This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Baker Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/UYB.2ACE/1491 Message Board Post: In the fall of 1883, my great grandfather Charles Taylor A Baker along with others from Cooke county, Texas migrated to an area about 10 miles East of what is now Ardmore, Oklahoma in Carter county. According to his grandson Robert Taylor Baker in his autobiography, "The fall when I was five father and grandfather Baker (Charles Taylor A Baker) and twelve other families all moved to the Indian Territory and settled ten miles East of where Ardmore is now. They all took up leases owned by the Buckhold Cattle Company. ...Our closest neighbor was sixty miles away. (I assume this means from the settlement) Each man and boy big enough to handle an ax or saw went into the woods to cut timber to build their houses. As soon as one had enough timber to build a house all the others gathered to help him and all the women and children came along and we had a picnic and house raising at the same time. ...At first grandfather organized a Sunday School. We all went and we had Psalm singing Sunday evening and prayer meeting each Wednesday night." My grandfather, Thomas Andrew Baker was born while they lived in that area. By 1891 they had moved to Enterprise Oklahoma where the next child was born. Are you aware of more data about the settlement near Ardmore? Was the Buckhold Cattle Company an Indian enterprise? I visited Ardmore several years ago for a couple of hours and was allowed into the "old" records room of the court house, but none of those records were early enough to contain data about these early settlers. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Wayland Ashmore