Volume 10 , Issue 9

Stella Friends Academy - Alfalfa & Woods Co., OK

Chronicles of Oklahoma - Stella Friends Academy by Mary Blue Coppock -- The first high school of Alfalfa county, Oklahoma Territory. Seated around their breakfast table one morning in the year of 1896, were Alvin and Laura Coppock and their ten children.

This was two years after the Coppocks had established their home in "M" County of the "Cherokee Strip." During the course of the meal, the father who had attended a business meeting of their church the night before, casually announced to the family that he had pledged $350 toward the erection of an academy.

In the fall of 1897, an accredited high school known as Stella Friends Academy was opened in a large tabernacle tent, pending the completion of the academy building, with H. C. Fellow, A.M., Ph.D., Principal, and his wife Melissa Fellow as assistant.

Other instructors that first year were Josie M. Snediker, Ernest Howard, Gertrude Bates and Chester Coppock. The first Board of Trustees were Isaac Pollock, President; Alvin Coppock, Treasurer; John Howard, correspondiing Secretary; Arlo Fell, Laura Coppock, Pearl Nuckles, Frank Veatch, Irene Hester, Charles Jackson and John Hays, Members.

The first catalog of the school, issued in 1897, contained the following description:

"Stella Friends Academy is situated in Woods County, Oklahoma Territory, nineteen miles east of Alva. Located in the eastern part of the beautiful Salt Fork valley, on the mouth of the Medicine river, standing on an eminence, the Academy building can be seen from the distant range of hills ten to fifteen miles away. The building is a frame structure 28x48 feet, divided below into auditorium, reception and library rooms, and above into five rooms for ladies dormitory purposes. The rooms and library are fitted up with the best of furniture. All the material used in the construction of the building was hauled in wagons, drawn by horses, from nineteen to forty miles. Surrounding the building is a beautiful campus of ten acres laid out in ample playgrounds and surrounded by groves of young trees. Tuition was $6.50 per term of twelve weeks. Pupils can secure excellent accommodations for self-boarding a fifty cents a month. First class board in private families, $2.00 per full week, and $1.50 per school week. An excellent working cabinet of 1,000 specimens and curios from various parts of the world is available for students in Natural Science and history.

Enrollment the first year (1897-1898) was 75; the second year, 90. Many names familiar in the Cherokee vicinity today were found among those early students.
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