Sapulpa: Creek Country, Oil, and Oklahoma Pottery

Sapulpa sits on the edge of the old Creek Nation territory about fifteen miles southwest of Tulsa, and the town's name is itself a piece of that history. Around eighteen fifty, a full-blood Lower Creek man from Alabama named James Sapulpa established a trading post about a mile southeast of where the downtown sits today. He had come to Indian Territory as part of the Creek relocation from the American Southeast, and his trading post became a meeting point on the frontier. When the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad extended its line through the area in eighteen eighty-six, the workers named their station Sapulpa Station in his honor, and a town grew up around it.

That was the first boom. The second came in oil. On November twenty-second, nineteen oh five, a discovery well four miles southeast of Sapulpa opened the Glenn Pool Field, one of the most productive oil strikes in early Oklahoma history. The same field would later be claimed as the one that made Tulsa the Oil Capital of the World. Sapulpa's population exploded from under nine hundred residents in nineteen hundred to over eleven thousand by nineteen twenty, and the oil money attracted glass manufacturers drawn by the abundant natural gas from the Glenn Pool. Glass plants went up along the highway north of town in the nineteen-teens, and Sapulpa became one of Oklahoma's small industrial centers.

The most distinctive enterprise to land in Sapulpa arrived in nineteen thirty-eight, when a ceramicist from the University of Oklahoma named John Frank moved his pottery works from Norman to a spot right on Route Sixty-Six. Frank had started his company in nineteen thirty-three during the Depression, making pieces from Oklahoma clay. He renamed the operation Frankoma Pottery in nineteen thirty-eight, when he made the move, blending his own name with Oklahoma's. The location on highways Sixty-Six and Seventy-Five was ideal, and Frank had the road north of town renamed Frankoma Road. For decades, travelers on Route Sixty-Six pulled in to watch potters at work and buy pieces glazed in prairie green and desert gold, colors Frank developed from local materials.

Frankoma Pottery ran in Sapulpa for over seventy years before the factory finally closed in two thousand ten. The building still stands near the intersection where Frank put his sign. Sapulpa calls itself the Crossroads of America for exactly that reason, the convergence of roads that once carried everything and everyone through this corner of Creek country.