Buck Creek
Frame one-room schoolhouse 1907-1940; stone building built in 1941; 1960 addition; annexed in 1967
Buck Creek was a one-room frame schoolhouse from 1907-1940 about four miles west of Bartlesville in Osage County. M.C. Ware was one of the principal founders and as of the 1940s it was in the area of the Borroum and Layton ranches. It evolved into Osage Dependent District 66, with students going to Bartlesville for the upper grades.
In 1931, Mrs. M. McCausland was the teacher there.
In 1941, when Miss Letha Conner was the teacher, the dilapidated schoolhouse was replaced with a two-room stone schoolhouse by the Works Progress Administration in a project for two workers costing $8,000. The building was 32' by 58' and made of rusticated sandstone, and over 200 people attended a celebration of its opening on April 30, 1941. By 1943, Mrs. Pearl Franklin was the teacher.
The most famous graduate of Buck Creek school was Carter Revard. He was born in 1931 in Pawhuska, and he and his twin sister, Maxine, moved with their mother, her third husband, and four stepsiblings out to Buck Creek where he went to school.
Carter Revard in 1966
When he was in eighth grade, he and Maxine worked as the school's janitors. The Buck Creek teachers were a Miss Conner, who at noon would play Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys on the radio, broadcast from KVOO from Cain's ballroom in Tulsa, and a Mr. Loyd, who hitchhiked each day from Bartlesville. After 8th grade, Revard attended school in Bartlesville, and as a senior at College High in 1948 he won a scholarship to the University of Tulsa on a radio quiz show.
He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1952, the same year he received his Osage name Nompehwahthe (fear inspiring), from his grandmother, Josephine Jump. Revard earned a doctorate at Yale, taught at Amherst, and was a professor of English for many years at Washington University in St. Louis. He specialized in medieval literature and wrote numerous books, including several collections of poetry. He received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1994 for "An Eagle Nation". Revard died in 2022.
A Wilma Mankiller, not to be confused with the later first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, taught grades 5-8 at Buck Creek school in the late 1950s and is shown in one of the photos. She retired in Oklahoma and moved to Indiana, where she taught until she was 66. In 1960, Mrs. Pearl Baker of Bowring taught grades 1-4.
In March 1960 voters approved $35,000 in bonds to add an A-frame addition with a lunch room, kitchen, classroom, library, and heating plant. They had turned down the same proposal a year earlier. James K. Goode taught the upper grades and his wife, Rubye, the lower ones, while Mrs. Otto Yount handled lunches. The school had softball and baseball and added outdoor basketball, a merry-go-round, and jungle gym. There was a teacherage, and the school served about 40 children.
Osage District 66 was annexed into Bartlesville Independent School District 30 in 1967. The school building later became a private residence.
The former Buck Creek district is the west island out in the Osage on the district boundary map
The original one-room schoolhouse; photo courtesy of the Bartlesville Area History Museum
Teacher Wilma Mankiller (distinct from the future Principal Chief of the Cherokees) and her students
Another teacher, with her students, who taught at the two-room schoolhouse at the same time as Wilma Mankiller
1960 addition and teachers; courtesy of the Bartlesville Area History Museum
School building after it became a private residence
Back of school building as a private residence
District History Pages
Buck Creek