Muldrow: A Cherokee Nation Crossroads
Near Fort Smith, Oklahoma
The land around Muldrow has Cherokee roots going back to the early decades of the eighteen hundreds, when the Western Cherokees, known as the Old Settlers, moved here from Arkansas ahead of the main Trail of Tears removal of eighteen thirty-eight and eighteen thirty-nine. The community sat in the Cherokee Nation, a fertile stretch near the Arkansas border. In November eighteen eighty-seven the federal Post Office Department gave the settlement a formal name, honoring Henry Muldrow, assistant secretary of the Interior.
Soon after, the Kansas and Arkansas Valley Railway pushed tracks through, turning a quiet Cherokee farming district into a proper town. Muldrow was incorporated after Oklahoma statehood. Today it sits just off Interstate Forty near Fort Smith, a small city that has outlasted the railway era while remaining firmly in the landscape the Old Settler Cherokees first called home.
