Meador Manor

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of the Will Rogers Memorial Museum and Tomb at Claremore. Yesterday’s card was of his birthplace, so two of the twenty cards in the pack dealt with The Cherokee Kid.

That’s not surprising, given that just a few years earlier, in 1935, Rogers had died in the plane crash with Wiley Post. It is hard, at this distant remove, to grasp how popular Will Rogers was on the national stage and the “good press” that gave Oklahoma, a state that often only makes the national news when something disastrous or embarrassing has occurred.

One obvious change at the memorial, beyond the switch from a single U.S. flagpole to poles for the U.S. and Oklahoma flags, is that the museum has expanded on its east side, which is the right side in the photographs.

Less obvious is that back in 1940, Will Rogers’ remains were still in a holding vault in Glendale, California. The bodies of Rogers and his wife, Betty, were not buried at the tomb in Claremore until 1944. The tomb is inscribed with an abbreviated form of what Rogers had said should be his epitaph:

I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.

Will Rogers

One indicator of Will Rogers’ status to Oklahomans is in the U.S. Capitol. Oklahoma donated two statues, of Sequoyah and Will Rogers. Rogers made it a condition that his statue be placed facing the House Chamber, supposedly so he could “keep an eye on Congress”. It is the only one facing the chamber’s entrance, and staff sometimes direct media to be at the “Will Rogers stakeout” to catch House members during and after votes. The left shoe of the statue shines, and supposedly each U.S. President rubs it for good luck before entering the House Chamber to give a State of the Union address.

After Rogers’ death, Oklahoma commissioned Jo Davidson to sculpt it. Betty had recommended him, as Will and Jo had known each other for some time. Davidson had frequently attempted to convince Rogers to pose for him, and Rogers had put him off, referring to Davidson as “you old head-hunter”. Davidson screened a number of Rogers’ films and sculpted him in the nude in clay, and then asked Betty to send him some of Will’s old clothes, which he modeled on the nude clay. Two casts were made, one for the U.S. Capitol and the other for the Memorial in Oklahoma.

The Memorial Museum and Tomb are located on a site Rogers had purchased in 1911 for his retirement home. When it opened in 1938, FDR gave a radio speech.

President Roosevelt’s Dedication by Radio on November 4, 1938:

This afternoon we pay grateful homage to the memory of a man who helped the nation to smile. And after all, I doubt if there is among us a more useful citizen than the one who holds the secret of banishing gloom, of making tears give way to laughter, of supplanting desolation and despair with hope and courage. For hope and courage always go with a light heart.

There was something infectious about his humor. His appeal went straight to the heart of the nation. Above all things, in a time grown too solemn and somber he brought his countrymen back to a sense of proportion.

With it all his humor and his comments were always kind. His was no biting sarcasm that hurt the highest or the lowest of his fellow citizens. When he wanted people to laugh out loud he used the methods of pure fun. And when he wanted to make a point for the good of all mankind, he used the kind of gentle irony that left no scars behind it. That was an accomplishment well worthy of consideration by all of us.

From him we can learn anew the homely lesson that the way to make progress is to build on what we have, to believe that today is better than yesterday and that tomorrow will be better than either.

Will Rogers deserves the gratitude of the nation and so it is fitting that the dedication of this Memorial should be a national event, made so by the magic of radio. The American nation, to whose heart he brought gladness, will hold him in everlasting remembrance.

The Memorial was initially almost bare except for the Jo Davidson statue of the man. The crowds that came to pay their respects were large, motivating Betty to give a major portion of his memorabilia to the Memorial Museum. It now houses his entire collection of writings and is the largest collection of Will Rogers memorabilia. The expansion to the east was made in 1982, and it includes a theater where you can watch some of his movies. I have always enjoyed visiting the museum, and there is a virtual tour.

A Bartlesville Connection

Will Rogers was friends with Frank Phillips and several of his brothers, and he would visit the Frank Phillips Home in Bartlesville as well as the Frank Phillips Ranch which became Woolaroc.

Will and Betty would also get together with Frank and Jane Phillips in New York, and once spent a week in upstate New York with them and Henry Firestone and his wife.

If you make it out to Claremore, be sure to also tour the J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum. I’m not into guns, but it still impressed me. Have lunch or dinner at the Hammett House.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us to a frontier outpost established in 1824 to keep the peace between the Osage and the Cherokee.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of Will Rogers’ birthplace near Claremore. The home still stands, but it is now about a mile away from where it was located when the postcard was printed.

The Dog Iron Ranch in Oologah had to be moved in 1960 to prevent it from being flooded by the creation of Lake Oologah. The current property of about 400 acres is a fraction of the original 60,000-acre ranch operated by Will’s father, and it originally had up to 10,000 Texas Longhorn cattle. The two-story house was completed by Clem Rogers in 1875, four years before Will was born.

Will left the ranch around 1905 and pursued an entertainment career in Hollywood. He became one of the highest-paid actors in the 1930s, appearing in over 70 films, and had a syndicated newspaper column and made many radio appearances. He died in 1935 when he and aviator Wiley Post crashed in Alaska on what was meant to be a leisurely trip around the world.

The Dog Iron Ranch was opened to public in the 1960s after the move, and the Oklahoma Historical Society sold it to the Cherokee Nation in 2023. It has since closed the ranch for over a year for renovations. Both Will’s mother and father were Cherokees.

Below is a documentary short exploring the difference between the “Rogers Ranch” and the “Dog Iron Ranch”.

A Bartlesville Connection

In December 1859, James Leontine Butler, an intermarried Cherokee, established an early trading post and post office at Black Dog Ford just south of modern-day Oak Park Village in Bartlesville. Butler Creek is named for his family. During the Civil War, he recruited a unit of Cherokee Mounted Rifles that included Clement Rogers. After the war, Clem resettled his family near Ft. Gibson, saving for four years before returning to the Cherokee Nation to start building their new home in 1870. Meanwhile, Butler had departed for Texas, where he had died in 1866 at age 33.

The ranch house is just a couple of miles north of the Skull Hollow Nature Trail that I’ve hiked multiple times.

Back in 1995, fellow science teacher Lynne Shaw and I toured the Northeast Power Plant at Lake Oologah. I created a slideshow of our tour which I eventually turned into a video.

Since that tour, one of the two coal-fired generators has been retired, and the other is slated to close by the end of 2026. Public Service Company of Oklahoma might convert or replace some existing boiler units to add more natural-gas fired generators at the facility.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take a just a ways down the road to Claremore.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is a depressing one, since it shows the Eagle-Picher Central Mill, of the lead and zinc mining district near Miami. If you aren’t already aware, Picher is now a ghost town that was turned by its own industry into an environmental disaster.

Decades 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 cave-in risks, groundwater contamination, and health effects associated with the chat piles and subsurface shafts resulted in the site being included in 1983 in the Tar Creek Superfund site by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The “Picher postcard” is something else, with its composition of the flower bed in the foreground while in the background looms one of the immense chat piles by the railroad and the mill.

The lead and zinc ore mined in Picher was concentrated in on-site mills and then sent out for final smelting and refining at the Eagle-Picher smelter in Galena, Kansas a dozen miles to the northeast as well as plants farther east and northeast in Joplin and Webb City, Missouri.

At its peak in the 1920s, Picher had over 200 mills. The one in the postcard was located a few miles southwest of the town of Picher, between the towns of Cardin and Commerce. Another postcard, not part of the souvenir pack, gives some perspective.

Below is an aerial view of the town of Picher in 2009.

A 1994 study found that 1/3 of Picher’s children had lead poisoning, and the EPA and state agreed to a mandatory evacuation and buyout of the entire township. A 2006 study showed 86% of Picher’s buildings were undermined and subject to collapse. In May 2008, 150 of its homes were destroyed by a tornado, and in 2009 Picher was dis-incorporated. A satellite view shows the scale of the mining mess.

A Bartlesville Connection

Bartlesville had its own past pollution from three zinc smelters which located there in the early 20th century because of the cheap natural gas from the Bartlesville and Osage oil fields. The smelters polluted the soil across southwest Bartlesville. In the period of 1988-1991, approximately 13% of Bartlesville children living on or near the old smelter sites had blood lead levels greater than or equal to 10 µg/dL, the concentration set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as the indicator for potentially elevated blood lead levels. None of the children in a control group from areas of Bartlesville not in the vicinity of the former smelters had levels exceeding that threshold.

That led to a cleanup from 1994 to 2001 across eight square miles. However, most of the ore brought into Bartlesville came from Canada and South America, and it reportedly did not process domestic ore. So it was not undermined by tunnels nor did it have huge toxic piles of chat.

Eagle-Picher was a merger of the Picher Lead Company and Eagle White Lead, with the former established by O.S. Picher. His namesake area was the most productive mining field in the tri-state area, producing more than $20 billion in ore from 1917 to 1947. More than 50% of the lead and zinc metal consumed in World War I came from the Picher Field, with it peaking in the 1920s with about 14,000 miners and another 4,000 people working in about 1,500 mining service businesses. An extensive trolley car system once brought in workers all the way from Carthage, Missouri over 30 miles northeast of Picher. However, perhaps 20 square miles around Picher became a toxic wasteland.

Other nearby communities like Cardin, OK and Treece, KS are also now abandoned. There are various videos of what remains of Picher; below is one.

Old towns sometimes die hard, and there is still a Christmas parade each year through Picher; at least 1,500 reportedly attended the one on December 5, 2025. If you ever have the strange urge to visit Picher, don’t be surprised if a highway patrol car or a car from the Quapaw nation force keeps tabs on you. Mind your Ps and Qs.

Tomorrow’s postcard will be on a happier note, showing a famous Oklahoman’s birthplace near Claremore.