Tulsa County plats, indexes online

Exciting news! Yesterday, Tulsa County Clerk Michael Willis announced that subdivision plats for Tulsa County are now online. You no longer have to subject yourself to downtown parking and courthouse metal detectors to access this fascinating trove of Tulsa history.

We have a pretty big deal launching in the Tulsa County Clerk's Office. After a lot of work, we have placed all the plats in Tulsa County on our website for free. I'm fortunate to have a great team that has worked hard to keep adding content to our website. If you're looking for a plat or some historical documents, you might check my website at http://www.countyclerk.tulsacounty.org/Home/Land and click one of the links near the top.

There are three categories of new content, each with its own index page:

Subdivision plats: A plat subdivides a large parcel of land into blocks and lots, which then become the fundamental unit of land ownership. Plats will also show public streets, common areas and private streets (typical for gated communities), easements, and covenants. Each city or town in the county has an original townsite -- Tulsa's consists of the tilted grid that runs parallel and perpendicular to the Frisco tracks -- and you will also find plats for towns like Red Fork, West Tulsa, Carbondale, Garden City, Dawson, Alsuma, and Highland Park that were ultimately annexed into the City of Tulsa.

Townsite plats, along with the plats of many older subdivisions, have the original street names, before they were renamed and renumbered to conform to Tulsa's grid. For example, the plat for the Orcutt Addition shows that what we know now as 15th Street between Peoria and Victor Avenues was originally called Cherry Street, and what we now know as Peoria was called Pine, and there's now a coffee house at the corner of Cherry and Jasmine.

Some of the plats show other interesting features. For example, the Park Hill Addition (just west of Owen Park) shows the route of the Oklahoma Union Traction Co. street railway (the company that also ran the electric interurban to Sapulpa), with a branch that terminates in Owen Park and another that continues along Easton Street. A proposed "subway" (underpass) is shown on Brady Street, which presumably would have replaced the streetcar's at-grade crossing of the MK&T railroad line. The plat for Irving Place shows the OUT line continuing west and around the Washington Irving Monument, which commemorates his visit to the area in 1832, as recorded in his book A Tour on the Prairies. The Owen Place addition shows a branch of the rival Tulsa Street Railway on Nogales Avenue terminating in a loop north of the MK&T tracks.

The plats page also includes the Comprehensive 1955 Zoning Map for the City of Tulsa, from the brief period when the city had extra-territorial zoning power within a five-mile radius of the city limits, a power that the courts nullified as the result of a lawsuit brought by the owner of Jamil's Steakhouse.

Platted indexes: The County Clerk logs deeds and other real-estate-related instruments (e.g., easements, condemnations, mortgages, lien releases, mortgage assignments, oil and gas leases) sequentially in books, but how do you find everything that might pertain to a specific lot? It's done with computers now, but previously paper indexes were used. The indexes are organized into a page (or more) for each subdivision and block, as each new deed is recorded. These books are now scanned and posted by subdivision and block. For example, on September 12, 1940, Ira D. and Ruth Crews sold Lot 1 and the north 2 feet of Lot 2 of Lamb Addition (southwest corner of Archer and Louisville) to a certain J. Robert Wills (a bandleader with a new hit record and a new bride). About a month later, Wills and his wife mortgaged the home with First National Bank of Anadarko for $3200, and a few days later the mortgage was assigned to Federal National Mortgage. He and his wife sold the property on February 13, 1946, to Mr. & Mrs. Robert E. Berry.

From the index for Johansen Acres Amended Block 3, we learn that James R. and Betty L. Wills bought lot 11 on May 23, 1958, and sold it on March 17, 1960. This would have been during the period that Bob returned to Tulsa and reunited with brother Johnnie Lee's band at Cain's Ballroom from roughly 1957 to 1959.

Unplatted indexes: What about land that isn't part of a subdivision? This land is usually described in terms of fractions of a section (square mile) within one of the statewide grid of 6-mile by 6-mile townships, e.g., the E 1/2 of the NW 1/4 of the SE 1/4 of Section 16, Township 17N, Range 5E. Unplatted indexes are organized by township and section, with markings to show which quarter-quarter sections are affected by a given instrument. While land can be divvied up in ways other than quarters and halves, the index provides a quick guide to which instruments might affect a given parcel, which then has to be confirmed by looking up the documents themselves. This is where you'd look to find the history of a currently platted parcel before it was platted. The index for Section 19, Township 19N, Range 13E -- 31st to 41st, Peoria to Lewis -- begins with a long list of allotments from the Creek Nation to various members of the Perryman family and others. O. Davis received an allotment deed for 2.5 acres on August 16, 1905, and on September 16 and 17, 1912, the Creek Nation removed restrictions on O. Davis's property. Using the index to read the original documents (or typed transcriptions) might tell an interesting story.

You can use these tools to trace your own family's history, too. I learned that in a little over a month's time will be the 40th anniversary of my parents buying our home -- I was in high school at the time.

I am grateful to Tulsa County Clerk Michael Willis for devoting his office's resources to making this happen and to the Tulsa County Republican voters who were wise enough two years ago to nominate Willis and end the 32-year reign of the Hastings-Wilson-Key-Rothman dynasty, a succession of County Clerks that stood in the way of greater public access to public records. Sometimes your vote actually makes a practical difference. We look forward to the results of Willis's ongoing efforts to make County Clerk records easily accessible to the public.

MORE: Historical Map Works has land ownership maps of the Creek Nation from 1910, Creek Nation 1910 Township Plats by Hastain and Model Printing Company. You can view and zoom the maps online, but you have to pay to download them.

It's a little strange to see Creek Nation boundaries being used as an organizing principle for maps made after statehood in 1907, but 1910 is soon enough that these maps may show Dawes Commission allotments to Muscogee Creek Indians and Freedmen. Surplus land would have been purchased by the U. S. Government from the Creek Nation and sold to other interested parties. I'm not sure if the color code (yellow or white) or notation (C or F followed by a four-digit number) indicates whether the land was allotted to an enrolled Creek or sold to a non-Creek. The maps show familiar Creek family names like Perryman, Tiger, Harjo, Yahola, Fixico, Rentie, Bible, and McIntosh, and family names that would be used for creek and park and subdivision names, like Berryhill, Woodward, Clinton, Childers, Hodge, Orcutt, Crowell, Fry, and Haikey.

The NW 1/4 of the SE 1/4 of Section 22, Township 19 North, Range 12 East, was Sue A. Bland's allotment. That's roughly between 36th Street, 38th Street, Yukon Ave, and 25th West Ave., and that's where oil was first struck in Tulsa County in 1901.

Three women named Glenn, Mabel C., Gracie, and Ida E., had 160-acre allotments in Township 17 North, Range 12 East. In 1905, Ida E. Glenn's allotment in the SE 1/4 of Section 10 was the site of the first well in the Glenn Pool, a massive discovery that would make Tulsa the Oil Capital of the World. The deed index for that section shows that I. E. Glenn received her allotment from the Creek Nation on August 28, 1903, and an oil and gas lease with W. S. Guthrie et al. was recorded on January 12, 1906, and renewed on March 9, 1908. The index for this square mile of land records oil and gas leases, pipeline right of way and conveyance, mineral rights, and many other transactions involving dozens of oil and gas companies over nine decades.