Okemah: Birthplace of Woody Guthrie

The name belongs to a Kickapoo chief. Chief Okemah built a traditional bark house on the new townsite in March nineteen oh two, waiting for the official land opening that would carry his name into the future. In Kickapoo, okemah means a highly placed person or high ground.

The land itself had belonged to full-blood Creek members Mahala and Nocus Fixico before the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad platted a townsite here and non-Indian settlement was opened in April nineteen oh two. Ten years later, on July fourteenth, nineteen twelve, a boy named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in a house in Okemah. He would grow up to write This Land Is Your Land, inspire Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and generations beyond, and become the most famous voice of the Dust Bowl and the Depression.

In two thousand one Okemah was named Oklahoma's first National Literary Landmark, its identity now inseparable from the singer born in a small house on the southern plains.