Historic Tulsa

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Broken Arrow’s first school was built in
1904. Four years later, additional rooms
were added to the building.
HISTORIC TULSA
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Broken Arrow was incorporated on May 4,
1903. J. B. Parkinson was the first mayor and
Tom Higgins was the first marshal. Schools
and churches were built to make a quality life
available for old and new residents alike. As
talk of statehood for Indian Territory and
Oklahoma Territory increased, Broken Arrow
attempted to become the county seat in one of
the proposed counties of the state of
Sequoyah. Broken Arrow won an election
over Coweta to become the county seat of
Coweta County of the proposed Sequoyah.
Congress squashed any idea of two states
and officially approved the idea to admit
Oklahoma as the forty-sixth state. When
county lines were drawn for the new state,
Tulsa became Broken Arrow’s foe and
ultimately was selected as the county seat of
Tulsa County. Broken Arrow residents had
offered to donate a two-story brick building
for a county courthouse, and were bitterly
disappointed when the constitutional
convention named Tulsa as the county seat.
By the 1920s, Broken Arrow was a bustling
community that had four large grain
elevators, two cotton gins, flour and corn
mills, three banks, a soda pop factory, three
hotels, dozens of other businesses, three
lawyers, and four doctors.
Eventually, Broken Arrow’s economy
turned from agriculture to a more broadbased,
diverse economy. The city’s first major
industry was Braden Winch Company that
moved its plant from Tulsa to Broken Arrow in
1945. Many other manufacturing firms
followed, providing high paying jobs for
Broken Arrow residents. Broken Arrow
became Oklahoma’s fifth largest city by 1990,
quadrupling its population of just twenty
years before.
Blue Bell Creameries built an ice cream
plant in Broken Arrow in 1990, one of three
such facilities in the nation. By 2000, Broken
Arrow was the state’s third largest
manufacturing city, home to more than two
hundred facilities that made everything from
machine tools to furniture. FlightSafety
International, Inc., provided hundreds of
high-tech jobs and made Broken Arrow the
flight simulator capital of the world.
Broken Arrow remained the state’s fifth
largest city in the 2000 census with a
population of 74,859.
SAND
SPRINGS
Sand Springs was the creation of one
man—Charles Page. At about the time
Oklahoma was preparing for statehood, Page,
an oil man and entrepreneur, bought 160
acres west of Tulsa in an area known for its
clear water from “sandy springs” along the
north bank of the Arkansas River. Page’s idea
was to build a planned industrial community