Bowlegs High School - Yahnseh Yearbook (Bowlegs, OK)

Page 11 text:

HISTORY CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER BOWLEGS, VERY EARLY DISCOVERY DEPRESSION RECOVERY THE PRESENT REGIME

Page 10 text:

Dedication To the members of the Board of Education who have given willingly of their time and energy in their unceasing efforts to maintain the high standards necessary for educational progress, this Yahnsch is dedicated. fi

Page 12 text:

C H A P T E R I - BOWLEGS, VERY EARLY - The initial chapter in the saga of U. G. No. 5 must read substantially like the open pages of any treatise on Oklahoma history. From the morning of time these wind-swept prairies were the hunting grounds of the Indianfof the Bowlegs and the other Plains tribes. Then, as a rapidly moving panorama came the Seminoles and the other Five Tribes from the South, the cattlemen, the railroads, the settlers4and Okla- homa was the forty-sixth state. Two integral units of the white man's re- gime were the farm and the school. Seminole County was a region of small farms and a con- tented rural populace. It was a region of the so-called cotton schools -one and two-room systems which declared a vacation during the harvest season. Two of these typically rural schools were Allen, District 24, and Thrace, District 26. Both were splendid two-teacher organizations offering work through the eighth grade, A limited num- ber of sports and extra-curricular activities were fostered. But students desiring high school training had to go away to nearby towns-- Seminole, Wewoka, and Ada. Allen and Thrace were entirely separate educational units in the early 1920's. But even then, Fate was uniting their destinies with a vision of greater things to come. Mr. and Mrs. Ernest L. Kiker were the last to guide the sixty students of Thrace. Allen, too, was about to dis- appear as a separate entity. In 1926 the Board of Education of the Allen District was composed of three unusually pro- gressive and far-seeing individuals: J. D. Ma- gruder, President, W. O. Townsend, Clerk, and J. O. Bradley, Member. Visualizing a high school where none then existed, these men set about making their dream a reality. The preliminary step was the election of Mr. and Mrs. H. S. Emerson, then teaching in Pontotoc County, to the positions of teachers in the Allen School. Emerson and the Board then began formulating plans for a rural high school to educate the boys and girls of an es- sentially rural community. And thus the story might have ended- ended with an average country high school, un- known and unsung. Thus the story of Bowlegs U. G. No. 5 might have ended before it was begun. But two factors made such mediocre end- ing impossible. First, was a gift of Nature, a gift so rich and abundant that the giving amounted to a veritable cataclysm, a gift which metamophised a rural countryside into a color- ful industrial center. The second factor was a man of dynamic energy and high ideals who builded a great in- stitution for the future. C H A P T E R II - DISCOVERY - A drowsy rural countryside was the present .Gite of Bowlegs in the summer of 1926. Farmers worked until Saturday noon, then took the fam- ily to town for a week's supplies and an ex- change of local gossip. On the dusty street corners men stood in sweltering little groups and speculated on the possible crop yield in the fall and made jocular references to how rich they were going to be when that wildcat test being drilled southwest of Wewoka became an oil well. That wildcat test became the Seminole Area Discovery Well! And overnight Bowlegs became a synomyn for all that was crude and lawless, all that was activity and Wealth and waste in a typical boom town. Thousands Hauling Timber to New Location Page Six