Maysville: Home of the Father of Modern Aviation

Maysville began as a stage stop called Beef Creek in eighteen seventy-one, when the El Paso Stage Company set up a station on a tributary of the Washita River in what was then the Chickasaw Nation. The town took its lasting name, Maysville, in nineteen oh two, in honor of local ranchers David and John Mayes. The fertile Washita River valley made it an agricultural community, and it carried on as a quiet Garvin County town through Oklahoma statehood in nineteen oh seven.

What put Maysville on a slightly larger map was Wiley Post, the aviator who grew up here when his family settled in the area. Post made the first solo around-the-world flight in nineteen thirty-three, circling the globe in seven days, eighteen hours, and forty-nine and a half minutes. He also pioneered high-altitude flight and developed an early pressure suit.

Maysville calls him the Father of Modern Aviation. Post died alongside Will Rogers in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, in August of nineteen thirty-five.