Grand Town Site

Grand did not have a lawyer or doctor. Every man respected the rights of others. Personal difficulties were settled in a primitive fashion. Petty thievery was unknown. No one ever locked his doors when he left home. There was no rush, no bickering or envying, or crowding there. It was Grand and well-named. The Law had not yet arrived.

That is the wryly sentimental, backward-looking summation by a pioneering settler of life in one of Western Oklahoma's first towns, now a picturesque ghost. (And a rather distinguished ghost at that. As someone has pointed out: Oklahoma has many ghost towns, but only one ghost county seat... of a ghost county.) Grand was never more than a small, struggling village. And its existence was actually quite brief. Yet it is almost uniquely representative of the western frontier in the late 19th century. And it was the home, if but briefly, of many citizens who became known as leaders elsewhere in the new state of Oklahoma.

The cattleman was king in this corner of the short grass country when the land still belonged nominally to the Indians. Then on April 19, 1892, the surplus lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservations were opened to white settlement. This section was first designated as "g" County. Sooner afterward it was named Day County and the location for a county seat was called Ioland, some 16 miles east of Grand. Farmers rushed in to claim land previously used by the cattlemen. In addition to the classic cowman/farmer confrontation, Day County also saw frequent Texan/Kansan confrontations, as homesteaders with widely divergent political and social backgrounds sought to wrest a living from a generally hostile environment.

Yet another representative frontier element was injected into Grand's existence on Nov. 12, 1893, when the Day County courthouse at Ioland burned to the ground. The next day the county commissioners moved the seat of government to Grand. (Complicity in the burning was widely suspected, but never proven.) The sleepy little village awoke sufficiently to provide a one-story courthouse. And a jail. In the time it claimed a post office and hotel, two stores, a blacksmith shop, two saloons, and two newspapers (one Republican, the other Democratic). As for the Law, it arrived with the county records; by 1907 Grand boasted four law offices and at least six lawyers.

But Oklahoma became a state, in 1907, and Day County was divided into Ellis County on the north, and Roger Mills County on the south. For a time Grand remained the temporary seat of Ellis County, while residents fought a heated battle over a permanent location. Arnett emerged as the eventual winner and on August 26, 1908, it took over the official records. Shortly thereafter it got even the frame courthouse itself! Grand, as a town of any real importance, had ceased to exist... although it clung to its post office, established Nov. 4, 1892, until Sept. 30, 1943. Many, many years before, alas, it had lost, also to Arnett, its only two-story building, that of the Woodmen of the World.

Yet the roster of Grand's important citizens is impressive, especially so, in view of its size and brief existence. Among the first lawyers to arrive was Charles Swindell, who went on to become District Judge, Congressman, and Justice of the state Supreme Court. Among its first doctors was Dr. O. C. Newman, founder of the Newman Hospital at nearby Shattuck, one of Northwestern Oklahoma's leading medical facilities today. Grand can also lay some claim to Will Rogers, who worked as a boy on the nearby Ewing ranch; Billy McGinty, the cowboy who rode with Teddy Roosevelt up San Juan Hill and was a pioneering rodeo performer in Madison Square Garden; and Temple Houston, son of the famed Sam Houston of Texas independence fame, who served as a judge in Grand.

As a town, Grand has had the corporate equivalent of political charisma. Since 1920, when one-time residents formed the Day County Association to keep alive memories of the old days, a constantly diminishing band of the faithful have met once each year to eat a picnic lunch under the trees. that remain... and to reminisce. Until her recent death, Augusta Metcalfe, Oklahoma's best-known primitive painter, was a regular attender. Long since reduced to a crumbling building or two, Grand thus continues to live in the memories of those who knew her when she was one of Oklahoma's more exciting not to say isolated seats of government.