Depew, Oklahoma

Depew, Oklahoma was named for Chauncey M. Depew, a United States Senator from New York who never set foot in Creek County. The honor arrived on April twelfth, nineteen oh one, when Walter F.

Malley founded a post office on the new Frisco railroad line between Sapulpa and Oklahoma City and gave it the senator's name. Depew was a well-known figure of the Gilded Age, president of the New York Central Railroad and a celebrated after-dinner speaker, though the connection between a New York railroad baron and a Creek Nation townsite was purely the habit of the era: naming new western towns for prominent easterners. Oil was discovered nearby in nineteen eleven, briefly transforming Depew from an agricultural depot into a boomtown.

The boom faded, as booms do. Today Depew sits quiet on old Route Sixty-Six, population about four hundred, its oil-era brick storefronts wearing the dignified rust of a century past.