Stone Gardens: An Indian Territory pioneering politician lent his name to a county when Oklahoma earned statehood

S. Latimer was born on December 10, 1855, in Linn County, Kansas, some twenty-five miles north of Fort Scott, at a moment when the border between free and slave soil still bled with the violence of Bleeding Kansas.

His lineage reached back through English stock established in the American Southwest by his grandfather Samuel Latimer, a pioneer who settled in southwestern Missouri and married a French woman. From that union came Dr. George W. Latimer, who prepared himself for medicine and practiced across Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas during the turbulent formative years of the border country.

The elder Latimer lived through the border warfare that scarred Kansas, left the territory before the Civil War fully erupted, returned to Missouri, and served for a time as a surgeon in General Sterling Price’s army.

After the war he moved his family to Benton County, Arkansas, then to Boonville, and finally to Springdale, where he ended his days.

He had married Nancy B. Cowan, and among their children was the son who would carry the name westward into Indian Territory.

Young James began his schooling near Marshfield, Missouri, and completed it at the high school in Fort Smith. Soon afterward he worked as a drug clerk in Boonville, then followed the expanding railroads through that state. In 1893 he crossed permanently into the Indian country, drawn by the iron rails that were stitching the Choctaw Nation together.

For a time, he served as operator in the office of the superintendent of the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad at McAlester. Over the next seven or eight years he held the posts of station agent and operator at Red Oak, Fanshawe, and Wilburton, towns that rose along the tracks amid timber and coal seams.

While stationed at Fanshawe he married, on September 6, 1893, Miss Allie Brashears, daughter of Judge Turner Brashears, a man of Choctaw blood whose family ties reached into the influential Leflore lineage of the Nation. Allie herself had been born near Brazil in the Indian Territory on August 5, 1875.

Through that marriage, Latimer acquired the rights of a Choctaw citizen. When his railroad service ended, he settled on a tract of land near the site that would become the village of Patterson, cultivating the soil as means allowed, raising livestock, and later taking his personal allotment under the new order of individual ownership that replaced communal tribal holdings.

The careful management of those interests brought him standing in the community and marked him for public trust. His Democratic neighbors saw in his business experience, his store of general information, and his steady social qualities a man fit to speak for them at the Constitutional Convention that would forge a single state from the Twin Territories.

Elected as delegate from the Ninety-ninth district, he sat on the committees that shaped primary elections, public roads and highways, private corporations, mines and mining, and oil and gas. He supported Peter Hanraty for the chairmanship and worked for the initiative and referendum and other measures that found their way into the finished document.

When the time came to name the new counties, Representative A. H. Ellis of Garfield County proposed that one of them bear the name Latimer. The suggestion carried, and the county that surrounds Wilburton still carries that mark of recognition.

At home the marriage produced three children: Winifred, born in 1895; Alvin Leo, born in 1898; and Marie Kathleen, born in 1903. Latimer belonged to Wilburton Lodge No. 108 of the Free and Accepted Masons and to the Catholic Church.

In the spring of 1941 a fall left him with a broken limb that confined him to bed. His constitution remained vigorous; he was never truly ill through the long months that followed, and only a few weeks before the end did he begin to use a wheelchair about the house. Neighbors and his wife believed recovery was near. Then a stroke struck, and from that moment until his death on October 29, 1941, he never fully regained consciousness.

Allie Latimer had remained at his side through every hour of the invalidism, her hands ready and her patience unbroken.

The funeral Mass was offered on Sunday morning, November 2, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church by Father Remmes. Active pallbearers and honorary ones drawn from the community carried him to Calvary Cemetery in Wilburton, where the stone that marks his rest stands near the place he had helped to name and to shape.

Allie would join him there eighteen years later, on the same calendar day of the year.

In that hillside ground the record of a life lived across the hinge of territorial and statehood time remains, written not only in the county that bears his name but in the ordinary fidelity of a family and the deliberate work of a citizen who helped turn Indian Territory into Oklahoma.