Ninnekah, Oklahoma

Ninnekah takes its name from a Choctaw word meaning night or darkness, a poetic choice for a small farming town in central Grady County. Its founding was strictly practical. In eighteen ninety-two the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway reached Chickasha in what was then the Chickasaw Nation, and a townsite was laid out just south of the new line.

The post office opened on July twenty-eighth, eighteen ninety-two, and the name Ninnekah was entered into the territorial record. Today it is a small community adjoining Chickasha on its south side, part of the long agricultural corridor that runs down United States Highway Eighty-One through Grady County, still carrying its quietly evocative Choctaw name.