Lawton Oklahoma came into existence when the United States Land Office began auctioning lots divided from a 320-acre townsite located near Fort Sill. The auction "drew an overnight population of ten thousand of men", with their families, who had failed to secure homesteads in the lottery of August 1 and came to the townsite in the hope of bidding successfully at the sale of lots. By this date it already had a newspaper.
Ft. Sill is a location I spent a memorable, if brief, part of my 18th and 19th year in.
Ft. Sill was founded in 1869, so there must have been some nearby community before that to service the post and its soldiers. To my surprise, it comprises of only 94,000 acres. It seemed so much bigger to me then.
FWIW, as I found out several years ago (probably a decade or more) I can recognize it from the air.
Lawton, as a city, didn't impress me all that much, but I never saw that much of it. A good friend of mine retired near there, something fairly common for people with a career association with the military.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Royal Navy and the research ship RRS Discovery, set sail from the port of Cowes, Isle of Wight, to start the British National Antarctic Expedition.
Prince Albert of Monaco's yacht Princess Alice II, loaned for scientific exploration, set a record for the greatest depth at which bottom trawling had taken place, collecting plankton and other undersea life at a depth of 6,035 meters (19,800 ft), southwest of the Cape Verde Islands. The record would hold until 1947.
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