Indian Pioner Papers - Gloster Wiley

Submitted by Brenda Choate  bcchoate@yahoo.com
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Gloster Wiley



Interview #1233

Field Worker: Maurice R. Anderson

Date: April 16, 1937

Name: Mr. Gloster Wiley

Residence: Pauls Valley, Oklahoma

Date of Birth: 1892

Place of Birth: Cherokee Town, Chickasaw Nation

Father: George Wiley, Texas

Mother: Jemima Allen, born in Indian Territory





I was born at Cherokee Town, Indian Territory, in the Chickasaw Nation. 



The first school I went to was held in an old church house near 

where I lived.  I was six years old.  A white man named Henry 

Russell was my teacher.  My father paid Mr. Russell one dollar 

a month for my tuition.  He only taught three months.  We used 

slates and sat on benches.  We had no desks.  There were about 

fifty children who went to this school.  The white children, 

Indians and Negroes all went to school together.  After that 

three months school was out and I did not go to school any more until 1901.



My father, George Wiley, with Dixie Smith, Monroe Smith, Zach Allen, 

Steve Allen, (all Negroes) and Mrs. Elizabeth Crawford, a white 

woman, donated enough money to build a Negro Mission school.  My 

father was one of the trustees and Mrs. Elizabeth Crawford was one 

of the teachers.  They had the mission school built in 1900.  It 

was located three miles east of Wynnewood Oklahoma.



The mission was a two-story building, built of lumber, and there was 

a basement.  The kitchen and dining room was in the basement and on 

the first floor was the class room.  The boys slept there on cots and 

in the mornings they would carry their cots out in the yard.  It if 

happened to be raining they would have to be stacked up in a corner 

of the room.  We had long benches to sit on and long tables for desks.

 

On the second floor was where the girls and the white women teachers 

slept.  There were four white women teachers.  A Mrs. Fannie Johnson, 

was the head of the school. 

 

There were about two hundred Negro children attending this school.  

Some of the children came from Ardmore and some from Seminole.

  

Lots of the children who lived within six or eight miles of the 

school would go home in the evenings.  I stayed and boarded the 

first ten months.  After that my father got a horse for me to ride 

back and forth on, so that I could live at home.



I heard my father say that each child paid five dollars a month 

for board and schooling and one dollar a month if the children 

went home in the evenings and brought their lunch from home.  

The children had to furnish their own clothing.



Monday was washday.  The boys would carry the water from a big well 

about a hundred yards away and the girls would wash the clothes 

down in the basement.  This mission was called, "Beseth Mission" 

and it was for Negro children exclusively.  It stood there until 

it was wrecked in a storm in 1917.  



I attended the school until 1907.  I was in the fifth grade and 

I quit to stay at home to help my father on the farm.  We raised 

lots of cotton and corn.