Doaksville History Trail

Doaksville History Trail. A Short Walk Into An Intriguing Past. , Doaksville is a small place, containing fifty or sixty people, consisting mostly of traders and mechanics. It has six stores, two saddler shops, one tailor, one blacksmith, one cabinet, and one shoemaker shop, also a drug store and a public house. , Rev. P.P. Brown, 1847 , Behind the Fort Towson Cemetery is the site of Doaksville, the largest town during the 1840s and 1850s in what is now southeastern Oklahoma. The Choctaws, joined eventually by the Chickasaw, created here an important political, cultural, and economic center tied to other places in Indian Territory and beyond by a series of roads and by transport on the Red River. Doaksville flourished with the rest of the Choctaw Nation until the Civil War changed Indian Territory forever and sent the town into decline. The end of Doaksville came when the last remnants of the town were relocated around 1900 to what is now the community of Fort Towson. , To get to Doaksville you must walk through the cemetery and climb the stairs over the back stone wall. On the other side of the wall you will find a trail that leads through the 35-acre site. The 3/4-mile trail and interpretive signs will guide you around the old townsite. You should allow approximately one to two hours to walk this trail and read the signs. Along the way you will visit locations where archaeologists have uncovered remains of buildings dating from the 1840s. , Although this trail is not handicap accessible, a fully illustrated booklet describing the trail is available at the Fort Town Historic Site Visitor Center. , Doaksville is owned and maintained by the Oklahoma Historical Society. It is open to the public only during daylight hours. , The archaeological research conducted at Doaksville in 1995, 1996, and 1997, and the development of the trail system was funded by a grant to the Oklahoma Historical Society from the Oklahoma Department of Transportation through the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA).