Lost City-Colorful Name, Old Memories
Muskogee Phoneix December 31, 1967

Lost City-This little community with a name as picturesque as its clear, winding Fourteen Mile Creek and surrounding hills is everything but lost to those who call it home.
"The old-timers say some plains Indians were camped down on the creek and a sickness hit them and they just packed up," says one resident of the name's origin. "They stayed most of the Winter-some of them died-and finally they left. They say one afternoon they were there and the next morning they were gone."

Mrs. Hudlin taught me out under that old oak tree, says Barney Mitchell of his early education when the school was a tiny two teacher institution. "They were putting up a new building and we had class outside till about the third week in October. Now Mitchell, with 19 years on the faculty, is principal of Lost City, a school which started as a log building in 1902 and today has five full-time teachers and 145 students.

"We still use that old bell out there- it's been here since the first school. Of course, we have an indoor bell system, but it's still used some. We ring it when they're going to have a funeral (the cemetary is just across the fence). They can hear it for miles around, and they know we need help in getting the grave ready."

"It was 1916 when we put in the store...we had the store and a grist mill and blacksmith," says 70-odd-year-old Mrs. John (Carrie) Potts, who 51 years after she and her husband, now dead, began business here lives alone and still sells gasoline from one pump at the same crossroads. "They'd come in their wagons and the roads was so rough they had to carry them over the rocks. One woman started out with a crate of eggs and I bet every one was broke when she got here. "I've got five girls...they all want me to come and live with them. But I've been here to long, I guess. Lost City, consisting of the school, Mrs. Potts' gas station, a small auto repair shop across the road, two indian churches and some half dozen homes in the general area, is located about four miles north of Hulbert on a winding, climbing and dipping blacktop road off State 51. The school is a rock structure built by the Depression era's Public Works Authority and a later addition which give it seven classrooms, a gym and auditorium and cafeteria. Modern plumbing has also been added. Its student body 85 percent of which is Indian, put it among the largest dependent districts in Cherokee County. Lost City's physical education includes students' participation in about four basketball tournaments a year, a county Spring Little Olympics event and a county softball tournament. It's gym space was once used by Hulbert High for some three years after the larger school was shorted of phys-ed facilities by a fire.

The school's instructor staff, consisting of six counting a halftime music teacher, includes Mrs. Dewey Young, a sister of Grace Hudlin, one of the two teachers principal Mitchell remembers from his early grades. Mrs. Hudlin is now with Lake Region Co-operative in Wagoner.

In addtion to the old cast Iron bell, mounted on a tall wood scaffolding, swings and other playground equipment and a few oak trees occupy a large part of the space in from of the school building. Many Lost Cityans have their own wells and others use water from the creek. Some are to be on the line of a new water system scheduled for Hulbert. Mrs. Potts, the mother of eight children, has continued business here since her husband died around 12 years ago and is the holder of a plaque from Phillips Petroleum Company presented for the selling of its products for 35 years, at her modest frame house beside the station, she tends to house-hold chores, including growing a garden annually and drawing water from the 50-year-old well. "I've lived here over 15 years, and around 16 miles of here about all my life" says S.F.Wing, who as a child came from Arkansas to the area in 1906. "It's a pretty good place since they got the road fixed. Before then it was pretty rough.

Contributor-Mason Catt #47685256
One of Carrie Pott's Great-Grandsons