Enid Cemetery: The First Grave on the Strip

A city's oldest cemetery tells you something about how the city began. Enid's tells you everything.

On September sixteenth, eighteen ninety-three, the starting gun of the Cherokee Strip Land Run fired and more than one hundred thousand people flooded into six million acres of former Cherokee Nation territory that the federal government had purchased and opened to homesteading. It was the largest single competitive land rush in American history. By nightfall, towns had materialized from nothing on the treeless prairie. Enid was one of them.

The new residents began dying almost immediately. In eighteen ninety-seven, a one-year-old child named Lee Stuart Anderson died, the son of Hymen and Cora Anderson, whose farm lay on the eastern edge of the new city. The Andersons buried him on their land, there was nowhere else to bury the dead yet, because the city was barely four years old. In eighteen ninety-eight, Hymen Anderson deeded fifteen acres of that same land to the city for use as a proper cemetery.

That original acreage became the Enid Cemetery, and it grew through additions in nineteen eighteen, nineteen twenty, and nineteen twenty-three. The earliest graves reflect the demographics of the land run itself, settlers from Kansas, Missouri, and the older Oklahoma territories, mixed with a scattering of people from every corner of the country who had gambled on the race and won a claim.

The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-six, together with the neighboring Calvary Catholic Cemetery. The older additions, the Original from eighteen ninety-eight, the First and Second from the nineteen teens and twenties, contribute to its historic significance as a document of one of the most extraordinary founding moments in American municipal history.

One year old. The first Enid child to need a grave. His name is there still.