 Broken Arrow is a city located in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of Oklahoma, primarily in Tulsa County with an extension into western Wagoner County. It is the largest suburb of Tulsa. As of the 2006 census estimates, the city had a total population of 88,314 while a census conducted by the city in 2005 put its population at a little over 90,000. It is estimated that at the 2010 census, the population will well exceed 100,000.
The name comes from an old Creek community in Alabama. When they moved to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, they started a new community named after the original settlement in Alabama. The town's Creek name was Rekackv (pronounced thlee-Kawtch-kuh), meaning broken arrow. This new settlement was located several miles south of present-day downtown Broken Arrow.
Decades later, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway company built a railroad which ran through the area. MKT was granted town site privileges along the route. They sold three of the as-yet-unnamed sites in 1902 to the Arkansas Valley Town Site company. William. S. Fears, secretary of the company, was allowed to choose and name one of the locations. He selected a site about 18 miles southeast of Tulsa and about five miles north of the thlee-Kawtch-kuh settlement and named the new town site Broken Arrow, after the former Indian settlement. The MKT railroad, which ran through the middle of the city, still exists today and is now owned by Union Pacific which currently uses it for freight.
For the first decades of Broken Arrow's history, the town was based mainly on agriculture. The coal industry was also important in BA, as there were several strip coal mines near the city during parts of the early 20th century. The city's newspaper, the Broken Arrow Ledger, started within a couple of years after the city's founding. BA's first school was built in 1904. The city did not grow much during the first half of the 1900s. During this time Broken Arrow's main commercial center was along Main Street. Most of the city's churches were also located on or near Main Street as well.
In the 1960s, Broken Arrow began to grow from a small town into a suburban city. The Broken Arrow Expressway (Highway 51) was constructed in the mid-1960s and connected the city with downtown Tulsa, fueling growth in Broken Arrow. The population swelled from a little above 11,000 in 1970 to more than 50,000 in 1990, and then more than 74,000 by the year 2000. During this time, the city was more of a bedroom community. In recent years, city leaders have pushed for more economic development to help keep more Broken Arrowans shopping and dining in BA rather than going to Tulsa.
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