The communities around it — Tahlequah, which had been the capital of the Cherokee Nation, Park Hill itself with its history as a center of Cherokee intellectual life before the Civil War — carried the accumulated history of a people who had been forced to rebuild twice: once after the removal from the Southeast, once after the Civil War devastation of Indian Territory.

The Cherokee Nation’s tradition of rebuilding around education was visible in this landscape.

The Cherokee Female Seminary, later to become the institution where Mary Ross would receive her undergraduate education, had been founded here.

The emphasis on literacy and education that had characterized the antebellum Cherokee Nation — the institution that had produced a bilingual newspaper and had achieved literacy rates that exceeded those of some surrounding white communities — had survived into the twentieth century, transformed and adapted but continuous.

Growing up in Park Hill in the early twentieth century meant growing up inside that tradition.