Bethlehem Cemetery and the Hendersons

Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus

 Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo

Bethlehem Cemetery and the Ghost Roads1

The once thriving hamlet of Fallis in Lincoln County is now a ghost town. The fact is made official by its inclusion in John W. Morris’s indispensable Ghost Towns of Oklahoma (1978). Morris’s definition includes towns whose population has declined by at least 80 percent from its maximum (13), and that would include Fallis. Wiki shows that its population in 1910 was 248, compared to the 2020 population of 21. The hamlet is oddly enough well documented, online at least. See the Sources listed at the end of this essay.

Though Fallis has its share of ghosts, the ones that await us are not there but in Bethlehem Cemetery a few miles away. From Wellston, take the 3330 Rd. north 3 1/2 miles. Turn west on 0870 Rd. (Fallis Rd.) and go one mile. Turn north on 3320 Rd. and go approximately 1/4 mile. The cemetery is located on the NE corner of 0870 Rd., just off the red-clay road. All that is visible of the cemetery is the hillside which looks like pasture land.

It would be appropriate here to insert a history of the cemetery, but it is impossible for the good and sufficient reason that so few documents exist. The name “Bethlehem”

1. Thanks and grateful acknowledgement first to my smarter cousin Ruth Coker of Arlington Texas, without whose research this rabbit would not have gotten out of the genealogical blackberry bush. The word “we” in this essay is not editorial. It means Ruth and myself.

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Bethlehem Cemetery

is not a family name, it sounds like the name of a church, but no church of that name is referred to in the old newspapers or the records at the Lincoln County Historical Society--though Black Dispatch supplies three names to be noted later on.

Given the mores of the people whose lives we are excavating, there had to have been a church. It may have sprung up in proximity with the old Iowa Indian Mission complex, which is in the same area. Aleltha Caldwell Conner, writing in 1939 in Guthrie’s The Leader, recalled:

About 1885 John F. Mardock, missionary of the Society of Friends, came to the Iowa country and established a mission and day school. . . . The old Mission church first stood near the burying ground. It was built about 1885 or '86. It is now standing near the main line of the M.K. & T. railroad northwest of Fallis where it was moved with the

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town's establishment. For a time it was used as a community church and school, then with the establishment of separate schools, was converted into a school for Negro children. With their own modern brick building being completed, it became a Negro Baptist church. For some time now it has been abandoned.

The best newspaper coverage of Bethlehem burials is provided by Oklahoma City’s fine black newspaper Black Dispatch, but their first mention of the cemetery doesn’t come until 1927. After that references are continuous until about 1960.

William H. Henderson (1815-1895), First Link

The ghost roads in Lincoln County are easily recognized for they are unpaved, red-clay roads, treacherous for the standard passenger car in wet weather. The ancestral bones to be discussed in what follows are interred in two graves in Bethlehem Cemetery. They belong to Harriet Henderson Long (1892-1971) and a man who evidence suggests is her great-grandfather, William H. Henderson (1815-1895). Though their bones have shared the same ground for sixty some years, the relationship between them has only been recognized about the present time, February 2023. The reasons for the ignorance were two. Harriet’s memorial initially included no maiden name. And the great-grandfather’s Find-A-Grave memorial had been placed in the wrong cemetery where there are other black people named Henderson but of no relationship to William. His memorial has only very recently been moved to Bethlehem where it belongs. Now the ancestral snake-- the ouroboros--has bitten its tail, completing the circle.

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The transferring of William Henderson’s digital memorial (at Find-a-Grave) is eminently reasonable following the logic of geography. William was an old black man without known family who died in poverty near the vanished town of Ingram. His corpse would have been hauled by horse and buggy to the nearest black cemetery. At the time of his death he was living somewhere near Deep Fork in the Wellston-Ingram-Fallis triangle so that the nearest black cemetery was Bethlehem. There is no obituary for him, but the exigencies of transportation make the conclusion certain. In rural areas of the United States down to the era of the automobile, the dead were carried to the nearest appropriate cemetery by horse and wagon, which usually meant within a five mile radius. There were doubtless a few exceptions, as in William Faulkner’s great novella As I Lay Dying, where Addie Bundren has left a specific request to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi, but the obstacles of the terrain and the river crossing make it clear why such burials were very much the exception. Though, Faulkner’s story is based on a local tale rather than fact, it is referenced here for the realism of its account of the hauling of a corpse with a horse and wagon.

William H. Henderson’s early antecedents are unclear, but the nearer we approach the present the more distinct he becomes until at last we hear his voice. The lack of initial clarity belongs to the nature of slave records. The Federal Census included Slave Schedules only for the decades 1850 and 1860, but these records do not contain the names of the slaves. Rather they list the slave owners, and the slaves themselves are indicated only by number, gender, and age. Thus, in exploring William’s life before the 1870 census, we have no direct documentation, only documents from which inferences can be made on the basis

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of age and gender of slaves as indicated by a given schedule’s entry for the slave owners.

A word about methodology is required here. Not only do the schedules not name the enslaved, in the south local newspapers as a rule don’t report events concerning them unless they’ve escaped. This results in an extreme paucity of data for our subject matter. Since the same has always been true of the lives of the poor, we may take a history lesson from the classical historian F. M. Cornford (1873-1943), who writes:

Many critics seem to think that an hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the production of more evidence than in fact exists. The demand is as easy to make as it is impossible to satisfy. But the true test of an hypothesis if it cannot be shown to conflict with known truths, is the number of facts that it correlated, and explains.

I would argue that the situation with American-slave data is comparable to the one Cornford describes, for apart from slave narratives we lack evidence. It remains, however, possible to constellate data in a way that permits logical inferences. Though the conclusions drawn cannot be documented, the patterns emerge. One doesn’t require astronomical measurements to see the constellations in the night sky. My own working motto is taken from James Baldwin, the brilliant Harlem essayist, who states: "The responsibility of the writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

Our ghost road begins in Hancock County KY, about which the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database tells us the following. “The county was formed in

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1829 from portions of Ohio, Breckinridge, and Daviess Counties. It is located on the north-western edge of Kentucky along the Ohio River and bordered by three Kentucky counties. Hancock County was named for John Hancock, whose signature is the most flamboyant on the U.S. Declaration of Independence.”

The county seat of Hancock County is Hawesville, named in 1829 for Richard Hawes, who donated the land for the town. Hawes was born in Virginia, was a U.S. Representative from Kentucky, and also served as Governor of Kentucky. The town, on the south bank of the Ohio River in Hancock County is the seat of its county. Its 1860 population was 1,128, but in 1870 had dropped to 855. The population at the 2010 census was 945, and nowadays it is included in the Owensboro metropolitan area, the fourth largest such area in Kentucky.

The 1830 population of Hancock County was 190 heads of households according to the U.S. Federal Census, and the population increased to 5,395 by 1860, excluding the slaves. Below are the number of slave owners, slaves, free Blacks, and free Mulattoes in the county for 1850-1870.

1850 Slave Schedule

• 134 slave owners

• 590 Black slaves

• 32 Mulatto slaves

• 12 free Blacks

• 1 free Mulatto [Elizabeth Shaw]

  1860 Slave Schedule

• 205 slave owners

• 677 Black slaves

• 143 Mulatto slaves

• 3 free Blacks

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• 10 free Mulattoes 1870 U.S. Federal Census

• 707 Blacks

• 43 Mulattoes

• About 5 U.S. Colored Troops listed Hancock

  County, KY, as their birth location.

  To return now to William H. Henderson, the first informative census for him was taken in Lower Town (now Owensboro), in neighboring Daviess County, Kentucky, on the south bank of the Ohio River, in 1870. It shows that he was a farmer born in 1815 in Virginia. It indicates that his wife Hester A., eight years younger, was born in Kentucky. It shows their four children, John (18), Isaac (15), Wheeler (13), and Isreal (9), all born in Kentucky. The second and last census that exists for him was taken in 1880 in the same location and lists his wife (same as 1860 census) and his two sons John (26) and Isreal (18). After that is a darkness, meaning the absence of direct records. So the researcher must constellate the information from other documents. Find-A-Grave records will help because we can link them, allowing visitors to click their way from William H. Henderson to Harriet Henderson and back again.

  Isaac Henderson (1866-1922)

  Our next stop on the ghost road is with the son Isaac, listed above. Isaac is not a link in the chain connecting William H. Henderson with Harriet Henderson Long, because he is not Harriet’s ancestor. Rather, he is the ancestor’s brother and confirms data we cannot provide for

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Isaac Henderson

the latter. Isaac was born in Hancock County in 1856, meaning he was born a slave. He is a firm star in the constellation we are drawing because, for whatever reason, he is blessed with the solidity of a granite tombstone in Owensboro, Daviess County, which also names his wife Mollie R. The Kentucky, US., Birth Records, 1847-1911 for Isaac show that his mother was Hetty Ann (Hetty being the common nickname for Hester, William’s known wife) and that he was owned by a wealthy man named Goldsby Lawson:

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The record below is from the cemetery where Isaac is buried:

The slave-owning Goldsby Lawson is a fixed star in this constellation, for he points us to the Federal Slave Schedule of 1860, which shows that among his 11 enumerated slaves he owned a male aged 48, a female aged 41, and a boy 5 years old. These figures correspond roughly to the ages and genders of William, Hetty, and Isaac.

With Isaac located, two of his siblings also come into view. First his elder brother Wheeler and Wheeler’s wife Fannie Jackson, both of whom are buried in Louisville’s Greenwood Cemetery. Isaac and Wheeler’s younger brother Israel is also buried in the same cemetery, but though his Death Certificate shows that he was married, his wife’s name is not to be found in the records.

What is to be found is a shooting ruckus involving Israel. A half-page column in the Owensboro Messenger- Inquirer for September 1890 reports the matter economically by putting the whole gist in its headlines:

MORE SHOOTING
Israel Henderson, a Disreputable Negro, Shoots Four Times at John Boyd The Fuss Raised in Front of the

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Colored Baptist Church on Fourth Street

The conclusion we draw from this affair was that Israel was no marksman. “He shot four times, but Boyd being fleet of foot escaped uninjured.”

With this said, we now have three sons of the patriarch William H. Henderson and can move on to the next generation connecting the him with Harriet Henderson buried in Fallis, Oklahoma.

John Henderson (1855 - ?), Second Link

The next stop on the ghost road, the second link in the chain, is William’s son John (1855 - ?), but John is a weak link for the simple reason that we don’t have a death date for him, which means no place of burial. His identity on the 1870 census for Daviess County is clear, for he is only 18, still unmarried, and the names of both of his parents are given. He is still unmarried in 1880, but his wife Miranda (born 1860) appears on the 1900 census, which is the last census we have for either of them. He is still in Daviess County. Like her husband, Miranda shows no death date or place of burial. Weak link though he may be, John is still important because his son Jim or John Henderson provides the third link in the chain--a very important one, for Jim was the father of Harriet Henderson.

John 2, as we may call him, married Miranda Bean probably in Hancock County about 1874. Almost nothing is known about him except what the censuses provide. In 1870 he is living unmarried in Lower Town (which would become part of Owensboro), Daviess County, with his parents. We have placed an FAG memorial for him in the huge Rosehill Elmwood Cemetery, where some of his kindred lie.

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John / Jim Henderson (1875 - ?), Third Link

The next stop on the ghost road is supplied by John Henderson, who in 1894 married Leanna/Leander Perkins in Red River County, Texas, which was the county where she was born. It would be an important county for the Henderson family as well, for they would spend roughly twenty years there. As its name suggests it is located on the north bank of the Red River, which is across from McCurtain and Choctaw counties in Oklahoma. This had to have been a tough county for African-Americans, as the whole northern tier of Texas counties along the Red River is marred by white blight. A few counties further west is Cooke County, where at Gainesville in 1861 some 46 “Union sympathizers” were hanged, black and white alike.

All five of John and Leander’s children were born in Red River County--a step-daughter Ella in 1888, then two sons (Mack, 1896 - ?), Charles (1900 - ?), and Clarence (1903-1980), and then their daughter Harriet (1892-1972). In 1860 John 3’s status is unchanged, still unmarried living with his parents. He must have gotten married about this date, however, for his next census, that of 1900, shows him in the same place but married to Miranda (no maiden name) and with a child named Millie who is 22 years old. In this year John owned his own home. It is the last record we have for him, though we have placed a Find-a-Grave memorial in Rosehill Elmwood Cemetery, where some of his kinfolks are buried.

Harriet Henderson (1892-1971), Fourth Link

If we were speaking of oil fields, we could say that the fourth figure on the ghost road is the discovery well, the hole from which this whole oil field bubbled into view. Harriet was the second of five children born to John 3 and

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his wife Leanna or Leander Perkins, who like all her siblings was born in Red River County. Harriet’s husbands were three: Thomas Fullbright of Paris TX; Luke Gibbs, of Red River County: and Nelson Columbus Long, who was born in Louisiana but married Harriet in Okemah OK. From these marriages, two children are known: Lorine Fullbright and Alfonso Gibbs. It may have been her

Harriet Henderson Long

marriage to Luke Gibbs that pulled Harriet out of Red River County into Oklahoma, for she married Gibbs in 1921 and Alfonso was born that year in Boley, Okfuskee County.

Harriet’s path through life can be tracked from 1900 to 1950 through the Federal censuses. In 1900 she makes her first appearance at about age of eight in Red River County with her parents and siblings. Then in 1910 in the same place and with the same family, though her age is mistakenly written as 14 (instead of 18) and she is described as a wage earner. In 1920 she is still in Red River but now married to Luke Gibbs and with their child Lorine, age 3, whose father was her first husband Tom Fulbright. In 1930 she is in Paden, a few miles from Boley, still married to Luke but now with her second child, Alfonso, whose father was Luke. In 1940 she is still in Paden, her marital

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status given as single, and she is listed with Alfonso and a step-grandson, Bobby Fulbright. The family is on relief. Lorine is not listed, indicating that she has already left home. In 1950 Harriet is living in Boley, and her spouse is Nelson Long, whose surname would appear on her headstone in Bethlehem Cemetery. The Social Security Death Index, filed in 1971, gives her previous place of residence as Moore in Cleveland County, so that residence must be included in our list, though we have no date for it.

Harriet’s final glory, however, was one that she never saw though doubtless she had imagined it. We know what Harriet dreamed of, for her stone tells the tale--not a stone but poured concrete with the writing incised by nail. Into the soft cement, marbles have been pushed, bright yellow, blue, green, jasper, and the red stone of sardis, an African-Babylonian exultation of color against the cement gray of the slab. There is something Byzantine about it, the sun, moon, and stars, the firmament of our earthly life as a box or jeweled casket, starred around the sides and bottom

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Harriet (Henderson) Long

with eyes that stare at us. The legend of her name and birth- and death-years pales by comparison.

Since the dying don’t usually rise from their death beds to decorate their gravestones, the stone had to have been made by Harriet’s daughter Lorine, who was Harriet’s only daughter and was taking care of her mother at the time of the latter’s death. It is to Lorine that we turn now.

Lorine Fulbright (1916-1982), Fifth Link

This is the fifth and final person we meet on our ghost-road trek, and she must be included for it was surely she who created her mother’s grave marker. Her maiden name came from Harriet’s second husband Tom Fulbright. Lorine has an entry on every census she lived through.

1920 Justice Precinct, Red River County, TX 1930 Paden, Okfuskee County, OK
1940 Paden, Okfuskee County, OK
1950 Boley, Okfuskee County, OK

The 1940 census notes that she is married and living with her mother but does not give her spouse’s name. Her first child, Bobby, is 1 year old. In addition, the census adds that she has completed four years of high school. The 1950 shows her husband Leonard Riley Richmond present and three more children, all under the age of 10.

Searching for William H. Henderson’s Grave

Unlike his great-granddaughter, William H. Henderson has no stone, unless it be one of the several illegible field stones scattered about Bethlehem Cemetery, which is located in the northwestern corner of Lincoln

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County a few miles from the muddy course of the Deep Fork River where the old man lived. Photos of some of these field stones can be seen at https:// www.okcemeteries.net/lincoln/bethlehem/bethlehem.htm. The present Find-a-Grave memorial which we have erected for him at Bethlehem Cemetery is an approximation. He died somewhere nearby, and Bethlehem is the nearest black cemetery, but the location of his grave remains unknown. He could have been buried at home, or he could have been deposited in the river..

The Deep Fork River is called a river only as a courtesy. In fact, it’s a big creek, though prone to river-like flooding depending on the season. During its Indian Territory days, the Deep Fork divided
the Iowa and Kickapoo reserves of present-day Lincoln County. The old Deep Fork District of the Creek (Muscogee) Nation lay on the east side of the Creek reserve between the Deep Fork and the Canadian River. In the 1880s, the Deep Fork bottom west of Christian Wells' trading post (present-day Wellston) became a center
of Boomer activity.

The river is the subject of the song "Deep Fork River Blues," written and performed by folk singer Tom Paxton, who lived in Bristow during his youth:

When the sun goes down, a man gets mighty lonesome
For his home, for his home
When the sun goes down, a man gets mighty lonesome

For his home, for his home

But I don't have to stay away forever I can go home, I can go home

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I don't have to stay away forever I can go home, I can go home

Paxton’s song is the standard variety of free-floating blues lyric that could be attached to hundreds of different songs. It conveys a feeling but no information.

Such information as exists can be readily summarized--first, as regards the cemetery. Though Bethlehem Cemetery suggested itself by its proximity to Henderson’s residence, when Ruth Coker and I began this research the earliest burial recorded there was 1911, leaving a sixteen year gap in the burial dates. Further research disclosed earlier burials, including two child burials in 1894 that we had overlooked. Then I found an obituary for Julia Irving, a “freed person” of black, red, and probably white heritage who died in 1901.

Fallis Blade, 2 June 1901

These three burials helped close the gap. Note especially that the language of the Irving obituary suggests that this was not the first burial at Bethlehem. The lack of fanfare implies that the cemetery already existed; it was probably attached to a log-frame meeting house. Three years later the Fallis newspaper finds the church gathering funds to construct a better building. I said earlier that no documents exist to allow a history of Bethlehem Cemetery to be

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written, but that may mean only that we haven’t dug enough. Later references in Black Dispatch indicate the presence of a Methodist and a Baptist church in Fallis between 1930 and 1945, and an obituary from 1928 mentions the Gethsemane Baptist church. The number of churches points to the years when Fallis had a thriving black community. Fallis supported a black newspaper--The Fallis Blade--during the first decade of the 1900s.

As regards William H. Henderson himself, living alone in a shack on a bend in Deep Fork he attracted the attention of journalists from Chandler. Because of his advanced age, they were ready to celebrate him as a local character and they would soon dub him the Hermit of Deep Fork. The first report comes from a social column in the Chandler News for August 23, 1895, headed INGRAM, TOHEE TOWNSHIP. It states merely, “Octogenarian Henderson nearly died of spasms last Saturday night.”

The second report, which comes two weeks later in the Chandler News- Publicist for September 6, 1895, reads: “Uncle Henderson, aged 81 years, feels very feeble and lonely on his six acre Deep Fork fraction.” “Fraction” was a term from homesteading that meant the land had been cut by a river and was not the standard 160 / 80 /40 acre plot. A “fraction” would be less than 40 acres. At six acres, Henderson’s land is little larger in extent than a housewife’s apron. “Uncle” is the standard white designation for elderly black men.

The third report is more discursive. It builds on the two reports above and comes from the Chandler News’ same social column entitled INGRAM, TOHEE TOWNSHIP and on the same date as the Chandler News-Publicist item quoted above. Journalists from two different newspapers? Old Man Henderson has become a local sensation, which is

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surely the effect the journalists aimed at in calling him a hermit:

Mr. Henderson, the 81-year-old hermit on Deep Fork, says, "I can well remember Henry Clay, W. H. Harrison, and General Jackson coming to our old Kentucky home and talking politics, drinking and smoking with father. Henry Clay was the smartest man I ever saw, and I thought that General Jackson was the ugliest.”

This report gives us something to chew on. It mentions three prominent politicians whose careers in pursuit of national office span the years from 1824 to 1849. Running for office, all three would have canvassed Kentucky, so Mr. Henderson’s story is credible. What may be more difficult to grasp immediately is that he calls his master “father,” but this would have been understandable in terms of the mores of slave society, by which masters often sired children on their slaves. That Mr. Henderson was allowed to see such important white men suggests that he was a house slave rather than a field hand. It also agrees with another fact that should be observed here. One question that the journalists would always have asked is about slavery, and yet Mr. Henderson doesn’t touch on the matter. Given that the year of the news articles in 1895, he may have evaded or refused such questions.

For the better part of a century now, psychologists and scholars of memory have been explaining that the memories of extremely painful events are fragile and may be easily lost or or hard to retrieve. Such studies began with

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the “shell shock” victims of World War I2 and have continued with survivors of the holocaust and other atrocities of the twentieth century. There is every reason to suppose that the African-American experience of slavery constitutes another such arena of the unbearable--of things too painful for the individual to recall. The former slaves interviewed by the WPA in the 1930s have provided us with shelves of splendid narratives, but they were responding to questions prepared by folklorists like Benjamin Botkin and John A. Lomax who tried to steer the interviews away from traumatic questions.

Lomax was the director of the Folklore Division for the Federal writers Project and devised the questions that were used by the WPA interviewers. His questions queried informants about “foodways, how they had learned about their freedom, and health, medicine, and folk cures” (Baker and Baker 8). The questions asked about music and Sunday pastimes, not about whippings and trauma, and the interviewees answers followed suit. It may well be that the trauma of the African-American’s Experience of slavery explains Mr. Henderson’s silence.

To return to our farewell to Mr. Henderson, the fourth and final report, which appeared in the Chandler Publicist for December 13, 1895, is pithy and to the point: “W. H. Henderson, who lived on a claim two miles west of here, died last Friday night at the ripe old age of eighty- one.” That was the death, and after death came the burial.

2. On the question of the soldiers’ repressed memories of battle terrors and shell shock in World War I, I have found the Regeneration Trilogy of Pat Barker to be exemplary. The novels Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995) explore the history of the First World War by focusing on the aftermath of trauma.

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For his burial we have no documents, only the proximity of the black cemetery of Bethlehem an hour’s wagon ride away. We have erected a Find-a-Grave memorial for him there, so that the digital links will carry the visitor back to Kentucky. It’s true we have no document that places him in Bethlehem, but in the history of the U.S., Britain, and Europe there are many instances of memorials which do not represent the burial place of the person memorialized. For the U.S., these are parodied by Groucho Marx’s famous question: “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” Correct answer: Nobody, for it’s a mausoleum not a grave. General Grant’s remains are there, but they lie in state, not in the ground.

In addition, the possibility must be allowed that William H. Henderson was buried at home, which would mean that no trace of his actual grave will ever be found. His home, we know, was close to the Deep Fork of the North Canadian River, but by now the river’s shifting channel would have long since carried off any remains left beside his shack. Thus the digital information lodged under his name for Bethlehem Cemetery on Find-a-Grave, does not indicate a grave but a memorial, a commemoration.

For his epic journey from slavery in Virginia and Kentucky to his hermitage on the banks of Deep Fork, let it be enough that William Henderson’s memory abides in Bethlehem with his great-granddaughter. The family history takes the form of the Ouroborus, bringing together the end and the beginning. The serpent has bitten its tail.

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Ouroboros from the Book of Kells (800 AD)

Sources

Three principal online sources not cited below are the databases at Ancestry.com, Gateway to Oklahoma History, and Newspapers.com.

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Print Sources
Baker, T. Lindsay, and Julie P. Baker. The WPA

Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Norman:

Oklahoma University Press, 1996.
Barker, Pat. The Ghost Road. New York City: The

Viking Press, 1995.
Conner, Aletha Caldwell. "Graves and Stately Tree

Mark Site of Once-Busy Indian Village At Fallis.” The Leader (Guthrie), April 16, 1939. Online at newspapers.com.

Morris, John W. “Fallis (Mission).” Ghost Towns of Oklahoma. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1978.

Murphy, Zula. “Murphy Family’s Been at Fallis for 100 Years.” New Era (Davenport OK), September 19, 1991.

Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Doubleday Anchor Book. 1920; New York, Doubleday, 1957.

Online Sources
Notable Kentucky African Americans Database. https://

nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/2359. Accessed Feb. 2023.

Paxton, Tom. “Deep Fork River Blues.” https://genius.com/ Tom-paxton-deep-fork-river-blues-lyrics. Accessed March 2023.

“Town of Fallis.” http://genealogytrails.com/oka/ lincoln/townoffallis.html. A cento of old newspaper clippings. Accessed Feb. 2023.

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Vassar, Jan. “Fallis.” Oklahoma Historical Society. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/ entry.php?entry=FA008. Accessed Feb. 2023.

Wikipedia, “Fallis, Oklahoma.” https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallis,_Oklahoma. Accessed Feb. 2023. 

Isaac Henderson gravestone

Ouroboros from the Book of Kells (800 AD)

Sources

Three principal online sources not cited below are the databases at Ancestry.com, Gateway to Oklahoma History, and Newspapers.com.

Print Sources

Baker, T. Lindsay, and Julie P. Baker. The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1996.

Barker, Pat. The Ghost Road. New York City: The Viking Press, 1995. 

Conner, Aletha Caldwell. "Graves and Stately Tree Mark Site of Once-Busy Indian Village At Fallis.” The Leader (Guthrie), April 16, 1939. Online at newspapers.com.

Morris, John W. “Fallis (Mission).” Ghost Towns of Oklahoma. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1978.

Murphy, Zula. “Murphy Family’s Been at Fallis for 100 Years.” New Era (Davenport OK), September 19, 1991.

Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Doubleday Anchor Book. 1920; New York, Doubleday, 1957. 

Online Sources

Notable Kentucky African Americans Database. https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/2359. Accessed Feb. 2023. 

Paxton, Tom. “Deep Fork River Blues.” https://genius.com/Tom-paxton-deep-fork-river-blues-lyrics. Accessed March 2023.

“Town of Fallis.” http://genealogytrails.com/oka/lincoln/townoffallis.html. A cento of old newspaper clippings. Accessed Feb. 2023.

Vassar, Jan. “Fallis.” Oklahoma Historical Society. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=FA008. Accessed Feb. 2023.

Wikipedia, “Fallis, Oklahoma.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallis,_Oklahoma. Accessed Feb. 2023.