Last week was the Historical Society's annual meeting. The membership and some scholars gather together to learn about new things, reward good scholarship, and have an enjoyable time. This year's meeting was held in Miami, OK. For those of you not from 'round here, the city's name is pronounced Mi-am-uh, not like the city in Florida. It is named for an Indian tribe whose headquarters is in the area.
As a member of the publications staff, it is my job to go to the annual meeting and solicit papers for our scholarly publication. It's fun to sit in and learn new things about topics in Oklahoma history, and more fun to then ask the presenters if they have been published elsewhere and, if not, if they would be interested in submitting their manuscript. I really love my job.
In between the paper sessions and evening activities on Thursday, I decided to go for a drive in the area. the next town over, Commerce, is the birthplace of Mickey Mantle. They are proud of their claim to fame, even featuring baseball bats on their city seal. Just beyond Commerce, however, is a town with a more dubious distinction--Picher, Oklahoma. In 2009 Picher became a ghost town, a victim of the environmental effects of the mining that had once made it a boom town.
"Picher is a ghost town and former city in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, United States. Formerly a major national center of lead and zinc mining at the heart of the Tri-State Mining District, over a century of unrestricted subsurface excavation dangerously undermined most of Picher's town buildings and left giant piles of toxic metal-contaminated mine tailings (known as chat) heaped throughout the area. The discovery of the cave-in risks, groundwater contamination and health effects associated with the chat piles and subsurface shafts—particularly an alarming 1996 study which showed lead poisoning in 34% of the children in Picher[4]—eventually prompted a mandatory evacuation and buyout (via eminent domain) of the entire township by the Environmental Protection Agency and the incorporation of the town (along with the similarly contaminated satellite towns of Treece and Cardin) into the Tar Creek Superfund site. . . . Starting in January 2011, almost all remaining commercial structures will be demolished, with the single exception of the Old Miner's Pharmacy, whose owner, Gary Linderman, refuses to abandon it." --Wikipedia
I wanted to see what it looked like. I wanted to see the aftermath of a forced evacuation. I wanted to see the chat piles that my Daddy talks about sliding down on car hoods with his friends while he was in college down the road in Miami. I wanted to experience a ghost town. The photos above are from my brief trip through the small town, and from my inadvertent trip to Kansas (Picher is RIGHT on the border).
There's the Picher Mining Museum, once a tribute to the bounty the earth provided, now a reminder of the dangers of its byproducts. The US government signs warning people that there is to be no trespassing on this land. The water tower that still looks freshly painted, wiht the few remaining houses behind it. The huge piles of chat that surround the town like a forbidding mountain range. All of these images strung together tell the story of people not ready to leave their homes, but realizing that the detrimental effects of the mines, and governmental pressure, were too much to contend with, except for the stubbornness of a few individuals. It was surreal to consider.
I made my way back to Miami, feeling like I had done more that tick an Oklahoma destination off my list. I had seen both glory and despair, and would take that experience with me.
Here's an NPR article on Picher, written just prior to its abandonment: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7357401
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