Stone Gardens: A Craig County pioneer named for a Spartan lawgiver was an early resident of Centralia
In the farm country of Shelby County, Missouri, a boy born in September 1853 received the uncommon name Lycurgus Bragg. The name recalled the ancient Spartan lawgiver, a choice that set him apart even in a large household.
His father, Judge Sylvanus Ingram Bragg, had been born in Lunenburg County, Virginia, in 1804 to Joel and Mary Bragg. The family moved to Kentucky around 1812, where Sylvanus grew up, married first Mary Baldwin in 1831, and later, after her death, wed Mary McGraw in Mason County in 1839.
In 1840, the Braggs pushed west into Missouri and settled in Shelby County, where Sylvanus farmed and raised stock on a substantial holding.
In 1856 neighbors elected him a judge of the county court, a post he held for four years. The family attended the Christian Church, and a nearby schoolhouse took the Bragg name from its proximity to their home.
Lycurgus was among the younger children of the second marriage. He grew up on the family farm amid siblings who would scatter across the county and beyond. In 1878 he married Della West, born in Missouri in 1859. They established their own household in Shelby County and welcomed sons Ingram West Bragg in 1879 and Gordon Lycurgus Bragg in 1892.
Della’s life ended in 1908 at about age forty-nine. Lycurgus lived on until 1934, reaching his early eighties. Both rest in the Centralia Pioneer Cemetery in Craig County,
The move from Missouri to Oklahoma placed the family in a young prairie settlement.
Centralia was surveyed in 1898 by J. H. Hargrove, a Missourian who named the place after Centralia, Missouri. He opened a post office in 1899 and watched the town take shape around a square on the open prairie near Blue Mound. Wooden storefronts, a livery,
groceries, and hotels rose quickly.
By the mid-1910s the community held roughly 750 residents and supported two banks. Schools operated in frame buildings, then in a brick structure. A local teacher named Mary Bragg led a Camp Fire Girls group in the 1920s, suggesting the Bragg name remained active in the town’s civic life.
Fires in 1907 and 1917 damaged much of the business district. A planned railroad from Vinita never arrived. The banks failed around 1929. The Depression and the lack of lasting transport links emptied the square. By 1980 only a few dozen people remained; today the place is essentially a rural crossroads with a handful of residents.
The Centralia Pioneer Cemetery preserves the graves of those early settlers, including Lycurgus and Della Bragg. It stands as the lasting record of a community that rose quickly from the prairie of the former Cherokee Nation lands and then largely faded. For the Bragg family the stones mark the end of a journey that began in Virginia, passed through Kentucky and a Missouri county court, and closed in an Oklahoma ghost town’s burial ground. T
he unusual name Lycurgus, carried from a Shelby County farmhouse to a plot in Centralia, remains one of the more distinctive markers in that quiet cemetery.
