Colbert's Ferry Site
a.k.a. Colbert's Ferry;Colbert's Ferry And Butterfield Stage Statio
3 mi. SE of Colbert, Colbert, OKThe site of Colbert's Ferry on Red River -- where the so-called Texas Road crossed the boundary separating Indian Territory and Texas between the present towns of Durant and Denison -- has been important historically for a century and a half - well before and long after the ferry itself offered transport across the unpredictable stream for man and beast, for freight wagon and mail-and-passenger-carrying stagecoach.
"Beginning as early as 1822," notes Historian Grant Foreman, "this great highway helped to populate Texas and served important pioneering traffic north and south through eastern Oklahoma. For half a century, until the coming of the railroad in 1872 and for many years after, thousands of restless home seekers were seen in motion along this... TEXAS ROAD. It was so called in contemporary vernacular, in current newspaper accounts, in army correspondence, and on maps of the period."
The tremendous importance of the route (which followed originally an old Osage Trace from the northeastern corner of present Oklahoma to the Three Forks area where the Grand and Verdigris Rivers joined the Arkansas) is easy to document. The first railroad to be built in the Indian country -- the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas -- paralleled the old road and gradually absorbed its traffic. And today, ironically, U. S. 69, which also closely parallels the Texas Road from Kansas to the Red River, now absorbs much of the M-K-T's traffic. All of the crossings were and, in the case of the present highway and railroad bridges, are in this immediate area, just up-river from the ford/ ferry site. (In the pre-ferry days of 1845, Foreman says, "it was reported that a thousand wagons had crossed the Red River into Texas in six weeks."
Benjamin Franklin Colbert (of the well known, influential - and numerous - Chickasaw family moved to this area from Mississippi in 1846. A man "of great sagacity and business tact," according to a contemporary, he soon owned a 500-acre plantation, operated with the 51 help of some 25 slaves, as well as a steam sawmill, a grist-mill and a cotton gin. In 1853 he established his first ferry here on the Texas Road.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.