Museum of the Great Plains

The Museum of the Great Plains in Lawton, Oklahoma grew out of the Comanche County Historical Society, which formed in nineteen fifty-two and began displaying collections at Fort Sill. With support from the local McMahon Foundation, a permanent facility opened on March twenty-fifth, nineteen sixty-one. In nineteen seventy-two it became the first institution in Oklahoma to receive accreditation from the American Association of Museums.

The museum's exhibits run from the Clovis culture, the Paleo-Indian people who arrived on these plains roughly eleven thousand five hundred years ago, through the cattle drives, homestead era, and the twentieth century. Lawton itself sits on land opened by lottery in nineteen oh one after allotments were made to the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache peoples, and the museum holds a great deal of that layered regional story.