Enid Oklahoma History & Facts

Enid is the ninth-largest city in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. It is the county seat of Garfield County. As of the 2010 census, the population was 49,379. Enid was founded during the opening of the Cherokee Outlet in the Land Run of 1893, and is named after Enid, a character in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. In 1991, the Oklahoma state legislature designated Enid the "purple martin capital of Oklahoma." Enid holds the nickname of "Queen Wheat City" and "Wheat Capital" of Oklahoma and the United States for its immense grain storage capacity, and has the third-largest grain storage capacity in the world.

In summer 1889, M.A. Low, a Rock Island official, visited the local railroad station then under construction, and inquired about its name. At that time, it was called Skeleton. Disliking the original name, he renamed the station Enid after a character in Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. However, a more fanciful story of how the town received its name is popular. According to that tale, in the days following the land run, some enterprising settlers decided to set up a chuckwagon and cook for their fellow pioneers, hanging a sign that read "DINE". Some other, more free-spirited settlers, turned that sign backward to read, of course, "ENID". The name stuck.

During the opening of the Cherokee Outlet in the Land Run of 1893, Enid was the location of a land office which is now preserved in its Humphrey Heritage Village, part of the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center. Enid, the rail station, (now North Enid, Oklahoma) was the original town site endorsed by the government. It was platted by the surveyor W. D. Twichell, then of Amarillo, Texas.

The Enid-Pond Creek Railroad War ensued when the Department of the Interior moved the government site 3 mi (5 km) south of the station prior to the land run, which was then called South Enid. During the run, due to the Rock Island's refusal to stop, people leaped from the trains to stake their claim in the government-endorsed site. By the afternoon of the run, Enid's population was estimated at 12,000 people located in the Enid's 80-acre (320,000 m2) town plat. Enid's original plat in 1893 was 6 blocks wide by 11 blocks long consisting of the town square on the northwest end, West Hill (Jefferson) school on the southwest end, Government Springs Park in the middle southern section, and East Hill (Garfield) school on the far northeast corner. A year later, the population was estimated at 4,410, growing to 10,087 by 1907, the year of Oklahoma statehood.

The town's early history was captured in Cherokee Strip: A Tale of an Oklahoma Boyhood by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marquis James, who recounts his boyhood in Enid.

Located in Northwestern Oklahoma, Enid sits at the eastern edge of the Great Plains. It is located at 36°24′2″N 97°52′51″W (36.400583, -97.880784), 70 miles (110 km) north of Oklahoma City. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 74.1 square miles (192 km2), of which 74.0 square miles (192 km2) is land and 0.1 square miles (0.26 km2) (0.12%) is water.

Famous Peoples From Enid Oklahoma

Vida Chenoweth

(October 18, 1928 – December 14, 2018) was a solo classical marimbist, an ethnomusicologist, and a linguist.

Credited with being the first to perform polyphonic music on the marimba and for doing for the marimba what Pablo Casals did for the cello and Andrés Segovia did for the guitar, she made her solo debut in Chicago in 1956, followed by a successful recital in New York. She subsequently gave concerts throughout the US and in Europe and the Americas.

Chenoweth, with her premiere of the Kurka marimba concerto in 1959, joined marimbist Ruth Stuber as one of the very few marimbists to perform in Carnegie Hall up to that time. Stuber premiered Paul Creston's "Concertino for Marimba with orchestra," which he had written for her, in Carnegie Hall in 1940.

After a hand injury when she was in her early 30s, she played a self-described farewell concert in Oklahoma in 1962 and retired from marimba performance to focus on mission work. She studied musicology and bible translation and became a missionary in New Guinea where she used her musicology training in developing her Christian message with indigenous music.

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