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PETER WINFRED SWARTS
Vol. 2, p. 1302
Book includes picture

While Oklahoma is filled with enterprising men who are developing
the material resources of this great state, there is also another
class, equally entitled to distinction, who as educators are molding
the plastic characters of the younger generation, the men and women
who will soon step into the places of responsibility and guidance in
local and state affairs. An Oklahoma educator of unusual experience
is Peter Winfred Swartz, now superintendent of schools at Lindsay.
Professor Swartz has been teaching since he was nineteen years old,
having begun his work in that line in
Garfield County, where he spent some of the years of his early
youth, his father having been a pioneer settler in that section of
the Old Cherokee Strip.

In ancestry he represents some of that sterling stock that came out
of the Kingdom of Wurtemberg, Germany, and settled in Pennsylvania,
the Swartz family having located in that province in 1752. Mr. Swartz
himself was born in Bushton, Rice County, Kansas, July 15, 1880, the
son of an early settler in the Sunflower State. C. W. Swartz, his
father, was born near Findlay, Ohio, in 1860. When he was fourteen
years of age his parents moved out to Illinois, and in 1876 to
Kansas. In 1879, C. W. Swartz was married in Kansas to Miss Maggie
Rishel, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1862. With the exception of
one year spent in Colorado, C.W. Swartz resided in Bushton, Kansas,
until 1894. In that year he came into the Cherokee Strip, which had
been open to settlement only the preceding year, and settled near
where Mino, in Major County, is now located, it being at that time in
Woods County. In 1905 he removed with his family from Major County to
Amity, Oregon, lived there until March, 1914, and is now a resident
at Ensign in Alberta, Canada, where he looks after his interests as a
farmer and stock man. Going into the old Cherokee Strip in what is
now Major County he bought a claim of 160 acres of land for the low
price of $275. Since going into the far western province of Alberta
in Canada he has secured a tract of railroad land, which he is now
developing, and he is a man in prosperous circumstances. In politics,
while an American citizen, he was a republican, is a member of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, and of the Modern Woodmen of America. His
children were four in number, Peter W. being the oldest; Lucy is the
Wife of G. Spencer Lockett, who is a carpenter and builder at Amity,
Oregon; Beatrix married Arthur Prater, a farmer at ensign in the
Province of Alberta; and Floyd, who still lives with his parents.

Peter Winfred Swartz as a boy attended country schools at Bushton,
Kansas, making the best of his advantages during the winter terms,
while the summer was spent in growing work on his father's farm. He
lived with his father and helped run the homestead partly in Kansas
and partly in Oklahoma, until he was twenty-five years of age. In the
meantime, at the age of nineteen, he had secured a certificate and
was granted the privilege of teaching his first school in the Lahoma
district of Garfield County, Oklahoma. He remained there one year and
spent three years in the Meno district school, and again for a year
was at Lahoma. He was for one year connected with the schools at
Fairview, in Major County, then for three years was principal of the
high school at Purcell, and in the fall of 1910 he came to Lindsay
and has directed the local school system as superintendent for full
five years.

As an educator, Mr. Swartz is never content with present
attainments, and from year to year is growing in capabilities and
broadening the horizon of opportunity. By attendance at such times as
he was free from his other work, he graduated from the Central State
Normal School at Edmond in 1905. In 1910 he won his degree A. B. from
the Oklahoma State University at Norman, and in 1911 was awarded the
degree A. M. by the same university his thesis being on political
science. The summers of 1907 and 1908 he spent at the Chicago
University specializing in Latin, and he spent each summer during
1912, 1913, 1914 and 1915 at Columbia University, New York City,
where for his work he was granted the degree A. M. in education, and
also received a superintendent's certificate from the Teachers
College of Columbia University.

Politically he is a republican, a member of the Methodist Episcopal
Church South, and teaches the Young Men's Class in his Sunday school.
Fraternally he is a past noble grand at Lindsay Lodge No. 196,
Independent Order of Odd Fellows, is junior warden in Lindsay Lodge
No. 248, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons and a member of the Modern
Woodmen of America. He is a member of the County Teachers'
Association and has been identified with the Oklahoma Teachers'
Association for the past fifteen years. On August 17, 1913 at
Bedford, Pennsylvania, he married Miss Edith Arnold of Bedford.

Typed for OKGenWeb by Charmaine Keith, October 3, 1998.