Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Tullahassee, OK

Tullahassee, in Wagoner County about five miles northwest of Muskogee, is considered the oldest of the surviving all-Black towns of Indian Territory - it is one of only thirteen such towns still in existence, out of more than fifty founded in Oklahoma.

The town's roots were planted in 1850, when the Creek Nation approved the Tullahassee Mission School on the Texas Road, founded by Presbyterian minister Robert McGill Loughridge to educate Creek children.

The mission's main building burned in 1880, and on October 24, 1881, the Creek Council transferred the school and community to the Creek Freedmen - former slaves of the tribe and their descendants - who rebuilt it and made Tullahassee their own town.

Tullahassee opened a post office in 1899 and incorporated in 1902; the townsite was formally platted in 1907, the year Oklahoma became a state.

In 1916 the African Methodist Episcopal Church opened Flipper Davis College in the old Tullahassee Mission building - the college served Black students until it closed in 1935.

Tullahassee's A. J. Mason Building, a surviving landmark of the town's commercial era, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The town's Carter G. Woodson School, named for the pioneering Black historian, was a center of community life until it closed in 1990.

Tullahassee held steady at nearly 200 residents from 1920 into the mid-twentieth century, before population drained away to just 106 people in both the 2000 and 2010 censuses.

Only 83 people lived in Tullahassee at the 2020 census, making the tiny town - barely half a square mile - one of the smallest incorporated municipalities in Oklahoma.

Tullahassee's town government has in recent years partnered with outside advocates on revitalization efforts aimed at preserving Oklahoma's oldest surviving all-Black town.