Elizabeth Fulton Hester was the first woman inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1928, which also was the first class. But it wasn’t her first time to be honored or celebrated.
Hester was a pioneer, missionary, nurse and teacher. She also supported the women’s suffrage movement and taught at both Choctaw and Chickasaw schools. Five of the young men she taught, according to Hester, went on to become governors or chiefs of their tribes. She, too, was a leader, active and vocal.
Even as a teen, she was determined and knew what she wanted. At 18 and already a graduate and faculty member of Southern Masonic Female Seminary in Georgia, she left home and headed west with her uncle’s family. Their destination was Indian Territory.
She arrived in Tishomingo in the late 1850s to teach at a mission school, and in that town became reacquainted with a friend she had met years earlier in Georgia. Two years later she and George Hester, a merchandiser who had come to town to sell goods, were married and moved to Boggy Depot.
The town became a center for Confederate activity during the American Civil War. George’s mercantile was transformed into a hospital and Elizabeth assumed nursing duties. Since George was a captain in the Confederate Army, the Hesters welcomed many top officers at their dining table.
They returned to Tishomingo in 1878 and she formed the area’s first unit of the new Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, which focused on women’s missionary services. Tireless and committed, she then helped form other auxiliaries throughout the territory and was honored in 1928 during the Jubilee Celebration of the Society’s East Oklahoma Conference. She had served as its president for 15 years and the conference treasurer for 18 years, and was a member of the Woman’s Missionary Council. She was also chaplain of the United Daughters of the Confederacy of Oklahoma.
Hester’s husband died in 1897 and a few years later she moved to Muskogee to be near her married daughter Daisy. She stayed active and involved and continued to support women’s suffrage. She taught Sunday School and started visiting jails to share her message. She founded a baby clinic for unwed mothers, which evolved into a childcare center. Her daughter and son-in-law, Robert Owen, moved to Washington, D.C., in 1907 after his appointment as Oklahoma’s first U.S. Senator.
Hester became one of the best-known Oklahoma women during her life of service and selflessness. On her 90th birthday in January 1929, she was honored for being Muskogee’s “first citizen of benevolence.” She died in August later that year, more than a decade after she spoke about women’s issues at the new Oklahoma State Capitol in February 1917. She was the initial woman to speak there. Another first.
