The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

PERRYVILLE.

Perryville was a Chickasaw and Choctaw settlement located at the junction of the Texas Road and a military road from Fort Smith, Arkansas, southwest of present McAlester in what is now Pittsburg County. The settlement benefited from regular travel and commerce along both routes. Soldiers and supplies passed through Perryville, as did emigrant parties bound for the Southwest during the California gold rush. Businesses included a general store, a blacksmith, an inn, and a stage stand. Perryville was named for James Perry and his extended Choctaw-Chickasaw family, who removed to the area from Mississippi after the Treaty of Doaksville (1837). Perry had married Elizabeth Colbert, daughter of prominent Chickasaw political figure George Colbert, and was among the Chickasaw delegation who signed the treaty. Perryville became the seat of Perry County in the Chickasaw District, Choctaw Nation.

The Colbert Institute, a Methodist boarding school for Chickasaw children, was founded at Perryville in the early 1850s. Following the 1855 treaty that formally separated the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations in Indian Territory, the Colbert Institute relocated west near present Stonewall, and Perryville was designated the seat of Tobucksy County in the Choctaw Nation’s Moshulatubbee District. (Tobucksy had several spelling variations, including “Toboxy,” “Toboxky,” and “Tobaksi.”) During the Civil War (1861–65) Confederate forces held Perryville. The Battle of Perryville was fought on August 26, 1863, after which Union troops burned the town.

Construction of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway and an influx of white settlers intruded upon Perryville after the Civil War. Increasingly known as “old Perryville,” the settlement supported a general store and post office as well as intermittent church meetings and county court proceedings through the 1870s. Perryville relinquished the county seat to McAlester in 1878. Coal mining in the region ultimately overwhelmed the site. At the advent of the twentieth century Perryville was confined within a coal lease operated by Thomas H. Chambers. The unincorporated community of Chambers later occupied the original Perryville townsite, of which nothing remains.

Jon D. May