FACTS FIRST

Norman started as a Santa Fe Railway stop. The railroad named it in 1887 for Abner Norman, a young surveyor whose crew had burned “Norman's Camp” into an elm tree more than a decade earlier. At noon on April 22, 1889, the Land Run opened the Unassigned Lands, and settlers filled the townsite in an afternoon. Norman won the county seat and the territory's new university. The University of Oklahoma held its first classes in a rented building on Main Street on Sept. 15, 1892.

After Pearl Harbor, the Navy built Naval Air Station Norman at OU's Max Westheimer Field (North Base) in the spring of 1942 and commissioned it on July 28, 1942. On the south side of town it also opened a naval air technical training center and a naval hospital. Every three months, about 800 cadets learned to fly at North Base. The station closed March 4, 1946. Later landmarks include Lake Thunderbird (1965) and the National Weather Center (2006). Norman is now Oklahoma's third-largest city. This map pins official historical markers and other notable sites; every pin says what its sources do and don't support.