Tonkawa's University Prep School

Tonkawa sits along a stretch of old Cherokee Outlet land, and its college predates Oklahoma statehood by six years. In nineteen oh one, the Territorial Legislature passed a bill to fund a University Preparatory School here, pushed through by legislator James Wilkin who spotted a gap: farm families in the northern territory needed a local stepping-stone to the University of Oklahoma in Norman. The school opened in nineteen oh two with two hundred seventeen students and seven faculty, offering courses in music, foreign languages, business, and military science. For decades it was frankly a feeder school, but it grew into Northern Oklahoma College, one of the oldest community colleges in the state, still serving Kay County students a hundred and twenty years later.