Our Arklahoma Heritage: Thrust into office unexpectedly. Nora Shaw was resolute in seeing courthouse built

Judge Daniel A. Shaw

In Leflore County, a drama unfolded in the spring of 1927 as poignant as any Shakespearean tragedy, yet as quintessentially American as the courthouse that would rise from its ashes.

The town of Poteau, then a bustling coal-dusted metropolis of 3,000 souls, its streets alive with the clang of Dierks lumber wagons and the mournful whistle of the Kansas City Southern, had lost its mayor.

Judge Daniel A. Shaw, a silver-tongued jurist originally from Waldron, whose gavel had rung like justice itself across the Choctaw Nation’s former courts, lay cold in Oakland Cemetery.

His sudden death in the winter of 1926 left not merely a vacancy in City Hall, but a chasm in the heart of his widow, Nora

.Under Oklahoma’s municipal code (Section 412 of the 1908 Statutes, to be precise) the vice mayor automatically succeeded. And who had Judge Shaw appointed to that ceremonial post but his own wife?

Mayor Nora Shaw

Nora Shaw found herself thrust from the quiet domesticity of her College Avenue bungalow into the mayoral chair still warm from her husband’s presence.

Her eyes, said those who met her, held the steady gaze of one who had buried infants in the red clay of Indian Territory and watched the Territory become a state. She was no stranger to loss, but neither was she a stranger to duty.

The election of April 5, 1927, was no mere formality. The men of Poteau. coal miners with lamp-black under their nails, lumber barons in Stetson hats, and Choctaw elders who remembered when Skullyville was the capital, turned out in numbers that swelled the ballot boxes.

They came not to pity a widow, but to crown a leader. When the returns were tallied at the LeFlore County Courthouse (then a modest brick affair on Dewey Avenue), Nora Shaw had won by 312 votes.

The Poteau Daily Sun headline the next morning blazed across eight columns: “MRS. SHAW ELECTED—FIRST WOMAN MAYOR IN LE FLORE HISTORY.”

Her inauguration on April 18 was a study in restrained splendor.

The oath was administered by County Judge James M. Culberson beneath the new courthouse’s half-finished dome, where masons from Fort Smith paused their trowels to witness history.

Nora stood upon a scaffold plank, her black gloves clutching the Bible that had belonged to Chief Mosholatubbee’s district.

“I accept this trust,” she declared, her voice carrying to the back rows where Choctaw women in traditional tears-dresses stood beside flappers in cloche hats, “not for myself, but for the children who will study in our schools, the miners who will labor in safety, and the memory of the man who believed Poteau could be great.”

Greatness, in 1927, meant concrete and steel. The old courthouse, built in 1908 when Oklahoma was but a year old, had proven too small for a county swollen with oil speculation and Choctaw allotment disputes. Ground had been broken in 1926 for a new temple of justice: four stories of Bedford limestone, Ionic columns rising like sentinels, a copper dome that would catch the sunrise over Cavanal Hill.

But Judge Shaw’s death had stalled the bonds. Contractors threatened to walk. The county commissioners wrung their hands.

Enter Mayor Nora.In her first week, she convened a “Courthouse Completion Committee” in the Presbyterian fellowship hall. Present were the widows of Confederate veterans, the president of the Colored Women’s Club, and Mr. Hans Dierks himself, who arrived by private railcar from Kansas City.

With the precision of a surgeon, Nora dissected the budget: $12,000 for the dome’s copper sheathing, $8,400 for the grand staircase’s marble, $3,200 for the law library’s oak paneling. She persuaded the Choctaw Nation to donate the great bronze doors, cast in Tulsa with bas-reliefs of the Trail of Tears and the Dancing Rabbit Creek treaty.

When the state auditor balked at a $40,000 shortfall, she sold “Courthouse Bricks” at a dollar apiece; schoolchildren brought pennies in Prince Albert tins, and the Choctaw princesses sold beaded bookmarks at the county fair

.By December 1927, the dome gleamed. On New Year’s Day 1928, Nora Shaw, now in a gown of midnight velvet, the mourning period honorably concluded, cut the ribbon with Judge Shaw’s own gavel.

Ten thousand people filled Dewey Avenue. The Poteau High School band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the Choctaw choir sang “Amazing Grace” in their liquid native tongue. Fireworks, funded by the Kerr-McGee interests, lit the winter sky above the Ouachitas.

She served one term, declining renomination in 1929 with characteristic grace: “The courthouse stands; my work is done.”

Yet her legacy was only beginning. The building she midwifed would house the trials of bootleggers during Prohibition, the land disputes of the Dust Bowl refugees, and the victory celebrations of 1945. Its cornerstone bears the inscription: “Erected 1926–1928 Under the Administration of Mayor Nora Shaw.”

The mayor herself lived quietly thereafter. She tended roses at the College Avenue house, taught Sunday school at the First Baptist Church, and dandled grandchildren on the courthouse steps. Her daughter Charlene would recall her mother’s hands, scarred from kneading bread for Depression breadlines, resting gently on the Bible during family prayers.

On October 24, 1963, Nora Shaw died peacefully at Poteau Hospital, surrounded by the children she had raised alone:

The Poteau News devoted its entire front page to her obituary, beneath a photograph of the courthouse dome at sunset.

“She built more than a building,” the editorial read. “She built a bridge from the frontier to the future.”

Today, when the courthouse clock strikes noon and the Choctaw Nation flag snaps beside the Stars and Stripes, one can almost hear the echo of a woman’s voice, steady, mourning-black, indomitable, reminding LeFlore County that even in the shadow of grief, a town can build its dreams in stone.