Blackwell: Born in the Cherokee Strip Run
Oklahoma
On September sixteenth, eighteen ninety-three, the federal government opened six million acres of the Cherokee Outlet to settlement in what became the largest land run in American history: over one hundred thousand people lined up at the boundary. Blackwell was one of the towns that appeared that day. Its founder, A.
J. Blackwell, had married into the Cherokee Nation and was living nearby since eighteen eighty-two, which qualified him to stake a claim. He drove the first stakes and then served as both justice of the peace and the town's first mayor.
A post office was operating by December first, eighteen ninety-three, and a school opened with fifty-two students in September of that same year. Gas wells began appearing northeast of town by nineteen oh two, and a zinc smelter followed in nineteen seventeen. Blackwell today is a small Kay County city that still feels like a land-run town.
