Little Town Below often sat near Horseshoe Lake, in the Neosho River Valley about a mile due east of Oswego.

[10] One family of mixed Osage blood that lived at Little Town before the Civil War was the John Allen Mathews family, who operated a blacksmith/gunsmith shop on the site and ran a trading post here, as well as one at Osage Mission and one at Fort Gibson.

[11] Mathews first purchased the trading post at Little Town from Augustus Chouteau in either 1838 or 1843, depending upon the source.

[14] Before the Civil War, Mathews was involved in driving off settlers from the adjacent Cherokee Neutral Lands and in stirring Southern sympathies among Native Americans living on the frontier.

Early in the spring of 1861, Mathews was commissioned a captain in the Confederate Army and given orders to organize a company of soldiers from among sympathetic Native Americans, specifically, the Quapaw.

This second company raided and looted Humboldt, Kansas, capturing no less than a dozen freed slaves.

[17] James Lane put a $1000.00 bounty on the head of Mathews,[18] who was soon betrayed by a man who worked at his ranch.

The man helped James G. Blunt and the Kansas 6th Volunteer Cavalry (and the Humboldt Home Guard) track down Mathews.

He was killed at the house of William Blythe, rented by Lewis Rogers, just southeast of Chetopa on the Cherokee Neutral Lands.

The ranch had consisted of a two story double log cabin (covered with burr siding and sporting plastered walls), a blacksmith shop, a stable, slaves quarters, a well house, a smoke house, a woodshed, and other outbuildings, as well as two race tracks.

His possessions and the stock of the trading post (including 50 buffalo robes and six bear skins) were distributed among the volunteers who had tracked him down.

M. George had opened a blacksmith shop and D.W. Clover a hotel, which was not only an inn for the public, but the county headquarters, a political rendezvous and a news center.

In 1868, Mr. Shanks operated the first pottery and made several kilns of stoneware; a cotton gin was set up the same year.

The first bank was opened in 1868 by W. M. Johnson, who was forced two years later to make an assignment of all that he had to satisfy his creditors.

[22] The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters.

[37] Parsons, Kansas-based Labette Community College holds classes on the Oswego High School site.

These school libraries provided extended services such as inter-library loan through Southeast Kansas Library System and access to Internet2 and online databases through Kan-ed, a service sponsored by the State of Kansas.

OCH had a contractual agreement with Eagle-Med to provide Air Ambulance services to any local or regional hospital.

On February 13, 2019, Oswego Community Hospital abruptly closed its doors, "citing [a] failure to expand Medicaid" and "low patient volumes."

However, later in 2019, then-Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt announced his office had executed a search warrant as part of a broader investigation of the hospital's operator, EmpowerHMS.

Labette Health and Via Christi Hospital of Pittsburg, Kansas provide the closest Level III Trauma Centers, the only two emergency rooms to achieve Level III rating in the State of Kansas.

[40][41] Two Level II Trauma Centers, Mercy Hospital Joplin and Freeman Health System, are located approximately thirty-five miles away in the regional hub of Joplin, Missouri, while the closest Level I Trauma Centers are in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Located on 80 acres (320,000 m2) near the north boundary of the city, Riverside Park overlooks the 100-foot (30 m) bluff that defines Oswego.

Many of the stone structures were built in the 1930s as part of a series of State of Kansas public works employment projects.

In the late 2000s, the National Park Service provided a grant to the City of Oswego to replace the concrete deck surrounding the pool, as well as the protective chain link fence.

[43] Encompassing the southern portion of Riverside Park, the Labette County Fairgrounds are host to many barns, exhibit halls, and Memorial Stadium.

The Stadium was once used by the Oswego High School football program, and now used for the Fair's demolition derby.

Oswego is located in the Joplin-Pittsburg broadcast market area and receives the majority of its television and radio signals from those two cities.

KGGF 690 AM Coffeyville covers SE Kansas and Broadcasts from its tower site in Mound Valley.