Built in 1877 facing the only road here, the Oak Grove School stood beside a key junction in the Osage Trail network. Before 1865, the Neosho River valley, including this site, was part of the Osage Reservation, and a large Osage village stood just east near a well-used river crossing later called Trotter's Ford. The principal routes of the Osage Trail ran from southwest Missouri into southeast Kansas as the Osage Continental Trail and from northeast Kansas south into northeast Oklahoma as the Osage Trace, and U.S. Government survey maps from 1865 show that these trails intersected here in Section 36. The Continental Trail crossed the Neosho at Trotter's Ford, continued west over a bluff about one mile east of here, turned south through Section 25 near the original Oak Grove log schoolhouse and cemetery, then passed through Section 36 in front of the later stone schoolhouse site before meeting the Osage Trace about one-half mile farther south. Throughout the 1800's, the trail was used by the Osage, by the U.S. military during the Civil War, by stagecoaches carrying mail to postwar settlements before the railroads arrived, and by thousands of settlers moving into southeast Kansas after the war. Travelers along this section included Washington Irving in 1832 on his way to Fort Gibson in Indian Territory, the Charles Ingalls family during their journeys to and from Kansas in 1869-1871, and the posse that searched for the Bender family in the spring of 1873. Laura Ingalls Wilder's account of her family crossing a flooded river in Little House on the Prairie and in her autobiography strongly points to Trotter's Ford as the place where that crossing occurred.