National Register Listing

Cherokee Supreme Court Building

a.k.a. Cherokee County School Superintendent's Office

Keetoowah St. and Water Ave., Tahlequah, OK

The Cherokee Nation was forcibly removed to Indian Territory from its ancient homeland in the Southeastern United States in the fall and winter of 1838-1839. This tragic trek to a then virtually unknown wilderness has since come to be known as the "Trail of Tears," justifiably so because roughly one-fourth of those making the journey failed to arrive. The various routes westward were marked by a steady procession of graves of the new-born, the aged, and the diseased.

The tragedy of this forced removal is made even more poignant by the fact that the Cherokee Nation of Indians had, in 1822 -- sixteen years before their Trail of Tears began -- adopted a republican form of government patterned on that of the then relatively new United States of America. Included was a national judicial system, at the head of which stood a National Supreme Court.

The word "civilized" in the so-called Five Civilized Tribes that eventually comprised Indian Territory was not an idle one. Thanks to the genius of Sequoyah, the Tribe by 1828 was publishing a newspaper in two languages - English and Cherokee. It was the only native American Indian tribe with a written language of its own - a language that stands as one of the great literary "inventions" of history.

The Cherokees, then, were not a band of savages being uprooted by a dominant society, but a nation largely of new Christians, ably led by visionary and dedicated leaders, being transplanted in a new and undeveloped homeland. And so it is that one of their first major accomplishments, after arrival in Indian Territory, was the reorganization of a tribal government torn apart by the stresses and strains of forcible removal from an ancient homeland.

Schools were started within a few months - the first publicly supported compulsory elementary school system in the Nation. And fully significant .. the first permanent structure built was that to house the Supreme Court. Unimposing by today's standards, it was hardly that at the time. Of brick manufactured by the Cherokees near the site, the small red structure was hailed by the Cherokee Advocate, the new tribal newspaper, as the "finest building west of Little Rock," And well it might have been.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1974.