Tullahassee Mission Site


Tullahassee Mission was a Presbyterian mission and school, founded on March 1, 1850 by Rev. Robert Loughridge. The mission was originally built for Muscogee Creek Indians, but after a devastating fire the Muscogee Creeks left Tullahassee and the mission and gave it to the Creek Freedmen, freed slaves of African descent.

History

The Muscogee Creek Indians were initially opposed to all missionaries and the establishment of schools, but after seeing the works of the Koweta Mission the Muscogee Nation to allow the creation of another mission northwest of Muskogee. The Creeks said they would pay one-fifth while the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions would pay the rest of the cost. Rev. Loughridge chose the site for Tullahassee Mission and purchased of land from Thomas Marshall. A three-storey, brick building was constructed on the site to house 80 students. The school opened in 1850 and operated for the next two decades as a boarding school to train both "full- blooded" and "mixed-blood" Muscogee students. In the beginning years of the school, Tullahassee admitted 80 students who were primarily full-blood Creek Indians.
The main building was largely destroyed by fire in December 1880. The Muscogee Creek Council relocated the boarding school for Muscogee children to a new site, and offered the former school and its improved plot to the Creek freedmen as a school for their children. The council also funded the replacement of the burned-out main building. The school reopened in 1883 as Tullahassee Manual Labor School, with additional funding from the Baptist Home Mission Society.
The Muscogee Nation transferred all Muscogee children to another school, Wealaka Mission and turned over the former mission building to Creek freedmen on October 24, 1881. Tullahassee Manual Labor School was the only school for freedmen to remain open after the US federal government dissolved the institutions of the Muscogee Creek Nation in 1906. Ownership passed to the U.S. Department of the Interior, who sold it to Wagoner County, Oklahoma in 1914. In 1916, the African Methodist Episcopal Church established Flipper Davis College, which moved into the former mission building. This became the only private school for African Americans in Oklahoma at the time. The college closed at the end of the 1935 school year.