Drummond family (Oklahoma)
The Drummond family is an American ranching family from Oklahoma. The family is one of the largest land-owning families in the state of Oklahoma and the United States. In 2017, the family owned 433,000 acres according to The Land Report magazine. In 2022, the family was the largest land-owning family in Osage County, owning about 9% of the county. 19th century: Settling among the Osage The family's founding patriarch was Frederick Drummond (1864–1913) who moved to Osage County (then the Osage Nation in Indian Territory) in 1886. Frederick had emigrated to the United States from Scotland in 1882. He briefly lived in New York, Texas, and St. Louis before being hired as clerk for the Osage Mercantile Company in the Osage Nation. Frederick would marry his wife, Addie Gentner of Coffeyville, Kansas, on July 6, 1890. Fred and Addie had six children including three sons, Roy Cecil Drummond, Frederick Gentner Drummond, and Alfred Alexander "Jack" Drummond. 20th century: Osage controversies and increasing wealth In 1903, the Drummonds moved to Hominy, Oklahoma, where Frederick founded the Hominy Trading Company. The Victorian-style Fred and Adeline Drummond House was built in 1905 in Hominy, Oklahoma, by Frederick and Addie. In 1908, Frederick Drummond became the first mayor of Hominy. Frederick and his son Frederick Gentner both spoke the Osage language. During the Reign of Terror in Osage County the Drummonds were creditors against and administrators for Osage estates. They also owned a funeral home that performed funerals for the deceased that would be paid for by the estate. Some families sold their allotments to the Drummonds to cover the costs of their debt to the Hominy Trading Company. Frederick Drummond died in 1913. Jack Drummond claimed at the time of his father's death, Frederick Drummond owned about 1,200 acres. After their father's death in 1913, Jack and Cecil Drummond founded Drummond Cattle Co., which over the next 50 years grew into a 200,000-head operation. Frederick Gentner Drummond took over running the Hominy Trading Company since he spoke Osage. Jack worked at the store starting in about 1920 and overcharged Osage customers, saying "those shirts would cost us maybe $6 or $8 a shirt and I'd get $50 or $60 a shirt." Strained relationships with family members and neighbor resentment towards Jack Drummond as an Osage County "land hog" led him in 1924 to start buying land in the opposite part of the state in Marshall County, Oklahoma. In 1925, during the Reign of Terror in Osage County, Jack Drummond acquired one-half of an Osage headright for $20,050. He later acquired a further another one-fourth of a headright in 1928 for $11,250. He purchased the headright from O.V. Pope, a white rancher who had inherited one and a half headrights after his Osage wife Nah-me-tsa-he (who was thirty years his senior) died. In 1926, the Drummonds partnered with the Mullendores ranching family to buy William Hale's ranch. In the 1930s Jack Drummond helped form a statewide cooperative marketing association so ranchers in the state