statistics from Columbia University in 1939. In 1967, Latting became the first woman elected to the Oklahoma City Council. During her service on the council, she called for stricter housing and building codes and more African American participation in government. She became the first and only female mayor of Oklahoma City in 1970 and the first woman to head the government of an American city with more than 350,000 people. Latting was instrumental in the adoption of the 1977 master development plan. During her tenure as mayor (she was reelected in 1975 and 1979), many new parks were constructed, including Myriad Gardens.

Lucille Mulhall

Lucille Mulhall (1885-1940) - cowgirl and Wild West performer

Lucille Mulhall was brought to Oklahoma in 1889 as a small child and grew up on a ranch in Mulhall, Oklahoma (named for her father). At a young age, she was already among the first women to compete against men in rodeo events. She performed in Wild West shows and in Vaudeville. Eventually, Lucille produced her own Wild West troupe and rodeo, “Lucille Mulhall’s Roundup.” In 1901, she performed at McKinley’s presidential inauguration ceremony. In 1903, she set the world record time for steer roping at 30 seconds. She won many awards, including “Champion Lady Steer Roper of the World” at the Winnipeg Stampede. At the time, her name was synonymous with the term “cowgirl,” as Teddy Roosevelt himself gave her the nickname. She was also known as “Rodeo Queen," “Queen of the Western Prairie,” and "Queen of the Saddle.” She was killed in a car accident in 1940.

Nanitta R. H. Daisey

Nanitta Daisey a.k.a “Kentucky Daisey” (1855-1903) - Land Run of 1889 participant

Nanitta Regina H. Daisey was born in Pennsylvania in 1855. As a child, her family relocated to St. Louis; sadly, her parents died, and she was orphaned there. She was raised and educated by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd Convent. As a young woman, she worked as a teacher and journalist in Kentucky, where she ran as a candidate for Kentucky state librarian. She had the reputation of a firebrand, confronting discrimination against women seeking professional positions.

She took part in the Land Run of 1889 as a journalist and a claimant. Working as a correspondent for the Dallas Morning News and the Forth Worth Gazette, she took a train north from Purcell on the day of the run. When the train reached Edmond, she jumped to the ground, staked a claim, and ran back to the train in time to be pulled back onboard by a fellow journalist. This daring claim cemented her firmly within the popular mythology of the Oklahoma land runs. Exaggerated tales began to surface about how she had jumped from the train’s cowcatcher and fired a pistol shot, or that she had been trampled in the land run of 1891, or that she and several women had built a 15-room house on an 1893 claim, constructed entirely of lumber they had hauled in on horseback. One factual exploit, however, took place in 1891, when she was caught sneaking into Roger Mills county as a sooner. She was captured by the US Army and taken to El Reno. Kentucky Daisey became a type of folk character representing “land run fever.” She is the subject of the public sculpture Leaping into History by Mary Lou Gresham, located in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Zelia Page Breaux

Zelia Page Breaux (1880-1956) - musician and teacher at Douglass High School

Zelia Breaux was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1880. After she earned a bachelor of arts in music, her father became the president of the Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now Langston University). Zelia Breaux was brought in to establish the music department. In 1918 she became the supervisor of music for the African American schools in Oklahoma City. The Douglass High School band, organized in 1923, became famous, touring around the nation, performing on the radio and at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933; the band even influenced important musicians like Duke Ellington and Charlie Christian. In 1939 she completed a master’s degree in music education. Zelia Breaux was co-owner of the Aldridge Theater in Oklahoma City and was inducted into the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame in 1983.

Susan Eloise (S. E.) Hinton

S. E. Hinton (1948– ) - writer

Susan Eloise Hinton was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1948. She is best known for her first novel, The Outsiders, which she published while still in high school in 1967. The book was an essential influence in the development of young adult fiction, and it was adapted into a popular film in 1983. She followed up her first hit with three others: Rumble Fish (1975), Tex (1979), and That Was Then, This Is Now (1971).

Ruthe Blalock Jones

Ruthe Blalock Jones (Chu-Lun-Dit) (1939- ) - professor, painter, and printmaker

Ruthe was born in Claremore in 1939 and raised in a traditional Native home. Her family were descendants of the Delaware-Shawnee-Peoria Nations. She attended Bacone College High School and received an associate degree from Bacone in 1970. She went on to earn her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Tulsa in 1972 and a master’s degree from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah in 1989. She began her career as an artist at the age of ten when she studied under Oklahoma artist Charles Banks Wilson. Jones worked in a variety of media—oil, acrylic, watercolor, and pen and ink. Her work is held at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Gilcrease Museum and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, and the Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Dr. Isabel Cobb

Dr. Isabel Cobb (1858-1947) - first woman physician in Indian Territory

“Dr. Belle” was born in Tennessee in 1858. At the age of 12, her family relocated to the Cooweescoowee District in the Cherokee Nation, near present-day Wagoner, Oklahoma. She graduated from the Cherokee Female Seminary in Tahlequah and then from the Glendale Female College in Glendale, Ohio. After teaching in Tahlequah for a few years, she went to medical school at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1892. At the time, it was only the second institution in the world where a woman could graduate with an MD. After an internship in New York, she returned to practice medicine in Wagoner County. She often performed surgeries in patients’ homes, though she mostly worked out of a farmhouse. She was known for frequently refusing to charge a fee.

Sophia Alice Callahan

Sophia Alice Callahan (1868-1894) - writer and teacher of Muscogee (Creek) heritage

Callahan was born in Texas in 1868 to a Muscogee (Creek) father and a white mother, the daughter of a Methodist missionary. Her elderly grandfather had died during the removal of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation to Oklahoma. She went to school in Virginia, then moved to the Creek Nation in Indian Territory to teach at various boarding schools. She wrote for multiple publications but most famously published a book in 1891. Wynema: A Child of the Forest, is believed to be the first novel written by a Native American woman. It is also likely the first novel written in Oklahoma. An important aspect of the book is that it was likely meant to draw attention to atrocities perpetrated against Native peoples, including the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

California M. Taylor

California M. Taylor (1868-1955) - entrepreneur and NAACP leader

California M. Taylor was born in Houston in 1868, in the Fourth Ward neighborhood, which was a growing community of Freedmen and Freedwomen. She went to school in Houston and then to Fisk University in Nashville. In 1904, she and her family arrived on the train in the town of Boley, located in the Creek Nation. Taylor worked as a teacher, newspaper correspondent, pharmacist, business owner, notary public, telephone operator, and secretary of the Boley chapter of the NAACP. Her work as the secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP, starting in 1929, was difficult due to the economic conditions of the period. She also served as precinct clerk and as the correspondent for the Okemah Daily Leader, in which she discussed race relations of the time. She died in Houston in 1955.

Alice Brown Davis

Alice Brown Davis (1852-1935)- first woman chief of the Seminole

Alice Davis was born in the Cherokee Nation in 1852 to an army surgeon father and Seminole mother. At the age of 15, her parents both died from cholera. Alice and her brother moved to Wewoka to live with John Frippo Brown. They were educated at the Seminole mission, and later, Alice ran a trading post with her husband. After 1885, she worked for Chief Brown as an interpreter, liaison, postmaster, and recordkeeper. In 1919, she was appointed the first woman tribal chief of the Seminole Nation by President Warren G. Harding.

Myra Maybelle Shirley Starr

Myra Maybelle Shirley Starr (1848-1889) - Old West outlaw

Myra Maybelle Shirley Starr was born in Jasper County, Missouri, in 1848. Her mother was a Hatfield of Hatfield–McCoy feud fame, and two of her brothers were outlaws who were killed by officers. Belle was continually associated with notorious outlaws and gang members and eventually married James C. Reed, formerly a member of Quantrill’s Raiders. She left Reed after he was involved in a number of robberies. In 1880 she married Sam Starr, and they moved to Younger’s Bend in the Cherokee Nation, near present-day Eufaula, Oklahoma. Their cabin quickly became a hideout for various criminals, and her husband was killed. In 1889 she was shot in the back and buried in Younger’s Bend. Technically her only documented crime was stealing a horse in 1882. Her murder remains unsolved.

Martha Helen “Mattie” Beal Payne

Martha Helen Beal, the “First Lady of Lawton” (1879–1931) - pioneer and first woman to receive a claim in the 1901 land lottery

Mattie Beal was born in Missouri in 1879, and her family came to Oklahoma during the 1891 land run; she graduated from Stillwater. She signed up for the 1901 land lottery and became the first woman to draw a prize when her name was the second pulled. Mattie and her husband received 160 acres in Lawton, which they commuted to individual town lots. In 1907 they began construction on a fourteen-room, Italian and Greek revival-style mansion. The Mattie Beal House was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Mattie Beal Payne died in 1931.

Rosemary Hogan

Rosemary Hogan (1912-1964) - one of the first women to become a full colonel and one of the “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor”

Rosemary was born in Ahpeatone, Oklahoma, in 1912. She went to school in Chattanooga, where she graduated as valedictorian and earned a nursing scholarship. She joined the Army Nurse Corps at Fort Sill in 1936. Rosemary then served as a nurse during World War II and received a Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds she received in an operating room bombing raid in 1942. While being transported to Corregidor island in the Philippines, the Japanese captured Hogan and her fellow evacuees. She became a prisoner of war at Manila’s Santo Tomas Internment Camp until 1945. After World War II, she served in the US Air Force Nurse Corps.

Ada Exira Wills Garside

Ada Wills Garside (1870-1950) - professional photographer in Newkirk, Indian Territory

Ada was born in Brown County, Ohio, in 1870. She lived in various parts of the Midwest until moving to Newkirk, Oklahoma Territory, in 1899. She was one of the first photographers in Oklahoma Territory, along with Emma Alfreda Coleman and Annette Ross Hume. She is known for photographing people of the area, including the Chilocco Indian School, other Native peoples, and a solar eclipse in 1900.

Muriel Hazel Wright

Muriel Hazel Wright (1889-1975) - teacher, historian, and editor

Muriel Wright was born in Lehigh, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory, in 1889 to a Presbyterian missionary teacher mother and a Choctaw physician father. Muriel was educated in Massachusetts and completed her studies at East Central Normal School in Ada in 1912, although she never received her degree. Through the mid-1920s, she worked as a principal and teacher before attending Barnard College, where she studied English and history. Wright understood the importance of her role in the Choctaw Nation. She worked as the secretary of the Choctaw Committee, secretary of the Choctaw Advisory Council, and a delegate to the Intertribal Indian Council. She collaborated on a four-volume work, Oklahoma: A History of the State and Its People, and authored many articles for The Chronicles of Oklahoma from 1923 to 1971. She also published three textbooks on Oklahoma history. Her 1951 A Guide to the Indian Tribes in Oklahoma remains the standard reference in the study of Oklahoma’s Native peoples.

Kate Galt Zaneis

Kate Galt Zaneis (1887-1973) - first woman to head a state college or university in the United States

Kate Zaneis was born in Georgia in 1887; her family relocated to Ardmore, Oklahoma, when she was a child. Upon her graduation in 1907, she was hired to teach in the Ardmore district. After serving as principal of Lincoln Ward School, she became the superintendent of Lone Grove High School in 1915. In 1920, while working on her bachelor’s degree, Kate was elected Carter County superintendent. Governor Ernest Whitworth Marland appointed her to the State Board of Education. Just before her graduation from Oklahoma A&M (Oklahoma State University) in 1935, the governor appointed her the president of Southeastern Oklahoma State Teachers College (Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant). Zaneis was the first woman to head a state college or university in the United States. She was responsible for many educational reforms, including requiring faculty members to have master’s degrees, equalizing the pay for women on the faculty, ending mandatory political donations from faculty members, and funding expansion of the school. She passed away in Ardmore in 1973.

Minerva Willis

Minerva Willis (1820-?) composer

Minerva Willis was, along with her father Wallace, a composer of spirituals. She and her father, “Uncle” Wallace, were relocated from Mississippi to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears. They were then enslaved on a plantation in the Choctaw Nation owned by a man named Britt Willis. Willis often hired Minerva and her father out to work at the Spencer Academy, a Choctaw school for boys in Spencerville, Oklahoma. When they worked at the school, they would sing “plantation songs” composed by her father. They included “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” and “Steal Away to Jesus.” The schoolboys enjoyed the songs and requested them often, and they caught the attention of the school superintendent, Reverend Alexander Reid. Reid documented the songs and introduced them to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an African American acapella ensemble from Fisk University in Nashville. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were immensely popular and would eventually tour around the world performing songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” cementing the songs in the history of American Folk music.

Mae Boren Axton

Mae Boren Axton (1914-1997) - singer-songwriter, known as the “Queen Mother of Nashville”

Mae Boren Axton was born in Texas in 1914, but her family moved to Oklahoma when she was very young. She attended East Central State College and earned a bachelor of arts in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. She then worked as a teacher in Oklahoma and Florida. After establishing some connections with people in the music industry in the early 1950s, she worked as a songwriter, radio announcer, and music promotor. She is credited with writing around 200 songs. She wrote many songs for artists like Willie Nelson but is most famous as the co-writer of “Heartbreak Hotel,” performed by Elvis Presley. She introduced Presley to Colonel Tom Parker and promoted him in his early career, which included pressuring RCA to sign him. She was also the mother of actor-musician Hoyt Axton.