The Savoy Hotel was built in 1909 as a modern elegant hotel with 62 rooms.  It was built to accommodate the many new visitors, workers, and businessmen coming to the oil and gas boom town of Nowata, Oklahoma. This year, 2009, represents her 100-year anniversary.  So saving this wonderful structure from complete destruction is a fitting birthday present to bestow upon this year.

An oil well drilled in Nowata struck “radium” water at a depth of 1500 feet.  Many people touted the health benefits of this water and thus the Savoy hotel added “Radium Water Baths”. So on February 16, 1916, J. R. Cruff started a Radium water bathhouse at the Savoy. The bathhouse had the latest and most modern apparatus with bathing experts in charge.

The mineral baths were good at healing for rheumatism, stomach trouble, malaria, nervous trouble, skin diseases, as said by the owner J.R. CRUFF. (source: Men of Affairs and representative Institutions of OK, 1916)

In the 1940’s it was the County Hospital.

Some renovation was done in the 1990’s and the building was used for events, dinners, weddings, and even for a feature film, “Possums”, in 1998.

But the roof began leaking a few years ago and soon nature was rapidly trying to reclaim what man had built 100 years ago.

The current town of Nowata, Oklahoma, started as a small trading post in 1868.  A post office was established November 8, 1889.  That same year the Kansas and Arkansas Valley Railway (later the Missouri Pacific Railway) was extended northward from Wagoner to the Indian Territory-Kansas state line by way of Nowata.  The Cherokee Nation established the official town of Nowata in 1892 (the same year that the famous Dalton Gang simultaneously raided two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas, just north of Nowata on Highway 169. )  It was incorporated by the Federal Government in 1904, and was chosen as the temporary county seat. In 1904, when Congress announced it would establish courts in several Indian Territory towns, an influential resident was dispatched to Washington, D.C., where he won a court for Nowata.  Up until 1907, the area was known as “Indian Territory”, because Oklahoma was not established as a state until November 16, 1907. Nowata won the permanent county seat position in the 1908 election after a spirited contest with the city of Delaware.

The word “Nowata” is actually thought to be a misspelling of the Delaware Indian word “Noweta”, which means “welcome”. 

In the late 1890’s oil and gas was discovered in the area and Nowata became a boom town.  The shallow oil fields were a huge draw to people trying to make their fortunes.  The population grew rapidly.

1. Newspapers started in 1894.
   

2. Telephones became popularly in use by 1899.
   

3. In 1903 a public school was constructed and it was proudly completed without the use of any taxes.
   

4. In 1908, Nowata became the official County Seat of Nowata County.
   

5. Nowata's population numbered 498 in 1900. In 7 years it increased to 2,223 in 1907, and then over 3,000 by 1909.
   

By this time it was necessary to build a large modern hotel to accommodate the visitors and new oil investors, business men, managers, workers, etc, that were coming into this oil and gas boom town.  So in 1909, The Savoy Hotel was built