Oklahoma Baptist University

Oklahoma Baptist University sits in Shawnee, the seat of Pottawatomie County, and its founding in nineteen ten came just three years after Oklahoma statehood. Baptist leaders from across the new state gathered to establish a college that would serve the Southern Baptist mission in Indian Territory's successor state. The campus opened with a handful of faculty and fewer than two hundred students.

Over the following century it grew into a private liberal arts university of roughly fifteen hundred students, known for its music and performing arts programs. Shawnee itself carries a layered history, sitting in the heart of former Potawatomi and Sac and Fox lands that became a major agricultural and railroad hub in the early statehood era.