Building 309, Fort Sill Indian School

With but a single break, Fort Sill Indian School has served the Plains tribes (primarily) for over a century. It was established in 1871, only two years after its namesake neighbor, Fort Sill. Closed through the 1880s, it was re-opened in 1891 and is still operating today.

The area immediately surrounding the school is an extremely important one historically. Fort Sill, through its long and illustrious career, has concerned itself primarily with the needs of the white man ... providing protection first from the various hostile tribes, then, with an increasingly sophisticated weaponry arsenal, from a variety of hostile foreign enemies. The Fort Sill Indian School area, on the other hand, has met -- or at least attempted to meet -- strictly Indian needs ... political and economic ... medical and spiritual ... and educational.

Here Lawrie Tatum, the first Quaker Indian agent, came in 1869. Here, in 1871, he opened the first Quaker Indian school. Here, too, was developed the Fort Sill Indian Sub-Agency, an Indian hospital (still operating), and a number of licensed Indian trading posts (including the well known Red Store), along with the supporting community that surrounded these agencies and institutions. For a time, therefore, it was thought that perhaps this entire non-m111tary area of some 1,000 acres might be included in a Historic District for which National Register status would be sought. However, since so little of a physical nature remains of this entire complex, the district idea has been rejected in favor of this nomination for a single building of the Indian School.

Building 309, though it dates only from 1904, is quite well preserved. Too, it is the only anywhere-near-original structure of the complex that remains the rest of the school's physical plant is relatively new. Similarly, the Fort Sill Indian Hospital immediately to the north has been routinely upgraded over the years to the extent that it is today a thoroughly modern facility. And, finally, the Sub-agency building, the Cox, Red, and Paschal stores, the Addison Hotel, the Methodist Mission Church, the Doctor's House and other residences and business establishments in the area have long since disappeared from the now vacant field lying north of the hospital.