Eskridge Hotel Museum
Wynnewood, Oklahoma
I just got back
from another trip to Oklahoma. We got some work done on my mother Wenonah's house;
we visited with my daughter and her family, and I got a chance to take another
look at the Paul Room of the Wynnewood Historical Society Museum. My daughter
Therese and her husband Kevin met us there.
About twenty years
ago my mother donated some of my grandmother's things to the Wynnewood museum,
furniture, art work, clothing, books. It took me a long while to get into the
building which isn't regularly open. Wynnewood is a small town, and it isn't
near the interstate, so I don't suppose there are enough visitors to make it
worthwhile to keep the museum open. The museum is located in the old Eskridge
Hotel, just a half a block from the town's only stop light at the intersection
of Kerr and McGee streets, honoring the founders of the Kerr-McGee oil company,
which operates a refinery nearby.
My mother chose
Wynnewood for her donation because it is near where her grandfather, J. T.
Rosser, first settled when he came to Indian Territory in 1888. Grandmother was
only eleven. She told the story later about their trip to Indian Territory:
I came to the Indian Territory with my
father and mother. We were moving from Mississippi to the Indian Territory in
wagons, working horses and oxen in 1889. I was eleven years old. I remember
people telling my father that he would have to be on the lookout for horse
thieves. We had some trouble while crossing Arkansas, but after we crossed into
the Indian Territory we never were bothered by anyone. My father would buy feed
from the Indians and they were the most accommodating people I ever met. We
came through Muskogee but there wasn't much of a town there then. At that time
there were but few roads and at times it looked as if it would be impossible to
go any farther. After several months of traveling over rough country we located
at Pauls Valley. My father traded the ox team, a tent and a few horses to Mr.
John Burks for a lease that had a two room log house on it. This lease had
never been worked but there was a plowed furrow around it. My father and
brother began putting this prairie land in cultivation. There was open range at
that time, and you could have all the hogs and cattle you wanted to own, but
you had to have your brand and mark on them.
SB 18, P 14. Interview
with Mrs. Victoria M. Paul, September 14, 1937.
Mrs. Victoria M. Rosser Paul
Grandpa, as my
mother called her grandfather, left Cedartown Georgia in 1866 after the Civil
War, and took his family west. At first it was only he and Emily, my great grandmother,
and their daughter Cora. Eight other children were born along the way, a son
Thomas and four girls: Kittie, Lillie, Victoria and Ada. A son and daughter, Luther
and Eula, were lost to illness. Over about a twenty year period Grandpa worked his
way across Mississippi, and Arkansas, settling for a few months or years in one place
and then moving on to another. Grandmother was born in Pittsborough County Mississippi
in 1877. Grandpa was actually headed for Texas to join his brother Ed, but he
never made it. The land in Indian Territory was so fertile, and the Indians so
hospitable that he decided to stay.
Grandpa's farm was
actually closer to Cherokee town than it was to Wynnewood. Cherokee Town, which
no longer exists, was named for a temporary camp of Cherokees making on their
way from Texas to join their brothers in Indian Territory in about 1840. After
he arrived, Grandpa hired a teacher and built a school for his girls and other
nearby children, but later Grandmother went to a subscription school in Pauls
Valley where she met Billie Paul, whom she would later marry. When her mother
died in 1893 Grandmother and her younger sister Ada moved in with their older
sister Cora who was married and living in Wynnewood. Cora was the proprietor of
a millinery (hat) shop there.
The Rosser girls
were taught to be ladies, in spite of their frontier upbringing. They studied
needlework, gardening, music - Grandmother played the melodian - and they
learned to prepare fancy fruit and flower arrangements, and pastries.
Grandmother didn't learn painting and charcoal drawing until about 1918, right
after the start of WWI, when she was married and living in Oklahoma City during
one of my grandfather's business ventures. My mother Wenonah was five at that time.
Grandmother studied with a Mrs. Sheets there, the wife of a prominent
physician. She did several oils and charcoals which hung in her house
when I was little. I have a charcoal drawing she did then of a bust of a cherub
sitting next to a vase full of brushes.
Cherub
Charcoal by V.M. Paul
Lion
Charcoal by V.M. Paul
Still Life
Oil Painting by V.M. Paul
The museum has Grandmother's rocking chair which dates back
to her marriage in 1898, a bed and a quilt, a beautiful old dress made with
eyelet crochet, family pictures, and books. There was damage to the room 10 or
15 years ago when the roof caved in, and many of the original contents have
been damaged or misplaced, but I was pleased to see that Grandmother's art work
had survived.
Eyelet Embroidery Dress
Grandmother's Rocking Chair
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