Cities and Towns of Adair County


Ballard Creek Bridge:  Photo taken by Gene McCluney in March 2007
Through truss bridge over Ballard Creek on N4740 Rd. in Watts
Closed to all traffic
Built 1929

Ballard is a township located in Adair County, Oklahoma approximately 1.5 miles south of the city limits of Watts, Oklahoma, and administered by the Watts city government. The community is locally referred to as Ballard Hill.

Baptist was a township that was 3 miles west of Westville.

Bidding Springs was a town located 9 miles northwest of Stilwell.

Blanck was 2 miles southwest of Stilwell.

Chance was 10 miles northwest of Westville.

Church was located 6 miles South of Stilwell.

Dannenburg was 3 miles North of Stilwell.

Echota, 8 miles west of Stilwell

Fairfield Mission, was 6 miles southwest of Stilwell.

Lyons, was 5 miles southwest of Stilwell.

Piney, was 6 miles north of Stilwell.

Stilwell, the county seat of Adair County, is located eight miles west of the Arkansas state line and twenty-three miles east of Tahlequah, capital of the Cherokee Nation. Intersecting in town are U.S. Highway 59 and State Highways 51 and 100. Construction of the Kansas City, Pittsburg, and Gulf Railway, later renamed the Kansas City Southern Railway, established the town. Preliminary plans had envisioned a railroad from Kansas City, Missouri, through western Arkansas to the Gulf of Mexico. The difficulty of laying tracks across the Boston Mountains influenced railroad owner Arthur Stilwell to reroute his line through Indian Territory (I.T.). The route bypassed Mays, I.T., home of the Cherokee Nation's Flint District Courthouse. In 1896 upon completion of the line, officials established a division point five miles north of Mays at the foot of Davis Mountain. This point became the site for a new town. Several merchants moved from Mays to the site, and lots were laid out on land purchased from Martha Johnson and Elizabeth Freeman. On January 2, 1897, Stilwell, named for Arthur Stilwell, was incorporated. Three years later the population stood at 779. The first frame commercial buildings sprang up along the west side of the railroad on Front Street. In 1906 fire completely destroyed the business district. Entrepreneurs erected new stone and brick buildings along Division Street, which became the business district. Fletcher's Hardware, started by B. G. Fletcher at Mays and moved to the new town, remained the oldest business in Stilwell in 2001. At 1907 statehood Goingsnake and Flint districts of the Cherokee Nation combined to form the new county of Adair, named for prominent Cherokee citizen William Penn Adair. As early as 1901 the towns of Westville and Stilwell began a ten-year competition for the county seat. After three hotly contested elections Gov. Charles N. Haskell declared Stilwell the seat of Adair County on May 6, 1910. Stilwell had 948 and 1,039 citizens in 1907 and 1910, respectively. County records housed at Westville were moved to Stilwell. In 1920 workers completed a three-story, native-stone courthouse on Division Street, but on December 30, 1929, it burned. In January 1931 officials occupied a new granite, steel, and concrete courthouse. Population numbers increased to 1,155 in 1920 and 1,366 in 1930. When Stilwell incorporated in 1897, it adopted a mayor-council type of town government. Rufus Allison served as the first mayor. In a 1946 special election citizens approved a city charter establishing a municipal government of a mayor and five-member city council. In 2002 Marilyn Hill Russell held the office of mayor, the first Stilwell woman elected to that position. City services included a police force, a volunteer fire department organized in 1900, garbage and sewage service, natural gas, and electrical power. Health services included the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller Health Clinic, Memorial Hospital, numerous home health care agencies, the Oklahoma Department of Public Health, and the Stilwell Nursing Home. Owned by the descendants of George Harlan Starr for four generations, Starr Springs, two miles south of town at the headwaters of Sallisaw Creek, supplied water for Stilwell from 1911. The growth of industry required additional water, and in 1963 Carson Lake was constructed near Lyons community. Stilwell is the gateway to the Lake Tenkiller area via State Highway 100 and the recreation facilities at nearby Adair State Park via State Highway 51. Because the Cherokee government established schools in Indian Territory soon after the arrival of its citizens over the Trail of Tears, education has been a priority. In 2002 Stilwell Public Schools served more than fifteen hundred preschool to twelfth grade students. Indian Capital Technology Center offered technical education for high school students and adults. Agriculture provided the foundation for the local economy. For almost one hundred years Stilwell was a farming community. However, from 1960 to 2000 many turned to ranching. During the Great Depression and World War II strawberries emerged as one of the major crops that flourished in the climate and flint rocks of Adair County. At one time locals cultivated more than two thousand acres. In 1948 the local Kiwanis Club decided to promote the strawberries' quality and organized the first Stilwell Strawberry Festival. This event succeeded beyond all expectations, and by the time of the second festival in 1949 the state legislature and governor designated Stilwell and Adair County as the Strawberry Capital of the World. In 2002 an estimated forty thousand people attended. Although cultivated acreage has decreased, the strawberry is still king on the second Saturday in May.  Major employers were Cherokee Nation Industries, Facet Manufacturing Company, Tyson Foods, and Mrs. Smith's Bakery/Stilwell Foods, which evolved from the meager beginning of the Stilwell Canning Company in 1942. The Kansas City Southern provides affordable shipping to area industries. Until 1969 four passenger trains per day provided transportation. On February 22, 1971, the depot was deeded to the city of Stilwell, and in 1999 the Adair County Historical and Genealogical Association leased the building as a restoration project.

Titanic was 12 miles northwest of Stilwell.

Watts is on U.S. Highway 59 near the confluence of the Illinois River and Ballard Creek, once Williams Creek. In the mid-nineteenth century Capt. Nathan Boone, youngest son of Daniel Boone, helped survey the area for a military road. Nearby is the original site of Fort Wayne, established in 1838. The Kansas City Southern Railway (KCS) laid tracks through the area in 1895-96, and in 1912 decided to relocate their division point from Stilwell to the Watts Switch, one mile north of Ballard. Overnight a tent city sprang up at the switch, and the hillside was populated by land speculators and gamblers as well as by legitimate business people from Ballard, construction workers, and KCS employees. The emerging town was named for John Watts (Young Tassel), a Chickamauga Cherokee chief whose family had settled in the region. The post office opened in L. J. Anderson's store on March 30, 1912. Adair County's first sheriff Frank C. Adair and Frank Howard organized the Guarantee Bank. Several hotels and rooming houses have served the community, including the Van Noy Hotel, the Yellow Hotel, Watts Rooming House, and King's Rooming House. Early-day merchants included Sizemore and Son, Langley and Vandagriff, C. Daniels, H. V. Waldroop, L. J. Anderson, and the Hodge Brothers. There have been two drug stores, one operated by Blue Foreman and Nettie Ezell, and the other by Homer Lackey. The lumberyard relocated there from Ballard, and the Nelson Hardware store and two livery stables opened in the town. A. E. Willey owned a bakery; Austin Maples and Leo Davison had garages. A Stilwell man, nicknamed "Cigar" Smith, manufactured cigars. The town's doctors included A. J. Sands, I. W. Rogers, and a Dr. Ezell. W. G. White, who was justice of the peace, operated a telephone exchange, with his wife, Jennie, and daughter Nanny as operators. Past newspapers include the Watts Watchman published in the 1910s and the Watts Journal printed in the 1940s. The school has always been the center of the Watts community. In 1913 residents built a three-story schoolhouse. In 1924 the building was razed and the bricks used to construct a new building. At the end of the twentieth century it served as part of an expanded campus. In 2000 the enrollment for the prekindergarten through twelfth grade was 376. In 1913 the population was estimated at 300. In 1920 the U.S. Census officially recorded Watts's population at 396. The town that the railroad had built declined when the roundhouse, coal chute, water pump station, ice house, and water tower were not needed and were removed one by one. The depot was bulldozed in the 1980s.

Wauhillau was 10 miles northwest of Stilwell.

Westville lies at the junction of U.S. Highways 59 and 62, and approximately thirteen miles north of Stilwell, the county seat. The town was founded as one of several townsites on the Kansas City Southern Railway (originally the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad), which was being built from Kansas City to the Gulf Coast. Construction entered the Cherokee Nation in 1895 near Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and approximately fifteen miles north of future Westville. The Westville post office was established on November 18, 1895. The town name honored Jim West, who lived nearby, one mile south of nearby Cincinnati, Arkansas, and whose son, Jim West, Jr., was an attorney for the Kansas City Southern Railway. Westville was within the Going Snake District of the Cherokee Nation. The original plat for the town included 175 acres. Expansion came soon with the development of the William D. Williams Addition and the Pat Dore Addition. The federal government sold townsite lots to Cherokee citizens at half of their appraised value and to non-citizens at the full appraised value. In 1898 A. J. Edmiston published the town's first newspaper, the New Era. This endeavor was followed by the Cherokee Wigwam, Westville American, the Adair County Democrat, and the Westville Record. In 1902 a second rail line, the Ozark and Cherokee Central Railway, which ran from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, began operations through Westville, giving the town an enviable position at a rail junction. The new line, owned by the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway, became known as the "Frisco" and discontinued service to Westville in the late 1940s. The community grew rapidly during its first years. It was the only town along the Kansas City Southern to gain in population in the years after 1897. Businesses in surrounding communities, such as Baptist to the north and Going Snake District Courthouse to the west, soon relocated to Westville. In 1900 the population stood at 296, climbing to 956 in 1920. The first school term began in fall 1903, and the high school graduated its first class (one student) in 1908. The Westville school system continued to grow, especially with numerous consolidations of rural schools in the mid-twentieth century. In the school year 2003-04 enrollment exceeded one thousand for the first time. At 1907 statehood, Westville became the seat of newly formed Adair County. The county's southern residents vehemently protested, wanting the government offices to be located in Stilwell. In a 1908 election Stilwell won by 101 votes. The results were protested, and a suit was filed and carried to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. As a result, in early 1910 another election was held in which Stilwell won by thirty votes. Westville residents again protested that there were voting irregularities, but Gov. Charles Haskell declared Stilwell the county seat. During much of the twentieth century Westville served a surrounding farming community. In 1901 the first bank was organized and named the First National Bank. A second bank was founded on January 3, 1903, and called the Peoples Bank. The Peoples Bank purchased the First National Bank in the 1920s and became the town's sole bank for most of the twentieth century. It remained the town's oldest continuing business. The town's 1930 population was 691. By 1950 the number had grown to 781 and by 1970, to 934.

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