The Okfuskee County History House is a small local museum with exhibits covering the long arc of the county's history: the Muscogee Creek people who called this land home before Oklahoma statehood, the land runs and early white settlement, the coal and oil booms that briefly made Okemah a prosperous town, and the Dust Bowl years that emptied it out again.
The museum holds photographs, documents, and artefacts donated by local families over the decades — the kind of collection that exists nowhere else and matters precisely because it is local. It is a good place to understand why the landscape and the people here produced someone like Woody Guthrie, and why "This Land Is Your Land" is a complicated song. Hours are limited; call ahead before making a special trip.