Braman grew at the midway point on the Santa Fe Railroad extension from Hunnewell, Kansas, to Tonkawa after railroad promoter J.W. Whistler and B.J. Templeton bought the one hundred sixty-acre Sam Garrison farm, platted eighty acres as a townsite, and accepted railroad surveyor Dwight Braman’s offer to survey it free if the town bore his name. Incorporated on January 9, 1889, more than five years after the land run that opened the Cherokee Outlet to homesteaders, the town received three thousand dollars from local citizens to build a depot and quickly developed a business district with stores, a bank, a hotel, saloons, doctors, and barbers. The post office opened on April 11, 1898, and the first newspaper appeared on December 30, 1899. By 1904 the Masonic Lodge had been founded, four churches had been established, and local organizations were active, while summer band concerts, Fourth of July parades, and land run anniversary celebrations marked community life. Early schools included one with three teachers and one hundred twenty-one students, followed by a new fifteen thousand dollar building dedicated in 1915 with classrooms, an auditorium, and a gymnasium, and a new high school in 1926. After oil was discovered in nearby fields, Braman modernized between 1924 and 1927 with electric lights, a water system, a storage tank, sanitary sewers, and a paved highway to Blackwell. The boom surged after the Herbert Oil Company Community test well No. 1 on the J.H. Belmer tract at the northeast corner of town blew in on May 21, 1925, initially producing forty barrels an hour from the Tonkawa sand. By June 19, more than one million dollars had been spent on drilling within the town limits, by early June half the town was under lease, and during the year thirty-eight derricks stood on Braman’s twenty-five blocks. The population rose from fewer than four hundred to five thousand in forty days, businesses operated around the clock, hotels, rooming houses, and homes were filled, and people camped in parks and along roadsides. Derricks covered nearly every available location in and around town by July, but the boom had ended by November 1928. The first mayor was Bert Payne, John Smith was probably second, Ed "Hog" Miller followed in 1924, Horace Kline served in 1927, then Hyle Horne, and Ed Johnston was elected in 1932 and served for forty years. More oil was found in 1937, but the boom did not return. From 1898 to 1930 Braman’s business life included merchants, bankers, mill and elevator operators, lumber yards, drug stores, hotels, restaurants, auto agencies, service stations, physicians, saloons, bakeries, blacksmiths, harness and shoe shops, livery barns, barbers, newspapermen, postmasters, rural carriers, depot agents, and many other local trades and services.