Our Arklahoma Heritage: All that remains of a historically Black Haskell County community is a cemetery and memories
In the years after the Civil War, former slaves of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory began settling near one another for mutual protection and economic security, and when federal allotment opened individual lands, many chose parcels next to other African Americans. This pattern created cohesive farming communities that could support stores, churches, and schools, and from those foundations more than fifty identifiable All-Black towns and settlements arose across the Twin Territories between 1865 and 1920.
Lewisville in what became Haskell County belonged to that distinctive chapter of American history. Unlike the better-known centers such as Boley or Langston, it remained a smaller rural place, yet it embodied the same drive for self-governance, open markets, and freedom from the daily prejudices that marked racially mixed communities elsewhere in the Midwest and the South.
Although no individual has been identified in historical records as the founder of Lewisville in Haskell County, Oklahoma, the community’s name may reflect the presence of the Lewis family among its early residents.
Joe Lewis, born in 1834 in Georgia, lived an extraordinary 106 to 107 years before his death in Lewisville in 1941, where he was buried in the local cemetery after a death record filed on February 3 of that year listed W.W. Wallis of nearby Kinta as the informant. In the 1940 census he appears in Beaver Township residing with Robert and Betsy Wright (or Right), both also born in Georgia, as their brother-in-law.
He is one of five people bearing the Lewis surname whose graves are recorded in Lewisville Cemetery, a lasting marker of the families who settled this small All-Black agricultural community around 1911 and maintained a presence there for decades even as the town itself faded.
Haskell County itself was organized at statehood in 1907 largely from former Choctaw Nation lands. Within that landscape, African American families who had already been present as freedmen or who had migrated from the Old South continued to cluster.
Historical compilations of All-Black towns by scholars such as Mozell Hill and Arthur Tolson include Lewisville among the communities established in Indian Territory, and later architectural and historical surveys place its formal founding in 1911, the same year Vernon appeared farther north. Like its counterparts, Lewisville offered residents the practical advantages of neighborly assistance and local markets for crops at a time when cotton and other agricultural products underpinned rural prosperity.
Entrepreneurs in such places typically started the businesses that turned a settlement into a recognizable town: general stores, blacksmith shops, and sometimes a newspaper that advertised for settlers throughout the South. African Americans who came viewed Oklahoma as a kind of promised land where they could practice the ideologies of economic advancement, self-help, and racial solidarity that Tolson identified as central motives.
Growth in Lewisville followed the familiar arc of other All-Black agricultural centers.
Families farmed surrounding allotments, children attended segregated schools, and churches served as both spiritual and social anchors. A cemetery that still bears the name Lewisville Cemetery preserves the community’s presence; many of its graves were later relocated from an earlier burial ground in Muskogee County, indicating the movement and consolidation of families across the region.
Early surnames recorded there, along with later military veterans from the world wars and Korea, trace generations who remained even as the town itself contracted. The broader All-Black town movement had already peaked by the time of statehood, and the rapid passage of Jim Crow laws by the new Oklahoma legislature disillusioned many who had hoped the territory would remain more open.
White distrust further limited expansion; in some counties residents signed oaths refusing to rent, lease, or sell land to African Americans within a mile of white or Indian residents. Lewisville, like others founded or still growing after 1907, operated within that tightening environment.
The economic shocks of the 1920s and 1930s proved decisive for most of these communities. Prosperity had rested on cotton and related crops; the Great Depression collapsed markets, and many railroads failed, isolating small towns from regional trade. Residents left for cities in the West and North in search of work, shrinking the tax base that supported schools and local government.
Credit dried up for Black farmers and businessmen when white lenders withdrew it. Even the largest and most successful All-Black town, Boley, declared bankruptcy in 1939. Lewisville survived in some form at least into the early 1960s according to survey records, yet it never developed the institutional density or railroad connections that allowed a handful of places to persist as incorporated towns.
By the late twentieth century it had become one of the many settlements listed as no longer inhabited or without local government.
Today Lewisville appears on maps as an unincorporated populated place in western Haskell County, a few miles west of Kinta and near the Quinton South topographic sheet. The cemetery remains the clearest physical remnant, holding the names and dates of families who once made the place their home.
Only thirteen of the historical All-Black towns still function as municipalities, with a fourteenth incorporated in 2001; Lewisville is not among them. Its story nevertheless belongs to the larger legacy those communities left: the determination of African American men and women to create, occupy, and govern their own places when few other options for economic and political freedom existed.
In the rich topsoil of the new state they built what they could, and the memory of that effort endures even where the town itself has faded.
