By 6 a.m. this Labor Day, the parking lot at Lori's Corner Store & Deli on Highway 70 already had trucks with McCurtain County plates lined up for gas, plates that hadn't been parked in Eagletown since Thursday. The store opens as early as 4 a.m. on weekdays, built for people who need coffee and diesel before the sun is up, and for most of the weekend just past, half its regular customers were ninety miles north at Tvshka Homma instead.
That's not a coincidence of scheduling. It's close to the whole story of how this town works.
A drive that empties the highway at home
The Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival ran Friday, September 4, through Sunday, September 6, at the Choctaw Nation Capitol Grounds in Tvshka Homma, and it draws roughly 15,000 people to the historic grounds around the original 1883 Capitol Building every year. For a lot of towns in McCurtain County, that's a fact about somewhere else. For Eagletown, which the Oklahoma Historical Society records as the first permanent Choctaw settlement in Indian Territory, it's closer to a family reunion that happens to fall on a federal holiday.
Chief Gary Batton put it plainly in his message ahead of this year's festival:
"The festival gives us an opportunity to fellowship, share stories and come together as a tribe."
The weekend's schedule backs that up. Saturday night's concert slot went to Neal McCoy at 7:30 and Mark Chesnutt at 9. Sunday brought Hope Darst and Ben Fuller to the amphitheater stage, and the day opened with Choctaw Village activities from noon to 3, plus all-day gospel singing. A free 5K ran Saturday morning at the Stickball Field, and the stickball games themselves, one of the oldest team sports on the continent, played out on a field next to the carnival midway. Chief Batton also delivered the 2026 State of the Nation address live from the Capitol Amphitheater on Friday at 5 p.m., a detail that matters here because it means the trip north isn't just entertainment. It's where residents go to hear how their nation is actually doing.
RV spots on the Capitol Grounds book out months ahead of the festival, which tells you something about how far in advance this weekend gets planned around in towns like Eagletown. The calendar in Hochatown, twenty minutes down Highway 70, runs on when visitors arrive. Eagletown's Labor Day runs on when its own residents leave, and when they come back.
Built to be crossed, not settled
The town's shape today still carries the mark of what it was built for two centuries ago, and that's a river crossing, not a destination.
Reverend Loring S. Williams was sent west in 1832 by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and established a station he called Bethabara on the west bank of the Mountain Fork River. The crossing there was marked by a massive cypress tree, one locals have long called the oldest tree in Oklahoma, and it became the landmark Choctaw families used as they crossed the river during the Trail of Tears. Williams organized the first church in Choctaw country in 1834, opened a school the following year, and served as the settlement's first postmaster. The place and its post office were known simply as Eagle Town.
After the Choctaw Nation adopted its constitution in 1850, Eagletown became the courtground, meaning county seat, of the newly formed Eagle County. Jefferson Gardner, a Choctaw trader, opened a general store on the river's east bank in 1874 and built an imposing house a decade later that still stands today as the Gardner House, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Gardner went on to serve as principal chief of the Choctaw Nation before losing his fortune after his term ended. The house and its small museum sit a few miles down Highway 70 toward Broken Bow, with the same giant cypress still marking the ground beside it, and admission is cash only if you plan to stop in.
When Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1906, Eagle County was abolished and folded into the new McCurtain County, and Eagletown lost its status as a seat of government. What came next reinforced the crossing-point pattern rather than breaking it. The Choctaw Lumber Company, later Dierks Forests, built a camp in town to house timber workers and constructed a rail line, the Texas, Oklahoma and Eastern Railroad, connecting to its network in Arkansas. When that railroad laid track from Valliant to De Queen in 1920, the depot went up two and a half miles southeast of the original river crossing, and many of Eagletown's businesses simply relocated to be near the tracks. Little of the original town remains today except the Gardner House.
Read that sequence back to back: a mission at a crossing, a courthouse that got abolished, a commercial district that packed up and moved toward a railroad depot. Eagletown has never really had a center that stayed put. It's had a highway, and a river, and businesses that cluster wherever the traffic is passing through that decade.
What's still open on a Tuesday
That pattern is still visible in how the town's two main stores sit apart from each other rather than side by side on a single Main Street block. Lori's Corner Store & Deli, at 9116 East US Highway 70 near the Mudline Road intersection, opens as early as 4 a.m. on weekdays and stays open until 9, with shorter Sunday hours. It's the highway stop, the one nearby RV parks point their guests toward for fuel and food before they head out for the day. Eagle Cash Grocery, over on Main Street, is the in-town grocery, serving the residential side of Eagletown rather than the highway traffic.
Two stores, two different customers, both still doing exactly what businesses here have always done: sitting at whichever point people are actually moving through, rather than anchoring a downtown that doesn't really exist anymore.
The river doesn't take the weekend off
While the Labor Day crowd headed north, the Mountain Fork River kept running the way it always does. The Lower Mountain Fork's designated trout stream stretches twelve miles from the Broken Bow Reservoir spillway down to the Highway 70 bridge, and Presbyterian Falls is one of the public access points along that stretch, according to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. Trout are stocked there from November through the end of March, which means the fall stretch ahead is when the river starts filling back in for the season.
A short drive off Highway 70 sits Mountain Fork Park, a first-come, first-served campground directly on the river with watercraft launch access and a short trail down to the water. Nobody collects a camping fee at the gate. A local resident comes around to do that, which is either charmingly informal or a small inconvenience depending on how you feel about paying cash to a stranger who wanders up to your tent. Either way, it's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a tourism website, only in the accounts of people who've actually camped there.
None of that paused for Labor Day. The river ran the same three days everyone was at Tvshka Homma as it will run tomorrow.
By Wednesday, the parking lot at Lori's will be back to its normal rhythm, mud from Mountain Fork Park will still be drying on somebody's boots, and the only visible trace of the weekend will be the fact that everyone's back. That's not a town returning from vacation. It's a town returning to itself, the way it has for close to two hundred years, one crossing at a time.
If you're keeping an eye on this stretch of McCurtain County for any reason, from a family camp on the river to a longer-term move, Teresa Bartlett knows this ground well enough to talk it through honestly. Let's Connect.
