Big Cabin, Oklahoma: The Switch Named for a Plank House

When the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway laid tracks through the Cherokee Nation in eighteen seventy-one and seventy-two, surveyors needed names for every switch and water stop. About a mile and a half northwest of the track they spotted a large plank cabin used by local Cherokee residents, and they named the switch Big Cabin. In eighteen eighty-eight, entrepreneurs built cattle stockyards near the tracks.

A post office had been serving the area since eighteen seventy-two, and in nineteen oh-four a formal town was platted. Within a few years the community supported four grocery stores, a hotel, a hardware store, and a cotton gin. Big Cabin sits in Craig County today, a small crossroads community where the Interstate Forty-Four interchange provides about the same service to passing drivers that the old Katy Railroad switch once offered to passing trains.