Saline District Courthouse
1.5 mi. S. of the intersection of OK 33, Scenic 412 and County Road NS449, Rose, OKSaline Courthouse is a not unhandsome physical reminder of the well-organized and quite effective judicial system brought by the Cherokees from their homeland in the Southeast and re-established here in Indian Territory.
During most of its existence, the Cherokee Nation had nine districts. In 1883 each was voted $1,200 to create a uniform set of new courthouses. All were built by 1889 and Saline is the only one to survive.
A judge usually came up from Court and was held at Saline at stated intervals. Tahlequah, the nation's capital, to preside. It was only natural that a small settlement should grow up to serve it. Soon Saline had, in addition to the two-story courthouse with its broad gallery, a blacksmith shop, a church or two, a school, a doctor's office, and a large general store.
One Thomas Baggett, a white Alabaman and a lawyer, married to a Cherokee woman, owned the store "that tragic September 20, 1897, when three fine and upright men were brutally slain," to quote a latter-day (and part-Cherokee) chronicler. In short order Baggett was shot down from ambush, the man who probably witnessed it was bludgeoned to death with a gun or a bottle (presumably by the murderer), and the sheriff trying to investigate the affair was killed, how and by whom was never determined. The incident was as complicated and confusing as it was tragic and the Cherokee courts never could figure it out to their complete satisfaction. But the fact that here "three fine and upright men were brutally slain" no one questioned.
Unrelated to these tragedies are those hinted at by inscriptions on the weathered stones a hundred yards or so in front of the courthouse. Consider the broken one belonging to A. J. Colvard. "Born 1858 Murdered-- -- 1892." And at the bottom the poignant cry: "Take care of my children."
The significance of the Saline Courthouse, however, lies not so much in specific events taking place in the old building or on the grounds around it as in its symbolic representation of the Cherokee Nation's judicial system. In Tahlequah, the capital of the Nation, still stands the Cherokee Supreme Court building, itself in the National Register. Saline, as the sole survivor of the Nation's nine district courthouses, would seem no less deserving of preservation.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
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.