What to See in Tahlequah - Top Sights and Attractions

Museum in Park Hill, Oklahoma. The Cherokee Heritage Center is a non-profit historical society and museum campus that seeks to preserve the historical and cultural artifacts, language, and traditional crafts of the Cherokee. The Heritage center also hosts the central genealogy database and genealogy research center for the Cherokee People. The Heritage Center is located on the site of the mid-19th century Cherokee Seminary building in Park Hill, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tahlequah, and was constructed near the old structure. It is a unit of the Cherokee National Historical Society and is sponsored by the Cherokee Nation, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and other area tribes. The center was originally known as Tsa-La-Gi but is now known as the Cherokee Heritage Center.^[1]

Public university in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Northeastern State University is a public university with its main campus in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The university also has two other campuses in Muskogee and Broken Arrow as well as online. Northeastern is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of Oklahoma as well as one of the oldest institutions of higher learning west of the Mississippi River. Tahlequah is home to the capital of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and about 25 percent of the students at NSU identify themselves as American Indian. The university has many courses focused on Native American linguistics, and offers Cherokee language Education as a major. Cherokee can be studied as a second language, and some classes are taught in Cherokee for first language speakers as well.^[2]

Museum in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The Cherokee National Jail or Cherokee National Penitentiary was built in 1874 as part of a governmental complex for the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. It served the Cherokee Nation until it was sold to Cherokee County, Oklahoma, which used it as a jail into the 1970s.

The prison, as built in 1874 for $6000, was a two-story building with a basement. The sandstone structure measures 48 feet (15 m) by 35 feet (11 m). The second floor has been removed and replaced with a flat roof. There are two sandstone porches on the main level, front and back, with hipped roofs. The Cherokee National Jail was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 28, 1974. The jail is now a museum, named the Cherokee National Prison Museum.^[4]

Building in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The Cherokee Female Seminary, was built by the Cherokee Nation in 1889 near Tahlequah, Indian Territory. It replaced their original girls' seminary that had burned down on Easter Sunday two years before. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

The Cherokee Council chose to rebuild the school on a 40-acre (160,000 m2) site north of Tahlequah, near Hendricks Spring. Two years later, on May 7, 1889, the dedication ceremonies were held in honor of the new building. The Female Seminary was owned and operated by the Cherokee Nation until March 6, 1909, after Oklahoma had been admitted as a state as a state in 1907, and tribal land claims were extinguished.

At that time the new State Legislature of Oklahoma passed an act providing for the creation of Northeastern State Normal School at Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The act also authorized purchase from the Cherokee Tribal Government of the building, land, and equipment of the Cherokee Female Seminary. At the start of the next academic year, on September 14, the state held its first classes at the newly founded Northeastern State Normal School, primarily intended to train teachers of elementary grades. The institution has been developed over the decades and is now Northeastern State University, offering a range of curriculum and graduate programs.

The Cherokee were the first Native American Female seminaries were a larger cultural movement across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, by which time they had taken over the role played traditionally by the boarding school, which had offered a more family-like atmosphere.^[6]