Watonga Attractions

Watonga Cheese Festival--October 7 and 8, 2022
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Watonga is home to several attractions of significant interest including the T. B. Ferguson Home.  The home, built in 1901, was home to Oklahoma's 6th Territorial Governor.  Ferguson wrote The Jayhawkers and Men on the Border.

His wife, Elva, authored They Carried the Torch: The Story of Oklahoma’s Pioneer Newspapers (1937) and also helped establish the Watonga Public Library. Elva Ferguson’s story of pioneer life and newspapers was the basis for Edna Ferber’s novel, Cimarron (1929).

A new post office, completed in 1937, was selected to receive a mural as part of the New Deal art project.  Commissioned artist Edith Mahier painted the controversial mural depicting Chief Roman Nose and other Cheyenne on the day of the land run of 1892.

Watonga’s notable citizens include Theresa Hunt Tyler, the town’s first dentist at a time when few women practiced that profession.  Native son Clarence Nash provided the voice of Walt Disney’s cartoon character Donald Duck.  Authors with local ties include Earnest Hoberecht, war correspondent and author of Asia is My Beat (1961) and Tokyo Romance (1947), William Cunningham, director of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Oklahoma Federal Writer’s Project and author of The Green Corn Rebellion (1935), Sidney Stewart who wrote Give Us This Day (1956), an autobiographical account of being a World War II prisoner of war and Leslie McRill, Oklahoma’s Poet Laureate in 1970.