Stone Gardens: He finished high school in Fort Smith, but lent his name to a newly founded county in Oklahoma

James S. Latimer was born on December 10, 1855, in Linn County, Kansas, about twenty-five miles north of Fort Scott, into a family that had already crossed several borders to get there.

The line was English. His grandfather, Samuel Latimer, settled in southwestern Missouri and married a French woman, and their son, Dr. George W. Latimer, trained for medicine and practiced in Kansas through the border warfare of the territory's formative years.

Dr. Latimer married Nancy B. Cowan. Their children were Mary E., later Mrs. Castleberry of Boonville, Arkansas; Rilla, later Mrs. Williams, who died in St. Louis and left two children; James

S.; Della, later Mrs. Griffey of Boonville; Ida, later Mrs. Fulton of Fayetteville, Arkansas; and Marvin G. Latimer, who would later live at Patterson, Oklahoma.

James began school near Marshfield, Missouri, and finished at the high school in Fort Smith,. Soon after school he clerked in a drugstore at Boonville and then spent several years in railroad work in that Arkansas. In 1892 he settled for good in the Indian Territory.

He worked for a time as an operator in the office of the superintendent of the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad at McAlester, and over the next seven or eight years held the posts of station agent and operator at Red Oak, Fanshawe, and Wilburton.

The key, the wire, and the station platform were his first public face in the coal and timber country that would later carry his name.

While he was station agent at Fanshawe he married Allie Brashears on September 6, 1893. She was the daughter of Judge Turner Brashears, a man of Choctaw blood tied to the Leflore line, and she had been born near Brazil in the Indian Territory on August 5, 1875.

The marriage made Latimer a Choctaw citizen by intermarriage. That citizenship let him take land. When his railroad work ended, he settled on a tract near the site of Patterson, cleared and cultivated it as his means allowed, bought and raised livestock, and later took his personal allotment.

The farm, more than the depot, gave him standing among his neighbors.

Democrats of the 99th district sent him to the constitutional convention of 1906 and 1907. He sat on the committees on primary elections, public roads and highways, private corporations, mines and mining, and oil and gas. He supported Pete Hanratty for chairman of the convention and worked for the initiative and referendum and other measures that went into the document.

When the convention turned to naming counties, A. H. Ellis of Garfield County proposed that the new county be called Latimer. The suggestion carried.

He was a Catholic and a member of Wilburton Masonic Lodge No. 108.

He and Allie had three children, Winifred, Alvin Leo, and Marie Kathleen. The later years were spent on the Patterson place and in the Wilburton orbit, a farmer and former station agent whose name was already on the map.

In the spring of 1941 a fall broke a limb. A stroke killed him on October 29, 1941. Funeral Mass was said at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Wilburton on November 2, and he was buried in Calvary Cemetery.

Allie survived him by eighteen years and died on the same calendar day, October 29, 1959. She lies beside him.