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COL. OLIVER R. LILLEY
Vol. 5, p. 2068

COL. OLIVER R. LILLEY.   Always will there be a glamor of romance
about those interesting adventurers who participated in the first
opening of the Oklahoma lands.  Few men took part in more of these
openings and endured more of the inconveniences and hardships
connected therewith than Col. Oliver R. Lilley, who for a number of
years has been a prominent citizen of Cushing in Payne County.
Colonel Lilley has seen a great deal of western life during his
career, has been in most of the states west of the Mississippi River,
and has been hardy, fearless, enterprising and a ready fighter for
any cause he believed to be just and right.  While he has been
identified with other affairs, Colonel Lilley is perhaps best known
among most people as an auctioneer, a profession he has followed
since early youth.

Born in Whiteside County, Illinois, November 23, 1861, he was taken
in the same fall out to Kansas by his parents, Joseph John and Anna
(Cross) Lilley, who were pioneers in Kansas at the beginning of the
Civil war.  His father, who was born in Pennsylvania, died in 1880 at
the age of fifty on his old homestead in Riley County, Kansas, twenty
miles north of Manhattan.  He had located on that home in the fall of
1861.  By occupation he was a farmer and stock raiser.  The mother
was born in West Virginia, and is now living at the old home in
Kansas at the age of eighty-six.  She became the mother of four sons
and one daughter, and the father had children by a previous marriage.

Up to the age of ten Oliver R. Lilley lived at home and the next
six years were spent in the same locality of Kansas, until the spirit
of adventure led him entirely away from home surroundings and out to
California.  He spent 3 1/2 years in that state, earning his way at
any  employment which he could secure.  He did his first work as an
auction-eer at the age of eighteen, and has since officiated at sales
and has sold all manner of goods, live stock, household possessions,
land and other property, and his operations have been carried on in
Kansas, Missouri, Texas and elsewhere.

Colonel Lilley arrived in Oklahoma June 22, 1890.  After that he
took part in all the important land openings.  At some of these
openings he has paid as high aa 10 cents a glass for drinking water.
He lay for hours at a time in the thick dust along the line which
marked the limit of the land for which thousands were striving to
gain possession.  At the opening of the Sac and Fox Reservation he
had a fortunate number, No. 370, secured a claim, and lived there and
developed it for fifteen years.  For several years he lived at
Ripley, and his home has been at Cushing since 1907.  Here he has
spent most of his time as an auction-eer.

Colonel Lilley is credited with many public spirited movements and
enterprises in Payne County.  He built and still owns the Lilley
Hotel, a thirty-nine-room modern hostelry, and managed it himself for
three years, and has since leased it.  He also has other real estate
in Cushing.  Up to 1912 he was a republican, and has since been
identified with the progressive policies.  Colonel Lilley was for two
years mayor at Cushing during the great boom following the
discoveries of the oil fields.  At that time the town was unable to
provide accommodations for the hosts of people who flocked to this
center, and hundreds of persons  lived in tents.  Colonel Lilley has
always stood for a clean town, has lead the fight against the illegal
liquor traffic, and has done much to keep that element of danger out
of the local life.  For twenty years he has been a member of the
Christian Church, is affiliated with the Scottish Rite Consistory of
Masonry at Guthrie, and with the Temple of the Mystic Shrine at
Oklahoma City.  He also belongs to the Eastern Star, the Knights and
Ladies of Security, and many other fraternal orders.

On September 22, 1889, Colonel Lilley married Miss Emma A.
Hetherington.  She was born at Racine, Newton County, Missouri,
February 16, 1872, and died at Stillwater, Oklahoma, April 3, 1915.
Their four children, all born in Oklahoma, are named Lenna A., Jessie
O., John  H. and Oliver L.

SOURCE: Thoburn, Joseph B., A Standard History of Oklahoma, An
Authentic Narrative of its Development, 5 v. (Chicago, New York: The
American Historical Society, 1916)

Transcribed for OKGenWeb by Rosana J. Lilley Whitenight,
rjwhite@mfx.net, October 2002.