Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma 080615165X, 9780806151656

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Picher, Oklahoma Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma

Photography by Todd Stewart Essay by Alison Fields

Picher, Oklahoma

THE CHARLES M. RUSSELL CENTER SERIES ON ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE AMERICAN WEST B. Byron Price, General Editor

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Picher, Oklahoma Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma Photography by Todd Stewart Essay by Alison Fields

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS : NORMAN

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Financial support for this publication was provided by the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Oklahoma.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stewart, Todd, 1963– Picher, Oklahoma : catastrophe, memory, and trauma / Todd Stewart ; essay by Alison Fields. pages cm. — (The Charles M. Russell Center series on art and photography of the American West ; volume 20) ISBN 978-0-8061-5165-6 (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. Picher (Okla.)—Pictorial works. 2. Tornado damage—Oklahoma—Picher—Pictorial works. 3. Abandoned buildings—Oklahoma—Picher—Pictorial works. 4. Picher (Okla.)—Buildings, structures, etc.—Pictorial works. 5. Ghost towns—Oklahoma— Pictorial works. 6. Hazardous waste sites—Oklahoma—Pictorial works. 7. Landscape photography—Oklahoma—Picher. 8. Memory—Social aspects—Oklahoma—Picher. 9. Picher (Okla.)—Social conditions. 10. Picher (Okla.)—Environmental conditions. I. Fields, Alison, 1979– II. Title. F704.P58S74 2016 976.6'99—dc23 2015024268 Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma is Volume 20 in The Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. ∞ Copyright © 2016 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Manufactured in China. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act—without the prior written permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. To request permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, University of Oklahoma Press, 2800 Venture Drive, Norman OK 73069, or email rights. [email protected]. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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Contents

Preface vii History and Memory 3 Artifacts 59 Structures 109 Landscape 163 Conclusion 199 Notes 203

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Preface On May 10, 2008, the town of Picher, Oklahoma, was hit by an F4 (devastating) tornado. Destroying more than one hundred homes and killing six people, this was the last in a series of natural, environmental, and economic catastrophes to strike the town. A center of lead and zinc mining, Picher had been a boomtown in the early twentieth century. By the time operations completely ceased in the late 1960s, over ten million tons of ore had been removed from the area. Picher owed its birth to the mining industry, but when mining companies departed, they left behind an environmental disaster. Eventually, in 2006, the federal government determined that the site was uninhabitable and began trying to buy out homeowners and local businesses in an attempt to close the town. Many individuals refused to leave—their ties to the place were too strong—but the tornado broke their resolve. I moved from Bloomington, Indiana, to Norman, Oklahoma, in 2004. Prior to moving to the state, I had been in Oklahoma only a few times. Oklahoma had never been my primary destination; it was instead a waypoint on a journey to some other more “interesting” place. What few preconceptions I had of my new home had been formed on the highway and mediated by the windshield of an automobile. For me Oklahoma had no identity—it was a nonplace. As someone whose artistic practice has for years centered on contemporary experiences of land, of place, and of culture, this posed several challenges. It did not take long, however, to realize that Oklahoma was a complex cultural landscape with much to discover and explore. It was within this context that I first began working on the body of photographs included in this book. In 2008 I completed work on the book Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment. That book centers on the idea that landscapes are embedded with both memory and history—that cultural narrative is what defines place. While working on it, I visited the sites of the ten Japanese American internment camps from World War II. Having been abandoned more than fifty years before, in most cases these landscapes

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viii Preface

exhibited very little physical evidence of their history. One afternoon as I was making photographs at a site in Arkansas, the owner of the land approached me and we began talking. He told me how he and his brother had bought the property from the U.S. government after the war and begun farming. Although the camp itself had been removed before they purchased the land, each year as they plowed the fields they had continued to uncover remains from the camp. For me this was a metaphor of how the past of these places had been buried and forgotten. Placing Memory was a project about unearthing the cultural histories and memories embedded in the sites. I was familiar with the long-standing environmental problems Picher had been facing and with some of the state and federal efforts to address the situation, but I had never been to the town or seriously considered photographing there. I had, however, seen many images and extensive photographic projects based on environmental disasters such as this. The work of Robert Adams, David T. Hanson, Edward Burtynsky, and Richard Misrach comes to mind as some of the best. But I was also familiar with several projects that treated these instances as spectacle, lacking any critical perspective or for that matter empathy. It was important to me that I not do the same. I first visited Picher in 2008, shortly after the tornado. Here I found a landscape quite different from those I had encountered at the internment camps. The tornado had leveled houses in a significant part of the town, leaving only building foundations and pavement still in place. The ground was layered with material artifacts—photographs, books, clothes, toys, letters, etc. All lay bare on the ground, all dislocated, all removed from their original context. The town was mostly abandoned. Buildings sat empty and in many cases open. Although most of the town’s residents had left, evidence of their lives was everywhere. I realized that this would not be the case forever. I knew that eventually this place would resemble the internment camps, becoming a landscape with little physical evidence of what had been before. During the next few years, each time I returned to Picher I found less and less remaining, the landscape increasingly enveloping everything left behind. Picher was in the process of disappearing, of slipping into nonexistence. With Placing Memory I was concerned with unearthing a contentious history. In Picher I was witness to its burial. Todd Stewart

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Storefronts, Connell Avenue, August 2010



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Chat Pile, August 2008

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Lytle Creek, August 2008



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Connell Avenue, January 2009



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Home Marked for Removal, October 2010

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Connell Avenue, October 2010



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Truck Destroyed in Tornado, August 2008

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House Ready for Removal, A Street, June 2008



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Residential Area following Tornado, January 2009

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Residential Area following Tornado, January 2009



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Picher, Oklahoma

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Unidentified Woman (Photographic print found in Picher)

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History and Memory

Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma explores the dissolution of Picher, Oklahoma, whose residents were pushed to neighboring towns after it was declared part of the Tar Creek Superfund Site in 1984 and after an F4 (devastating) tornado caused widespread destruction in 2008. A series of photographs of Picher taken by Todd Stewart from 2008 to 2014 documents the town’s entangled identities—the thriving small town whose residents are proud of its churches, schools, and contributions to the U.S. military; the country’s most toxic Superfund site; the otherworldly ghost town precariously positioned over massive sinkholes. But further, this book details the way that memory—embedded in the artifacts, landscapes, and structures left behind—is dislocated and reframed through both chronic and acute events of environmental trauma. Picher’s journey out of existence raises a question: when material and physical markers of identity are destroyed, what remains to tell the story of the past? Drawing on the memories of former residents, the material artifacts left behind, and the changing physical environment, this book attempts to unravel the deep connections among memory, place, and identity in Picher. The sound of rain on a zinc roof. . . . The aroma of biscuits fresh from the oven. . . . The clean, fresh taste of cold lemonade. . . . The reassuring sound of the old ice cream freezer being cranked. The acrid smell of fizzled firecrackers. The creosote on a wet telephone pole. . . . The sound of pond frogs on a hot, hazy day. . . . Radio music drifting out open windows. . . . Sleds made of anything that would move to go down snowy, frozen chat piles. The smell of ore on damp overalls. Last, but not least, the sound of mine whistles that kept all our lives orderly. Beverly B. Walker De Santo, Tri-State Tribune (Picher, Okla.), June 10, 1999 Over the past several decades, early residents from the tristate region of northeastern Oklahoma, southeastern Kansas, and southwestern Missouri have published recollections of their childhoods spent in the region’s booming mining district. In her “Memories to Last a Lifetime,” Beverly B. Walker De Santo

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lingers on the tastes, smells, and sounds associated with her childhood outside of Treece, Kansas—a neighboring town of Picher. Her memories are both public and private, ranging from holiday celebrations, the changing seasons, and schoolyard play to home cooking.1 Former resident Dean Sims also reminisces about the smells of Picher. He remembers pleasant scents of honeysuckle and lilacs, but he also mentions the choking stench of millpond chemicals, decaying fish, manure from mule barns, and outdoor toilets.2 While De Santo’s and Sims’s lists evoke rural childhood experiences from the 1920s and 1930s, the specific references to ore, chat, millponds, and mine whistles ground these sensory memories in the specific location of the mining field. Leroy “Buck” White, who grew up in Picher during the same time, suggested that the appeal of the aromas associated with the mines had to do with a sense of freedom these surroundings inspired. Further, the sounds—of a conveyor moving tailings up a chat pile, the humming of electric hoists, the whistle of the ore train—evoked a set of shared experiences “that only former Picherites would understand.”3 These sensory memories of the mining district, both sweet and harsh, could be conjured long after the mining field ceased functioning. To discuss the past, present, and future of Picher, it is necessary to acknowledge the residents who lived there over the years and survived beyond the life of the town. While Stewart’s photographs highlight the physical undoing of the town, the former residents of Picher have actively created communities of memory through newspaper commentaries, videos, social media, and informal gatherings. Their reminiscences of Picher add to the record of the town’s past—a history marked by changes in landownership, economic boom and bust, and a shrinking but loyal community. The town of Picher, in far northeastern Oklahoma, is located eight miles north of the small city of Miami on U.S. Highway 69. Located on lands designated to the Quapaw tribe, the town had its beginnings in a zinc and oil strike on Quapaw member Harry Crawfish’s allotment in 1913. Before this discovery, bluestem grass covered the area’s rolling hills and was harvested and widely distributed as a stock food. The discovery of mineral resources, however, transformed the prairieland. In the Tri-State Lead and Zinc District, Picher became the top-producing mining field.4 A network of underground mines extended from Treece, Kansas, to Joplin, Missouri. In its early years as a mining camp, Picher had many of the markers of a western boomtown—dance halls, saloons, gambling dens, brothels, and black market sales of liquor and hard drugs. According to fiery reformer J. J. Shepherd in 1918, Picher was quite a scandalous place to live. In his

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Unidentified Miners, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District, 1902 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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publication the Rounder, later the Square Deal, he sought to expose the town’s corruption, violence, and lawlessness. In one issue, Shepherd charged that “it is daily habit for armies of Picher prostitutes to go swimming in Picher creeks at the suburbs of Picher, that their bathing suits are the ones furnished by nature, that an army of men stand on the bank viewing the show, while the girls’ business managers are shooting craps nearby.”5 While it is impossible to verify Shepherd’s many allegations, Picher’s early execution of law and order has been compared to the camps that sprung up during the prior century’s gold rush. In addition to a lack of governance, early miners also faced limited public resources. A law and order league was formed in 1917, laying the foundation for incorporation. In 1918, the town incorporated and was named after O. S. Picher, owner of the Picher Lead Company. Early civic organizations included the Commercial Club, a chamber of commerce, the Advertising Club of Picher, and the Kiwanis Club, and town utilities such as a water well, sewer system, and later, electrical service were put into place. Since Indian lands were not taxable, civic organizations raised money for the formation of schools and churches and the improvement of roads. 6 Railway companies added services in the area, further sparking both population growth and mining functions. The town’s population surged with the mining field’s production, reaching over fourteen thousand in the 1920s (with some estimates reaching over twenty thousand). More than half of the lead and zinc used in World War I originated from the Picher Field. Over four hundred men from Picher fought in World War I,

Unidentified Mill, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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many enlisting in the Army Corps of Engineers, where they could make use of their vocational training and knowledge of explosives.7 The Great Depression hit the mining field particularly hard, with lead and zinc dropping significantly in price. Mining companies could not pay the utility bills to run electric hoists and instead resorted to hand jigs to lift mined rock to the surface. Some miners, known as “gougers,” gouged out the pillars that supported the mine’s roof to obtain extra zinc and lead.8 In 1935, some miners fought for unionization, heightening labor disputes. After a difficult decade, World War II again generated great demand for the mines’ products. From 1917–47, the mining field produced over $20 billion in ore. Lead ore was used to produce bullets, zinc prevented steel equipment and tanks from rusting, and eventually locals would describe Picher’s mines as “the mines that won World War II.”9 Zinc was also used on the home front, in products like washtubs, batteries, and dietary supplements. The lead and zinc ore was located 230 to 280 feet below ground, under a layer of shale and embedded in chambers of limestone. The mining process involved taking crude ore, laced with metals, crushing it and sorting it in local mills, and then heating it to remove impurities. As an occupation, mining was fraught with danger and hardship. In addition to low pay, miners fell victim to work-related illnesses such as silicosis and tuberculosis, and they suffered accidents, sometimes fatal ones. Mining records from the Eagle-Picher Mining and Smelting Company in the 1940s provide detailed descriptions of the location of these injuries, noting the time lost and compensation granted. A sample record from June 1944 reports ninety-

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three accidents caused by falling boulders, slips, and mechanical mishaps, resulting in hernias, contusions and lacerations, and bone fractures, with miners losing fifty-one days of work and getting compensated a total of $90.10 The increasing mechanization of the mining process and the introduction of new heavy equipment in the 1950s did reduce some of the miners’ burdens. Despite the challenges, former miners enjoy looking back on lighter moments. Ben Moody, an employee of the Eagle-Picher Company, wrote a series of commentaries under the title “Yester-year in the Picher Mining Field” for Picher’s Tri-State Tribune in the 1980s. He reminisces about Halloween pranks in the mining field, such as pushing over two-hole toilets that were all over the field. Moody remembers some miners trying to avert the prank, one by hiding in a toilet with a shotgun filled with rock salt, and notes, “Several times I have received rock salt in that part of my body which I sit on. However, if we could catch someone between his legs and then push over the toilet with the person inside—it made for the greatest Halloween.”11 Moody also recalls sweeter memories, like the time an unexpected Christmas bonus allowed him to purchase a coveted winter coat for his wife from a fancy department store in Joplin. By all accounts, the community that developed in Picher was close-knit—a place where everyone knew each other and willingly helped out those in need. As evidenced by historic photographs from the mining district, community spirit was strengthened through churches, neighborhood businesses, and the school system. Perhaps because of Picher’s extreme record of both early hardships and successes, residents frequently exhibited a fierce loyalty to the town. After the mines largely closed in 1967, former miners found work in neighboring towns, many for the BF Goodrich plant in Miami.12 Multiple challenges prevented new industry from entering Picher. Quapaw tribal members owned or repurchased portions of the real estate, which now sat on a series of empty mines. The mining efforts had transformed the surrounding landscape. Ore production in Picher’s lead-zinc mines led to massive piles of chat, fine gravel waste made up of leftover mineral fragments. The chat piles, some two hundred feet high, still dominate Picher’s landscape.13 The mine waste covered 25,000 acres and had a devastating impact on Quapaw lands and the town’s economy. The abandoned mines filled with groundwater, and acid began to seep into nearby Tar Creek. Contaminated, rust-colored water threatened underground aquifers, wells, and lakes. Children swam in ponds near the mines, unaware that what they thought were sunburns were actually burns from caustic chemicals.14 Subsidence, or sinking ground, over

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abandoned mineshafts swallowed homes. Little League fields were built over huge, empty underground caverns at risk for caving in, and strong winds carved ridges in the chat piles, sending heavy metal dust airborne. In 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, better known as Superfund. Three years later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated the Tar Creek Superfund Site. Five towns—Picher, Cardin, Quapaw, Commerce, and North Miami—were included in the forty-seven-square-mile site, ranked as the most toxic in America. At that time, the Picher area included fourteen hundred mine shafts, seventy million tons of waste tailings, and thirty-six million tons of mill sand and sludge.15 The new law targeted polluting factories, refineries, and mines. If still active, companies were compelled to conduct a site cleanup. If the sites were abandoned, Superfund monies garnered in part from a tax on petrochemical industries would cover the expense.16 The mining companies that had caused the damage around Picher were largely bankrupt or had disbanded, offering little opportunity for recourse. Picher residents filed a class action lawsuit against the Blue Tee Corporation, the Gold Fields Mining Corporation, and three other companies for health damages and relocation fees. Representatives of these companies argued that chat is not the source of lead contamination in Picher.17 While debate occurred over the precise cause of contamination and its impact, studies indicated that the toxic environment was taking a toll on human bodies. In 1994, a study showed that 35 percent of Quapaw Indian children tested had hazardous levels of lead in their blood. Three years later, a study involving the five towns within the Superfund site and nearby Miami found lead in house paint, soil, and dust. In Picher and Cardin, 25 percent of children had elevated blood lead levels. Former Picher-Cardin Elementary School principal Kimberly Pace has spoken widely to the press about the educational challenges faced with Picher’s schoolchildren, noting that she did not initially connect performance issues with environmental contamination.18 While not conclusively proven in Picher, lead exposure has been linked to behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, and lowered IQ. Long-term heavy metal exposure can lead to kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and strokes. Further, the unique mixture of lead, manganese, cadmium, and other metals found in Picher posed unknown additional health dangers.19 However, a number of residents resented the reports focused on environmental health risks, claiming that they were unfairly used to justify pushing them out of their homes.

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In 1996, the EPA embarked on a massive remediation of the site, including “a mixture of buyouts, chat sales, on-site disposals, rural residential yard contamination cleanup, soil cleansing, and rural residential well sanitization.”20 A government buyout was put in place for families with young children. Workers capped mine shafts and tapped into a deeper aquifer for city water. The EPA replaced the topsoil on two thousand plots of land, at a cost of over $120 million. Between 1997 and 2000, blood lead levels began to drop and it appeared that EPA cleanup efforts were having a positive impact. With federal money funding a new city hall, water tower, and freshly paved roads, it seemed that Picher was on the path to recovery. Despite these efforts, there were signs that the extent of the pollution was beyond repair. Wind redistributed contaminated dust into the town’s water and topsoil and abandoned mineshafts continued to pose cave-in risks. Children still had levels of lead in their blood that were higher than the national average. In 2000, then-governor Frank Keating appointed a task force to assess the town’s future sustainability, leading to the conclusion that the town was unlivable and its approximately sixteen hundred residents should be evacuated. The documentary The Creek Runs Red, coproduced by KERA–Dallas/ Fort Worth, captures the resulting divides in the community over how to proceed.21 On a political level, a schism developed between local, state, and federal officials supporting a relocation plan and those opposed. James Inhofe, the former chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, was initially opposed to a relocation plan. Noting that the decision to move was an individual choice, he allocated $45 million to the University of Oklahoma to conduct cleanups in the surrounding areas. Other politicians, such as U.S. Representative Brad Carson and Governor Brad Henry, proposed federal legislation for a voluntary buyout.22 In 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers confirmed the evaluation that the town was unsafe, noting that one-third of the town’s homes were threatened by the underground caverns.23 By this point, dozens of cave-ins had occurred, and much of the town was at risk of more. With the population already decreased from previous buyouts, particularly a state-funded one targeting families with children under six years old, this report shook the confidence of many remaining residents. An Inhofe-supported federal buyout was offered to any resident who wanted to leave, and many did. Town businesses dwindled. Orval “Hoppy” Ray, owner of the Pastime Pool Hall and Mine Museum, and Gary Linderman, owner of the Ole Miners Pharmacy, were among the last to keep their doors open.

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Former Mill Site, January 2009



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On May 10, 2008, the tornado hit Picher, causing extensive damage and taking six lives. A seventh victim died of carbon monoxide poisoning soon afterward. Over 150 people were injured in the storm and more than one hundred homes destroyed. The southern portion of the town was almost entirely flattened, and afterward there were no attempts to rebuild. In May 2009, the Picher-Cardin schools closed their doors after holding final graduation ceremonies.24 The same year, city services shut down and the police force dissolved. Only a handful of individuals and families remained, living off the grid and determined not to leave their land. By 2011, demolition crews had brought down many of the town’s structures. A few buildings with historic significance—the mining museum, an auction house, and a church— were spared.25 In many neighborhoods only house foundations now remain. With the federal buyout measures complete, the Quapaw tribe purchased much of land back from the government and regained control of its future. The Quapaws, who were removed from their Arkansas homeland and relocated to northeastern Oklahoma in 1818, were left with a massive waste site on their allocated tribal lands. The reservation—a six-by-sixteen-mile tract of prairieland—has a complex history of land management. After the General Allotment Act of 1887, tribal leaders divided the reservation into two-hundredacre allotments and assigned them to tribal members. The allotted lands were not necessarily contiguous, and this created a confusing map of landownership. The Quapaws lobbied to retain leasing rights for agricultural and business purposes, an act that had notable implications once zinc and lead ore was

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History and Memory

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Weber Mine, World’s Largest Ore Pile, Picher, Oklahoma (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

discovered on their land. Unlike tribes who pooled profits, in the Quapaws’ case mineral rights were reserved for individual landowners. The discontinuous location of ore, then, meant that select tribal members attained great wealth, while many others lived in poverty on increasingly polluted lands.26 Today the tribe is working with local agencies and state and federal governments to determine the next steps for remediation. They have provided basic services for the remaining residents, while staking a claim to be part of chat sales and strategizing to ultimately flood the area to create a wetland. The tribe has also supported recent legal efforts by individual Quapaw landowners to gain government restitution. Quapaw chairman John Berrey claimed that the federal government’s close relationship with the area’s mining companies prevented effective cleanup efforts and contributed to the pollution of Quapaw lands and mismanagement of tribal assets. Berrey said, “At Quapaw, we think, it is one of the most heinous, illegal managements that took place in Indian country. It’s a horrible story; it’s a sad story.”27 From Picher’s incorporation in 1918 to its formal dissolution in 2014, its mining industry fueled war efforts and supported generations of miners and their families but ultimately left behind immense underground voids and towering mountains of waste. While a dwindling number of former residents retain rich sensory details of life in Picher, these layered memories are further reflected in Todd Stewart’s photographs of the objects and places left behind. This book focuses on artifacts, structures, and landscapes due to their crucial roles in orienting identities and shaping memories.

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Untitled (Postcard found in Picher)

Picking Oklahoma Cotton (Postcard found in Picher)

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Lead and Zinc Mines in Northeastern Oklahoma (Postcard found in Picher)



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A Busy Day In Picher, Oklahoma, ca. 1920 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

Picher, Oklahoma, date unknown (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Connell Street, October 2010



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Unidentified Miners, St. Louis No. 4 Mine, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District, 1936 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

Unidentified Miners, St. Louis No. 4 Mine, 1936 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Former Mill Site, January 2009



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Unidentified Mine Worker on Bridge over Flooded Mine, Ballard Mine, 1936 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

Lead Face, St. Louis No. 4 Mine, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District, 1936 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Unidentified Mill, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Meeting, Headquarters of the Tri-State Section of the American Zinc Institute, 1924 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Mine Crew, Picher 12 and 14 Mines, Eagle Picher Lead Co., 1929 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Unidentified People in Dress Clothes (Photographic print found in Picher)

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Unidentified Couple in Front

Unidentified Young Woman

of Houseboat (Photographic

with Flowers (Photographic print

print found in Picher)

found in Picher)

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(Above) Unidentified Infant

Unidentified Family, May 1985

(Photographic print found

(Photographic print found

in Picher)

in Picher)

(Below) Unidentified Women (Photographic print found in Picher)

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Unidentified Family (Photographic print found in Picher)



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Bell Telephone Ground Breaking Ceremony, Picher (Photographic print found in Picher)

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High School Band (Photographic print found in Picher)



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1923 Cherokee County Junior High Basketball Champs, Treece, Kansas (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

Eagle-Picher Eagles, Mining Co. Basketball Team (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Mickey Mantle’s Boyhood Home, Commerce, Oklahoma, May 2014 (Mantle’s family moved to Commerce when he was four years old; he later worked for a short time in the Picher mines and began his baseball career playing with local teams from the Tri-State Mining District.)



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Marathon Runners, Brewster Mine, Federal Mining and Smelting Co. (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Football Team at Hayman Field, Picher (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Hayman Field, Picher-Cardin High School, October 2010



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Unidentified Women and Girl, Union Church (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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United Methodist Church, Connell Avenue, August 2010



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Police Department, Picher, 1940 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Picher Fire Department Truck, March 2011



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Eighth-Grade Students, Picher Junior High School, 1923 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Livingston’s Dry Goods Store, Picher, ca. 1918 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Gus Bennet Pool Hall, Main Street, Picher, 1923 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Sedgwick Furniture, Picher, July 1, 1946 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Mine Crew, Paxson Mine, Eagle-Picher Mining and Smelting, 1943 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

Mill, St. Louis No. 4 Mine, June 30, 1936 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Mine Crew, Sea Saw Mine, Commerce Mining and Royalty Co., July 3, 1935 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Unidentified Woman and Mine Crew, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District, ca. 1920 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Unidentified Miners, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Hartley Mill, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District, 1917 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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Ground Foremen Safety Meeting, Tri-State Mining District, Picher, January 24, 1928 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Unidentified Miners, Tri-State Lead and Zinc Mining District, 1937 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)



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American Zinc Institute Silicosis

American Zinc Institute Silicosis

Laboratory (Photograph

Laboratory (Photograph

courtesy of Baxter Springs

courtesy of Baxter Springs

Heritage Center and Museum,

Heritage Center and Museum,

Baxter Springs, Kansas)

Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Chat Pile, January 2009



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Duenweg Federal Mill, Federal Mining and Smelting, 1943 (Photograph courtesy of Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas)

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Mine Painting, Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum, May 2014



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Clockwise from top left: Harlequin romance novels, Plastic Church, Game, The Broadman Hymnal

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Artifacts

An office desk nameplate, a baby’s bib, a bullet casing, a single gold high heel, and a worn copy of The Exorcist litter an abandoned front yard. Several miles away, a partially submerged lawn mower, a tractor wheel, and an easy chair break the glassy surface of a small pond. Farther down a paved street, a series of concrete house foundations are barely visible under an overgrowth of cattails and tiger lilies. The arbitrary nature of these scenes gives the effect of a town encased by a snow globe, its contents shaken and redistributed at random. These pieces of physical evidence are all that remain in place to tell the story of the thousands of previous residents of Picher. Understanding the personal artifacts that litter the landscape in Picher poses special challenges. Unlike the long-buried artifacts of a forgotten civilization, Picher wears its material culture on its surface. The objects found are both intensely intimate and entirely detached from their original owners. They were left behind, intentionally or unintentionally, and offer some insight into the place and people. Stewart’s photographic account of Picher’s remaining material objects suggests narratives that are rich and multilayered but necessarily incomplete and unknowable. There is a scene in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where the Joad family is forced to sift through meaningful possessions—an inscribed book, a father’s pipe, a china dog—to determine what they can bring with them on their journey to California. Looking through prized materials, they question what would happen if these objects were left behind: “How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”1 Psychologists, archaeologists, folklorists, art historians, and others have examined the deep connection between people and their physical possessions. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi claims that material objects structure the way we understand our selves and our lives.2 Objects frame memories and provide evidence of events gone by, justifying that our identities and experiences matter. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett further examines the role that “memory objects” play in strongly evoking past experiences. Memory objects, she writes, are “a way to materialize internal images, and through

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them, to recapture earlier experiences.”3 These memory objects are even more powerful when the place or person remembered no longer is present. However, how can we access someone else’s memory objects? The Joads might have also questioned, “What will remain to tell our story when we are no longer present?” When people are forced from their homes, memories are fragmented and take on new meanings. Steinbeck’s Joads left their home in Oklahoma during the Great Depression due to the environmental crisis of the Dust Bowl, in order to seek better fortune in California. Decades later, a new set of environmental dangers pushed residents from their homes in Picher, though many chose to move only a short distance away. Why were certain objects left behind, and what stories can they tell? As archaeologist James Deetz notes, “Surviving artifacts cannot be taken as necessarily representative objects of their period.”4 People tend to dispose of the most mundane tools of daily life, while artists, archaeologists, and curators preserve objects of special interest or value. In the process of photographing the material artifacts left behind, Stewart does not only document but also makes choices about the types of objects to highlight and the manner in which they should be displayed. These choices are made more complex by the many ways in which objects came to be left behind. For some families departing Picher, those who accepted early government offers for their property, there was time to carefully pack bags, to assess what objects from the past to bring with them to their new homes and lives. However, for those who stayed, the 2008 tornado harshly disconnected many owners from their possessions, scattering objects across the landscape. Still other Picher residents seemingly picked up and moved abruptly, leaving many personal letters, photographs, and objects behind in their homes. While some objects appear to have remained in their original contexts, others provide scant clues about their owners. To return to the metaphor of the snow globe, once the globe is shaken, it is impossible to track the origin of each flake or to get the snowflakes back in their previous positions. Yet the newly created landscape offers opportunities for exploration and the discovery of beauty. Through Stewart’s photographs, we see that the material objects left behind represent travels taken or longed for, mimic the physical transformations of the landscape, embody cherished beliefs and ideals, and provide windows into personal relationships. Over the past decade, waves of emigration have resulted in Picher’s current status as a landlocked ghost town nearly in the center of the

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United States, in cotton and oil country. Stewart found and photographed postcards—“Picking Oklahoma Cotton” from approximately 1910 (page 14) and “Oklahoma Oil Refinery” from 1917 (the latter not included in this book)—that proudly show off pre–Dust Bowl industry in the then-new state and point to a changing landscape. The first postcard shows a group of workers, including men, women, and children, posing in a cotton field. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, farmers worked steadily to discover what would grow successfully in Oklahoma’s climate of hot summers and high winds. By the 1910s and 1920s, cotton had become one of Oklahoma’s most valuable cash crops, and it has remained a staple crop throughout the southwestern part of the state. The second postcard, “Oklahoma Oil Refinery,” depicts a landscape overtaken by oil derricks that dot sloping green hills back to the horizon. From large derricks in the foreground on either side of the postcard, plumes of black oil shoot into the air, framing the scene. A rectangular inset picturing the refinery shows almost no sign of natural landscape but a sprawling complex of paved roads, pipes, and chemical processing plants. The postcard touts Oklahoma as a top producer of crude oil, where workers and stockholders are rewarded, claiming that the state “can supply the world.” Postcards in the early twentieth century served as an inexpensive, easily accessible mode of conveying information that did not require literacy to understand. Further, the possession of quality private postcard collections was an indication of social status. According to communication studies scholar Catherine Palczewski, early postcards held social significance that rivaled “the power of the internet in contemporary times.”5 While the historic postcards featuring cotton and oil reflect optimism about the possibilities for industry in Oklahoma, and while they were likely influential in shaping perceptions of the state, these postcards do not reflect the ebb and flow of Picher’s own local economy. The population growth after Pincher was incorporated as a city in 1918, as its zinc and lead mines took off, and the town’s dramatic population loss beginning in the late sixties were not the sort of thing that would be marked by a postcard. The found postcards of Picher indicate the layers of meaning embedded in material objects. In addition to the social meanings generated when the postcards were produced, they likely endured over time as collectors’ items highlighting the early history of the state. Today postcards are often viewed as mass-produced kitsch, meant to include others in our journeys or nostalgically reflect on completed travels. The newer postcards and maps

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Clockwise from top left: Pink Swan, Ping-Pong Paddle, Record Album, Doll

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found left behind in Picher point to a desire for escape and adventure, temporary migration away from the heartland. In Stewart’s “Map and Cruise Ship” (page 69), a map of the United States is folded to show the Atlantic Ocean, and attached are an itinerary for the Panamanian TSS. Mardi Gras and a postcard depicting the massive white cruise liner. In “Interior, Connell Street, August 2010” (page 105), a faded fishing net with a shell and faux seahorse hangs in an abandoned building, perhaps the record of a past vacation. Among the found objects, a series of recovered Harlequin romance novels suggest that a measure of escape and intrigue could also be found without leaving town. One features the tattered cover of Sandra Field’s 1991 novel, The Land of Maybe, depicting a couple posing on a boat deck, the man’s hands held protectively at the woman’s shoulder and side (page 58). In the background, jutting green cliffs rise above a rocky shoreline. The romance, an account of the protagonist’s efforts to resist a wealthy, handsome suitor, is set in the Faroe Islands, an archipelago between Iceland and Norway. With their Nordic culture, whaling tradition, and rainy weather, the islands evoke a distant, romantic geography and climate far from everyday realities of Oklahomans. As signs of real and imagined travel, maps, postcards, souvenirs, and novels depict places that stand in stark contrast to Picher. Through abandonment and exposure to the elements, people’s former possessions, some perhaps beloved, have been transformed. The change can be seen in “Interior, Main Street, 2010,” depicting a plastic dog left on a deteriorating shelf (page 82). The object is barely recognizable as a child’s toy, a bobblehead dog whose velvety fur is peeled back, like burned skin, with only small pieces still clinging to its head, chest, and hind leg. With wires protruding through its snapped neck, the dog’s face is planted on the ashcovered shelf. Even inorganic materials decay, we see, and the figure blends into the surrounding environment, peeling wallpaper in the background here reinforcing the sense of decay and physical destruction. In another photograph, a found wooden Ping-Pong paddle tells a similar story (page 62). Table tennis, originally a parlor game for the British upper class, is most commonly played in the United States as a recreation room activity. Typical paddles have a wood handle and a double-sided red or black rubber face, but in this case any rubber coating has been stripped away. Photographed against an austere background in Stewart’s studio, it appears that the paddle has undergone a violent transformation. Four dark, grooved imprints give the odd impression of fingerprints burned into the handle. The

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paddle itself appears to have originally had a red-and-white design, but it now seems covered with a black textured substance, giving the appearance of dirty oil or dried blood or both. Other artifacts provide evidence that gun use, particularly in bullet casings scattering the landscape, is abundant in Picher. YouTube videos of the town posted after the majority of residents had left show that chat piles had taken on second lives as firing ranges. In another photo titled “Interior, Main Street, 2010,” Stewart photographed the June 1974 issue of Guns magazine (promising “finesse in the firearms field”) on site, next to a partially disassembled toy car (page 87). The tattered magazine and car sit on a partially burned plank, and, like the shelf on which the toy dog stands, the magazine is covered with ash. Driving through Picher today you see evidence of damage wrought by the tornado, but if you ignore towering chat piles, the lush green landscape gives little indication that environmental disaster has occurred. Looking closely at objects left behind, however, is perhaps a more telling way to see the transformations that have occurred. The juxtaposition of toys and evidence of gun culture serves as a reminder of the forceful and random way in which some material objects at Picher were rearranged—and the tenuous nature of their continued existence. The plastic dog, table tennis paddle, and toy car bring to mind the childhood toys and other material objects on display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan. At this museum, displays of personal artifacts seem to serve two purposes: first, to personalize the story of the atomic bombing so that it becomes relatable, and second, to show the extreme destruction wrought by the bomb. After the bombing, fire that broke out melted and twisted objects in a way that looks almost to have been volcanic. Stacks of teacups look like the vertebrae of an ancient creature and bridge trusses are twisted into unrecognizable forms. Closer to Picher, personal artifacts recovered from sites of destruction can be seen at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum and at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. After a traumatic event, objects may not only physically change form but also shift in meaning. For Myrta Caschaar, who was widowed in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, the two-dollar bill that was among the returned personal effects of her husband no longer symbolized their marriage but instead the crime that had taken place.6 Stewart’s photographs likewise capture artifacts that have transformed in meaning. Unlike the causes of the bombing artifact examples above, each a single catastrophic event, it has taken years for the town of Picher to go

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Clockwise from top left: Thermos, John Wayne, Shotgun Shells, Rifle Stock



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Clockwise from top left: Monopoly Board, Pitcher, Postcards, Scrapbook

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silent and empty, a process that is still going on. It seems unlikely that the personal objects strewn about the landscape, many simply left behind in moves to nearby towns, will ever be formally processed in museums. Instead they will decay and eventually decompose in the elements, or they may be bulldozed under the ground. Photography projects such as this one may be the only way such personal artifacts are recovered and memorialized. For the time being, the personal items that remain in Picher help create a picture of people whose lives were bound up in these ordinary, everyday objects and made up of moments such as those visible in the numerous photographs left behind. These items have been separated from the people who could infuse them with more meaning—those who could identify the people, places, and events depicted. Anthropologist Fuyubi Nakamura, who was involved in efforts to restore personal photographs after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in eastern Japan, notes that recovering personal photographs from the wake of disaster site is a delicate procedure. First, environmental damage often renders digital images stored on computers, CDs, portable drives, and cameras irretrievable, leaving photographic prints and physical photo albums the most likely of such items to be recovered. When dealing with such artifacts, concerns over privacy come into play when determining what photographs should be made public. Nakamura found conflicting sentiments among survivors about such items. While some now identified the photographs as “debris” and wished to move on, others found real joy in being reunited with these personal objects of memory.7 After the 2008 tornado moved through Picher, a reporter from the Oklahoma City daily Oklahoman described resident Margaret Reeves locating her wedding album in the midst of her destroyed house: “‘It’s our wedding pictures,’” she said, opening the album and then closing it right away. She looked away and put her arm over her face. ‘It’s just our pictures and stuff. . . . We know there’s nothing else.’”8 While recovering the photographs was deeply emotional, it was overshadowed by the overwhelming loss of her home. In Picher, some photographs were simply left behind when families left town and were damaged by exposure, while other photographs were dislocated by the tornado. Nevertheless, recovered photographs in Picher demonstrate various forms of personal connections within individual families and within the community. These photo prints, many torn or faded, show a marching band sharing a silly moment during a contest, a casual outdoor picnic, a family formally posed, a baby bundled in blankets,

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and group of Bell Telephone workers. An especially compelling found photograph (“Unidentified Women”) features two older women posing in a yard next to a stuffed jack-o-lantern trash bag (page 26). They look directly at the camera, holding up a broom and a pitchfork in a pose reminiscent of American Gothic. Their garden tools and rolled-up pant legs indicate that they were in the midst of yard work, but their hints of knowing smiles suggest that they were posing for an orchestrated scene. Older blackand-white photographs capture earlier generations in formal poses and stiff dresses and suits. Without connections to their original owners, many details of these photographs remain unknowable. However, the variety of found photographs documented by Stewart reflects a small town with vibrant community members committed to their jobs, and involved with their families, their churches, and their schools. Through Stewart’s documentation, these photographs move from a private to a public realm. Marita Sturken states that the shift of a photograph from its personal or familial context to a one of historical significance—for instance, an image of a place that has since been destroyed—creates a deepened sense of poignancy. She writes, “These images thus present a compelling prior innocence to which they offer a partial and enticing kind of retrieval. At the same time, they can be hauntingly tragic in evocation of loss.”9 The photographs found at Picher, then, merge personal memory, cultural memory, and history. Personal photographs can also play a significant role in resurrecting disbanded communities. This can be seen in the collection of photographs compiled by Holocaust survivor Yaffa Elliach of her childhood shtetl, Ejszyszki. During the Holocaust, German killing squads murdered all but twenty-nine Jews from Ejszyszki, and afterward all material evidence of the dead was eradicated. Elliach spent years recovering photographs of the shtetl, and over one thousand of these images now appear in a massive, multistory exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.10 As historian Edward Linenthal demonstrates, these photographs helped to restore a multilayered story of the community, including the people, buildings, and events that gave it vibrancy. What role can personal photographs play in public remembrance of Picher? Deetz concludes, “It is terribly important that the ‘small things forgotten’ be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured. We must remember these bits and pieces, and we must use them in new and

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Clockwise from top left: Map and Cruise Ship, Construction Toy, Ceramic Christmas Tree, Blue Boy



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imaginative ways.”11 During the twentieth century, the town of Picher was, in some ways, just like many other small towns in the center of the country. The found photographs and other remaining material objects showcase ordinary aspects of daily life. Yet Picher’s transformation into a ghost town was extremely atypical, as one of a few towns in the world to be evacuated due to environmental risks. Because the dissolution of Picher was gradual, with environmental toxins causing health problems over decades and failed

Cardboard Fan, Front

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efforts to restore the town, the designation of the Tar Creek Superfund Site does not represent an easily categorized trauma. Memories of Picher are fragmented and diverse and do not follow a singular narrative. If, however, we understand material culture as an embodiment of culture and memory, Stewart’s photographic contemplation of the objects left behind at Picher assist us in keeping memories of the town alive, while finding in the objects new meaning and aesthetic value.

Cardboard Fan, Back

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Garden Gnome, October 2010

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Croquet Mallet, October 2010



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Glove, October 2010

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Glove, October 2010



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Boot, March 2011

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Kitchen Decoration, March 2011



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Ghost, October 2010



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Residential Area following Tornado, June 2008

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Gas Station, Connell Street, June 2008



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Interior, Main Street, August 2010

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Interior, Main Street, August 2010



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Interior, October 2010

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Globe, October 2010



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Cigarette Machine, Main Street, October 2010

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Interior, Main Street, October 2010



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Interior, Connell Street, August 2010

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Interior, Connell Street, August 2010



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Interior, Connell Street, August 2010

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Interior, Connell Street, August 2010



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Mattresses, March 2011

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Softball Uniform, March 2011



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Open Window, October 2010

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Combs, October 2010



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Refrigerator Magnets, October 2010

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Contents of Kitchen Cabinet, August 2008



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Deflated Ball, October 2010

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Interior, March 2011



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Guitar, June 2008

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Jeans, June 2008



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Tire in Flooded Home Foundation, March 2011

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Television, October 2010



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Bowling Trophy, June 2008

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Interior, Connell Street, August 2010



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Brick Veneer, October 2010



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House Marked for Removal, October 2010

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Structures

The abandonment and demolition of Picher, hastened by the 2008 tornado, has occurred over many years. Before the federal buyout was complete, there were about seven hundred buildings in the town.1 As demolition projects continue, however, one can imagine a future where the town’s built environment is no longer. In the same manner that Csikszentmihalyi argued that material objects shape our sense of self, built structures often organize interactions with the environment. People move through space by drawing up a hierarchy of remembering and recording our surroundings. A 2009 graduate of Picher-Cardin High School, Eric Reeves, said, “You drive through town and look, and everywhere you look there are memories of something— parades or football games, track meets, whatever—there’s memories everywhere.”2 In addition to the memories provoked by buildings, they shape our sense of direction. They are among the landmarks we remember that get us to the correct place. When the markers that ground us are gone, we are left untethered. This was the case for Willie Ng, the starting quarterback who led Picher’s 1984 football team to a state championship. Ng coached high school football in Picher for years before the decline in athletic programs prompted him to transfer to nearby and rival Commerce High School. He reflected, “The things that you had fond memories of, with, or at are gone. It’s disorienting because you look for landmarks—maybe not street names—but your buddy’s house or this store and it’s gone.”3 Another displaced resident, Patsy Huffman, visited her former family home in Picher, now torn down to its foundation. She said, “I raised two kids—a boy and a girl—in that house. The front porch was over there. You know, I can hardly picture things now, it has been so long.”4 When physical structures no longer exist, memories about these places become uncertain. The 2008 tornado scrambled prior sites of orientation. The high winds lifted gravel from chat piles, creating what one resident called a “sandblasted” effect on buildings and raising concerns about toxic dust in the air.5 Viewing aerial photographs taken before and after the storm,

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the then-director of the Picher Housing Authority estimated that 295 homes were destroyed in the storm. More than two hundred homes had already been abandoned due to government buyouts by the time the tornado hit, which likely reduced the overall casualty numbers from the storm.6 Todd Stewart’s photograph “Residential Area following Tornado, June 2008” captures the chaotic scene of a former house, just after the tornado moved through (page 80). Recognizable objects—an oversized refrigerator, a laundry basket, and artificial flowers—are visible in the foreground, while the background is a jumble of twisted wood, corrugated steel, and now-disconnected plumbing. While one tree still stands in the midst of the wreckage, its branches have been nearly denuded, and the base of an uprooted tree appears on the right. Tornadoes reconfigure built environments in unpredictable ways. For instance, they may completely destroy one home and leave neighboring ones untouched. “Residential Area following Tornado, January 2009” (page xviii) shows this occurrence—a house stripped down to its foundation by the tornado, creating a gap in an otherwise intact neighborhood. In addition to structures being torn apart, signs point to sites that are no longer in operation or have been torn down completely. “Gas Station, Connell Street, June 2008” (page 81) shows a metal billboard mangled by the tornado, its former message unknowable. Piles of rubble surround it on an empty lot. The loss of physical markers to shape our environment forces a new relationship with the environment around us. For Picher, the decision not to rebuild tornado-damaged structures secured the fate of the town. Resident John Hutchinson confirmed after the storm, “It’s the finishing blow to a dying town.”7 The tornado prompted the federal government to provide disaster funding, which assisted buyout plans then in progress. Although all but a few of Picher’s residents left their homes, the houses untouched by the tornado were not immediately demolished. Illegal tenants entered some of these houses, eventually leaving behind their own signs of life. In “Interior, October 2010,” a bare mattress is set up on a bed frame in a room marked by peeling carpet, an old-fashioned print and two records haphazardly placed on the wall, and a fallen window shade that does little to prevent light from entering the room (page 154). Comforts are clearly at a minimum in this space, but nearby, seen in “Magazine Page, October 2010,” a rumpled page torn from a pornography magazine is strewn on the floor (page 157). Empty structures also invited crime, with a number of buildings slated for demolition in the area targeted by arsonists. The Quapaw Fire

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“Firemans Hall” in Picher, March 2011



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Department responded to a series of fires in 2011, but since the buildings were empty, little investigation occurred.8 In Ghostly Ruins: America’s Forgotten Architecture, Harry Skrdla discusses the liminal nature of such sites—operating in spaces between their former lives and future destruction. He writes, “These structures exist in a limbo between utility and complete collapse. We encounter them during the relatively brief time before they are no longer recognizable and lose all meaning for us.” 9 Stewart has encountered Picher’s built environment in just this stage. His photographs remind us of the brevity of this in-between period, capturing structures “living” their final lives before passing out of existence. There is an undeniable pull to such sites, and tourists, ghost hunters, and artists have been drawn to Picher. Skrdla continues, “Part of the charm of abandoned structures is that they are honest. They have reached the end of their lives, no matter what the cause, in their own way, and we respect them for it. They are revered elders of their race, wearing their wrinkles without regrets.”10 The appeal of such structures and their use after abandonment added additional layers of history and memory to Picher’s built environment. One lasting structure marked by such multilayered memories is the former Picher Field Mining Museum. The building, located on North Connell Avenue on the edge of town, opened in 1925 as offices for the Tri-State Zinc and Lead Ore Producers Association. The group promoted products made from lead and zinc, compiled maps and statistics about mining activities, developed health records, and sent lobbyists to Washington. Later the Picher Field Mining Museum served as a repository for maps, artifacts, documents, and photographs of the mining district. In 2003, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, an official list of significant sites in American history.11 This designation offered protection from damage by federal projects and prompted its preservation even in the midst of the town’s near total demolition. In 2007, however, its board of directors voted to find a new home for the museum’s extensive collections. The board determined that the materials should be moved to the Baxter Springs Historical Museum and the Axe Library at Pittsburg State University, both in Kansas. The new organizations have been tasked with inventorying and ordering the collections—comprising more than 150 feet of linear documents, many confidential in nature—with the hope to preserve as much of Picher’s mining past as possible.12 The collection, placed briefly in a Picher Housing Authority building for temporary storage, was moved to its new homes months before the May 10 tornado destroyed the housing authority structure. The mining

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museum building still stands, now vacant. Other abandoned structures serve as direct reminders of the town’s mining past. In “Former ‘Dog House,’ March 2011,” a nondescript metal-sided building stands in an otherwise empty lot (page 128). An interior shot of the same building shows two long benches lining the walls, under rows of windows (page 129). For the miners, the “dog house” served as a sort of locker room—a place to change into and out of work gear and store lunch pails. Miners were each assigned a basket to store their belongings. Viewing Stewart’s photographs without any words of explanation, one might not guess the building’s former function. The correlation between structures and the people who lived or worked in them is essential. In Picher, several residents outlasted their neighbors, keeping businesses open while the built environment disappeared around them. Gary Linderman, owner of the Ole Miners Pharmacy, moved to the town in 1975. He opened the pharmacy in 1998, and it is the last mainstream business to survive in Picher. While he acknowledges the risks of the town’s industrial waste and sinkholes, over the years Linderman has felt compelled to continue working for the community. He has kept his business going long after most people have departed, by serving former residents who moved nearby and by offering mailed prescriptions and home deliveries. In staying open, the pharmacy became a meeting place for current and former residents. Linderman’s minister gave him the nickname “Lights Out Linderman,” suggesting that either he or the city government would be the last ones out of town, shutting down the power main when they left.13 Other business owners held onto to their properties as long as they could. Orval “Hoppy” Ray, who passed away in 2009, was the owner of the Pastime Pool Hall. Ray lived in Picher for eighty-four years, and, with a local historian, self-published three books about his life there. After an injury during his naval service during World War II, Ray returned to Picher and worked in the mines and then for BF Goodrich. He eventually purchased a downtown pool hall and hung his father’s mining paraphernalia on the walls. Before it was demolished in 2011, the pool hall had a stage for live music, displayed photographs and artifacts of the town’s mining past, and featured historic Brunswick billiard tables. In “Storefronts, Connell Avenue, August 2010,” the white and beige façades of Ray’s pool hall blends in with the other empty downtown buildings (page ix). However, an old-fashioned mining bucket is anchored in front of the entryway and a sign remains marking the “Pastime Mini Museum” that was once part of the site. While a “Keep Out” sign and the sheet-metal-covered window deter entrance to the building, the single

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Former Bell Telephone Co. Building, August 2010

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light fixture high above the door was one of the last illuminated lights on Picher’s Main Street. Ray’s pool hall was one of the last buildings in town to keep its lights on.14 Finally, Joyce and Gary Cox, co-owners of C & J’s Gorilla Cage, reluctantly closed their restaurant in March 2010. In “The Gorilla Cage, January 2009” the faded, flaking red-and-white trim signal the decline of the building, but the writing on the windows cheerily declares that the restaurant is open (“the last place in Picher!”) despite the trauma that the town experienced, which is evoked by a hand-painted funnel cloud (page 133). “The Gorilla Cage, October 2010,” with its deserted parking lot and defaced menu, shows that the café is no longer in business (page 132). While the Pastime Pool Hall and C & J’s Gorilla Cage are now closed, the continued existence of these buildings prolongs memories of their operation. As Justin Armstrong writes, “Even in the absence of people, in an apparently lifeless setting, the buildings and streets . . . evoke understandings of their former human semblance . . . these sites are traces of an evaporating past.”15 After the tornado, municipal services drastically declined. While water and electric services continued for those who declined the federal buyout, in 2009 the public schools shut their doors, the police force disbanded, and the city hall closed. Traffic lights and stop signs were removed. “Picher Fire Department Truck, March 2011” shows an out-of-service fire truck sitting in an empty lot littered with charred wood and rusty metal. Located directly off of Highway 69 on the edge of Picher, the truck serves as an immediate signal that the town’s operations have ceased. The truck has been left out in the open, not in the expected protection of a fire hall. While utility lines, a stop sign, and buildings in the background suggest activity, the truck does not appear to have any future use. In 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provided $15.7 million in funding to the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality via the EPA. A subaward was made to the Lead Impacted Communities Relocation Assistance Trust (LICRAT) for remediation of the Superfund site. Contractors soon began demolition work. The main business district outlasted many of Picher’s neighborhoods, but ultimately most of its buildings—including the post office and movie theater—were torn down. The demolition process was not without controversy, and in 2012, former residents filed a lawsuit against LICRAT and four other entities, charging that the organization rigged bidding and submitted false claims for remediation.16

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Home Damaged by Tornado, June 2008



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Storefronts, Connell Avenue, August 2010

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Ole Miners Pharmacy, March 2011



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Storefront, Connell Street, October 2010



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Storefronts, Main Street, January 2009

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“Firemans Hall” in Picher, March 2011



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Storefront, Connell Avenue, March 2011

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Storefront, Main Street, January 2009



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Mobile Home, March 2011

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Abandoned Structure, March 2011



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Former “Dog House,” March 2011

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Former “Dog House,” March 2011



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Hand Prints, October 2010



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The Gorilla Cage, October 2010

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The Gorilla Cage, January 2009



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D&D Drive-In Sign, Connell Avenue, January 2009

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Picher-Cardin High School, October 2010



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Window, March 2011

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Metal Building, March 2011



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Near Faith Church, A Street, October 2010

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Church, A Street, October 2010



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Interior, October 2010

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United Methodist Church, Connell Avenue, August 2010



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Funeral Home, Connell Avenue, August 2010



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Picher Christian Church, Netta Street, January 2009



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United Methodist Church, Connell Avenue, August 2010

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Interior, Connell Avenue, August 2010



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Full Gospel Revival Center, October 2010



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Abandoned House, January 2009

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Abandoned House, October 2010



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House, January 2009



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Interior, October 2010

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Magazine Page, October 2010



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Pastime Mini Museum, August 2010



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House Foundation, June 2008

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House Foundation, June 2008



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Dugout and Chat Pile, June 2008

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House Destroyed by Tornado, June 2008



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Lytle Creek, October 2010

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Landscape

Picher has been designated one of the most toxic towns in the United States, with its environmental damage occurring over decades. Yet Picher’s lush landscape defies expectations. Vegetation—overtaking abandoned structures, breaking through former sidewalks and house foundations, and covering over debris caused by the 2008 tornado—seems to soften the effects of the trauma done to the land. Colorful wildflowers and twisting vines enliven deteriorating buildings. Stewart’s photographs reveal dramatic juxtapositions of beauty and destruction, growth and decay, and show that processes of nature are always in flux. While Stewart documents the erasure of the town of Picher and its associated memories—a past that cannot be recaptured—his photographs also depict a landscape transitioning into something new. Stewart began photographing Picher in 2008, just after the tornado that caused many of the remaining residents to depart. In the years that followed, demolition crews leveled landscapes and brought down structures, except for designated historical structures. Besides showing artifacts and buildings, Stewart’s photographs feature the town’s last maintained environments—lawns, playgrounds, and playing fields—and pictures of these are imbued with the knowledge that these sites would soon be untended. The abandonment of community areas, particularly spaces of play, was an important step in Picher’s decline. For instance, once the town’s playing fields were deemed at risk for gradually caving in, parents from surrounding towns refused to let their children travel to Picher for games. Unable to sustain a student body, much less extracurricular activities, Picher-Cardin High School was forced to close its doors. On May 15, 2009, the final class of eleven seniors graduated following a vote to merge the school system with those of Commerce and Quapaw. In “Hayman Field, Picher-Cardin High School, October 2010,” however, the school’s Hayman Field appears freshly mowed and the taglines “Gorilla Pride” and “Go Big Red” remain crisply painted in red. Despite the empty school building and blank scoreboard, mowing

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of the field continued for years after the town was deserted. On a 2011 trip to Picher, the hum of the riding lawnmower was one of the few sounds of human activity I heard. This effort to maintain the playing field is significant and indicates the value placed on high school football in Oklahoma. The manicured field serves as a lasting symbol of community pride for a team that won the state championship in 1984, soon after the town was declared part of the Superfund site. The decision to continue mowing the field can be seen as a sign of resistance to the realities of the town’s death. This spirit of resistance was evident in the yearbook of the last graduating class, which lists their class song as Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” and class motto a line attributed (probably erroneously) to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”1 The neatly mowed football field creates a disconnect from the overgrown, detritus-filled landscape beyond the perimeter of the field, outside of the camera’s scope. Barely visible in the right background is a decades-old rock wall that surrounds the stadium, built to force spectators to purchase tickets in order to enter to watch football games.2 The Tar Creek Superfund Site is one of the only designated Superfund sites that effectively served as a playground. In addition to the chat piles and mining pools, contaminated waste made its way into constructed spaces of play. One longtime resident recalled that Picher’s Head Start facility was built on a sludge pond.3 In “Playground, October 2010,” yellow and white rocking horses with rusty springs appear to gallop away from a weedy playground in the early stages of abandonment (page 170). White pipes designate a play area, but the overgrown weeds suggests that no children have played there for some time. In the background, a picnic table, swing sets, and a basketball court also stand empty. The deserted playground highlights the absence of young people in the town. In 2005, many families took advantage of a state-sponsored buyout targeting families with children under age six. With the departure of Picher’s children, it was clear that the town did not have a future. The absence of children on this playground emphasizes this loss and shows a previously maintained community space beginning to decline. “Tree, March 2011” also features an abandoned play space, but on a smaller scale (page 180). Faded boards, once painted white, are nailed onto a tree trunk. The spacing of the boards suggest that they were meant for children to climb, and two chains hang from a branch, perhaps part of a dismantled swing.

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Residential Area following Tornado, January 2009



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EPA Emergency Response Vehicle, June 2008

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In contrast to the football field, this space of private play has been left to deteriorate. While the images just described reflect the effort to maintain spaces of play within the community and their slow decline, Stewart’s photographs also feature landscapes that are no longer livable. The 2008 tornado was, for many families, the final straw in their decision to leave Picher. The tornado crushed houses and scattered debris, making the already contaminated land even more uninhabitable. In “Stray Dog, August 2008,” a dog hunches protectively over freshly killed prey, with construction debris in the background. Stray dogs in Picher are yet another signal that people have left, leaving former pets to fend for themselves. These dogs indicate not only absence of owners but also the lack of city services such as animal control. In this image, the aggressive stance of the dog, staring directly at the camera, creates a sense of danger and unapproachability that parallels the landscape around him. Twisted wood and part of a shingled roof blend into a thatch of overgrown weeds, vines, and trees. The cleared gravel foreground may have been part of a house lot, while a large, stark chat pile looms in the background, reinforces the sense of inhospitality. Chat piles, mounds of fine gravel waste up to twenty stories high, have long been an identifying feature of the town. Today they can be seen on Google Earth’s satellite photographs. The chat piles were not a planned element of the constructed environment but were inevitable by-products of the mining industry. According to Ben Moody, who worked as manager of Eagle-Picher’s Land-Lease Department in the 1930s, the magnitude of chat piles in Picher could be attributed to landowners wanting to wring the most profit from their property in the shortest time possible. Indian allotments were typically two hundred acres, but leases were made with as little as twenty acres, dividing the land between multiple mining companies. Each plot had its own mill, creating a chat pile on every lease. For example, Moody points to the Sin-Tah-Hah-Hah Allotment across from the high school, which was divided among five mining companies, each with one or two mills or tailing piles. Having separate mills ensured that the landowner would receive royalties for the zinc and lead from the ore produced on their land. Eventually, the Eagle-Picher Company purchased a tract of land to create a central mill, which developed a system to account for the zinc and lead of many mines and consolidated the deposit of waste rock to just one site.4

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The many chat piles became a core part of the town’s identity, and, as sites of informal play, they were a defining element of growing up in Picher. Children climbed and went sledding on the chat piles, played in sandboxes full of the mineral grit, and were sometimes called names like “chat rat” and “lead head” by outsiders. “Connell Avenue, January 2009” features a downtown sign that shows the pervasive nature of environmental pollution (page xiii). Designed by a local fifth-grader, the sign warns children, “Don’t put lead in your head.” Drawn in a childlike cartoon form, a boy grins and points to his head. Beside him a disembodied pair of hands washes under a faucet, small puffs of yellow signaling contamination. The cheerful sign is a prominent reminder of the risks the chat posed to children in Picher. Despite being filled with heavy metal contaminants, and being void of natural growth, the chat piles have invited human engagement. Danger signs and fencing discourage people from walking or driving on the piles, but tire tracks and debris indicate these have been ignored and breached, and that the chat piles were one of the community’s most lasting sites of play. Adults frequently held picnics and keg parties on the mounds, and, after the population thinned, chat piles were used as shooting ranges and ATV courses. In “Croquet Mallet, October 2010,” a wooden mallet rests among one chat pile’s debris. It may have been left behind from a picnic or, like so many other material objects in Picher, simply ended up there by chance. The faded mallet barely stands out from the chat in the background, the dust and grit enveloping signs of human activity. Picher’s water supply was also transformed by mining. Once mining came to a halt, water was no longer pumped out of the mines, and the abandoned shafts filled with water. This acid-contaminated water eventually rose to ground level, entering Tar Creek and traveling to other water sources. The contamination was reportedly discovered in 1979 when George Mayer of nearby Commerce, a rancher and breeder of Arabian horses, saw the bodies of his white show horses turning rust orange from acid burns.5 Acidic water was seeping into his pasture, now part of the Mayer Ranch Passive Treatment System. Water that residents swam in and fished in became suspect—children received chemical burns swimming in mine pools, and fish pulled from local sources were tainted with heavy metals. According to environmental activist Rebecca Jim, thirteen tons of heavy metal flow down Tar Creek every day, flowing into Grand Lake, the water source for a number of surrounding counties.6

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Chat Pile and Tornado Debris, August 2008



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Playground, October 2010

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In Stewart’s photographs, however, there are limited signs of the bright-orange toxic sludge that prompted the title of The Creek Runs Red. Instead, in “Lytle Creek, August 2008,” water snaking along the edge of a chat pile appears tranquil and even regenerative. The water seems to have no color of its own—it simply reflects the sky and landscape. The vivid green of the surrounding grasses and trees is almost shocking in a landscape so toxic. Looking closely, one sees that signs of debris are tangled in bare branches, but the surrounding vegetation overwhelms them. In contrast, “Flooded Remains of Home Foundation, March 2011” focuses on shallower water that pooled in the void of a house foundation. Here small piles of bricks and weather-worn cinder blocks haphazardly interrupt the water’s surface, casting long shadow, and greenish scum prevents glassy reflection. While the chat piles tower aboveground in Picher and water pools on its surface, vast underground caverns are not visible in Stewart’s photographs. However, as the mines closed, inspectors confirmed that abandoned mineshafts and drill holes posed dangers to residents. In July 1967, the roof of an empty mine collapsed, swallowing three houses, five cars, and ten people, although there were no fatalities. George Foote, who escaped along with his wife and ten children, reported a thunderous explosion and then looking up to see the ground above him. His home dropped forty-five feet underground.7 Despite encouragement from mining experts to take action, leaders and residents of the shrinking town resisted the assessment that Pilcher was unsafe. In 1978, then-mayor Naomi Poole insisted that cave-ins were occurring outside of city limits, in neighboring towns, and one anonymous official claimed that Picher residents would “defend that whole damn town even if it was all being caved in.”8 Despite this resistance, the U.S. Bureau of Mines and state geographical surveys done in the 1980s found thousands of holes in the tristate area, spanning over four hundred square miles. While capping the mines or filling them via hydraulic pumping could have addressed this problem, the price tag of such endeavors was prohibitive. In 2006, an Army Corps of Engineers study confirmed again that the ground was unstable in Picher and vulnerable to collapse. Although debates over the impact of heavy metal contamination continued without resolution, and the EPA attempted to remediate the topsoil, the looming threat of sinkholes made Picher uninhabitable. By 2007, trucks were diverted around the town so their weight did not add pressure on the

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abandoned mineshafts below. Traversing Picher’s landscape by foot does not reveal this instability. Instead, manicured landscapes and community spaces have given way to new growth. Stewart’s photographs show this process evolving—from the mowed football field to overgrown house sites—in the years following the tornado. Places of human activity and play become less recognizable as trees, grasses, flowers, water, and even spreading chat absorb signs of the people who lived there. “Abandoned Industrial Structure, October 2010” shows flora creeping into the urban built environment (page 181). As seen from inside an industrial structure, vines wind around an open window, creating a screen to the outside world. Only two of the windowpanes remain intact and others have shards of broken glass. Sunlight filters through the leaves, highlighting intricate cobwebs. A house can be seen through the window, showing that some aspects of a neighborhood are still present. Similarly, in “Near Faith Church, A Street, October 2010,” new growth has pushed up an old sidewalk, while purple and white flowering weeds crowd its edges (page 196). The sidewalk ends at an empty street, across from the empty parking lot of a still-standing church. Unless one is aware of the unstable ground below or happens upon one of the existing visible sinkholes, viewing Picher’s landscape does not reveal its instability. Despite this, the landscape is clearly in transition. Stewart’s photographs show both the bleakness and the beauty of Picher’s decline. For residents who have left the town, fewer and fewer markers of their lives there remain visible. While there are clear signs of nature taking over in Picher, the transformation of the landscape is not occurring without human intervention. Plans continue to manage the area’s chat, water, and mineshafts. For instance, the EPA is overseeing the sale of the contaminated gravel, with the intent of making it a safe resource for asphalt road materials. According to an EPA representative, this process could take about three decades, and the unusable chat will be placed in a toxic waste storehouse outside of Picher.9 From 2011 to 2012, Ottawa County oversaw the closing of the city’s two sewage lagoons, seeding them to create a natural pasture.10 The Quapaws, who hold ownership of much of the land in the area, have publicly announced a plan to flood the town by 2020 and restore the town to wetlands.11 These changes have a profound effect on memory. Landscape scholars Clare Rishbeth and Mark Powell write, “Experiences of landscapes are shaped in part by memories accumulated through

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everyday experiences, and longer memories of childhood, places left behind, and sensory qualities lost.”12 As time and distance separate former residents from Picher, and the landscape becomes something vastly different than their experience there, it will be impossible to retain the sensory qualities of the town. The History Channel show Life after People featured Picher in its episode “Toxic Revenge,” describing the apocalyptic conditions in Picher as “a future that has already happened.”13 What is the next future of this landscape? Will it find new life like Superfund site Newton Creek in New York City, where a community of paddlers is taking to once toxic waters?14 One member of the Quapaw tribe imagines that once the self-cleaning wetland has completed its work, it would be a triumph to sell bottled water out of what was once a Superfund site, effectively erasing memories of Picher as a contaminated landscape.

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Sinkhole, May 2014

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Contaminated Water Entering Tar Creek, May 2014



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Tar Creek below Contamination Area, May 2014



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Lytle Creek during Rain, June 2008

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Lytle Creek during Rain, June 2008



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Tree, March 2011

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Flooded Remains of House Foundation, March 2011



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Abandoned Industrial Structure, October 2010

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Abandoned Industrial Structure, October 2010



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Backyard, October 2010



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Tar Creek above Contamination Area, May 2014

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Contaminated Water Entering Mayer Ranch Passive Treatment System, May 2014



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Clean Water Leaving Mayer Ranch Passive Treatment System, May 2014

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Mayer Ranch Passive Treatment System, May 2014



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Willow, October 2010

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Stray Dog, August 2008



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Backyard, March 2011



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Trees near Lytle Creek, October 2010

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Tree with Tornado Debris, June 2008



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Near Faith Church, A Street, October 2010

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Former Home Site, A Street, October 2010



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Road near the Site of EaglePicher Central Mill, May 2014

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Conclusion

In January 2014, the district court of Ottawa County issued a final order dissolving the town, halting the collection of any sales or use taxes for Picher.1 Memories of Picher take on different meanings for each individual who has lived there, and these meaning are multilayered—inscribed in the material culture, transforming landscapes, and ruined structures. In 2009, Orval “Hoppy” Ray reflected on the key role that Picher played in winning two world wars, claiming, “They should have built a monument here to the town instead of trying to tear it down.”2 However, now that the town has ceased to exist, the question of how Picher will be remembered remains unanswered. John Mott, who lived for more than seventy years in Picher, carefully recorded his life’s memories on several spiral-bound notebooks, intending to publish them in a memoir. Instead, when the 2008 tornado struck Picher, the spiral bound notebooks were swept out a window and disappeared. Like the narratives Mott recorded, memories of Picher are fleeting, subject to transformation over time, and their retention is unpredictable. However, Todd Stewart’s photographs of the town serve as a form of memorialization, providing a visual record of changes to its material culture, landscape, and built environment.



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Chat Removal Contractor near Commerce, Oklahoma, May 2014



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Google Earth Satellite Image of Area Surrounding Picher, 2014

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Notes

HISTORY AND MEMORY 1. B  everly B. Walker De Santo, “Memories to Last a Lifetime,” Tri-State Tribune (Picher, Okla.), June 10, 1999. 2. “ The ‘Smells’ of Picher,” Tri-State Tribune (Picher, Okla.), August 21, 1986. 3. Ibid. 4. “Picher,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, http://www.okhistory. org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=PI002 (accessed February 28, 2015). 5. J. J. Shepherd, “Criminal Picher,” Square Deal (Picher, Okla.?), July 27, 1918, in Baxter Springs Historical Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas. While Shepherd’s original publication was titled the Rounder, subsequent issues were published under a variety of names, including Square Deal. 6. Allan Mathews, “Picher Growing Pains—The First Dozen Years,” Tri-State Tribune (Picher, Okla.), August 9, 1990. 7. Ibid. 8. B  en Moody, “Yester-year in the Picher Mining Field: The Picher Mining District during the Depression,” Tri-State Tribune (Picher, Okla.), September 1, 1988. 9. D  anniel Parker, “Picher, Oklahoma: The Tragedy of a Ghost Town,” City Sentinel (Oklahoma City), March 9, 2011, http:// city-sentinel.com/2011/03/picher-oklahoma-the-tragedy-ofa-ghost-town (accessed January 31, 2014). 10. B  en Maglaughlin Mining Records, June 1944, Eagle Picher Mining and Smelting Company, Cardin, Oklahoma, in Baxter Springs Historical Center and Museum, Baxter Springs, Kansas. 11. Moody, “Yester-year in the Picher Mining Field.” 12. Abby Sewell, “Time’s up for Toxic Town of Picher, Okla.,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2014. 13. F  elicity Barringer, “Despite Cleanup at Mine, Dust and Fear Linger, New York Times, April 12, 2004. 14. T  he Creek Runs Red, directed and produced by Bradley Beesley, James Payne, and Julianna Brannum (Dallas: Creek Runs Red and KERA-Dallas/Ft. Worth, 2007), DVD. 15. “ Picher, OK,” AbandonedOK, http://www.abandonedok. com/picher (accessed January 31, 2014). 16. Margot Roosevelt, “The Tragedy of Tar Creek,” Time, April 19, 2004, http://content.time.com/ (accessed February 28, 2015).



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17. Barringer, “Despite Cleanup at Mine.” 18. Ibid., Roosevelt, “The Tragedy of Tar Creek”; Frank Morris, “Oklahoma Mining Town a Victim of Its Success,” NPR, February 11, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=7357401 (accessed January 31, 2014). 19. Roosevelt, “The Tragedy Of Tar Creek.” 20. “Picher, OK.” 21. The Creek Runs Red. 22. “Despite Cleanup at Mine, Dust and Fear Linger.” 23. “Oklahoma Mining Town a Victim of Its Success.” 24. “Picher, OK.” 25. “ Demolition Set for Okla. Town Plagued by Lead, Sinkholes,” NBC News, January 2001, http://www.nbcnews. com/id/41313436/#.UayK6b_vy1s (page discontinued February 28, 2015). 26. L  arry G. Johnson, Tar Creek: A History of the Quapaw Indians, the World’s Largest Lead and Zinc Discovery, and the Tar Creek Superfund Site (Mustang, Okla.: Tate Publishing, 2008), 133. 27. B  rian Daffron, “Tribe Files Suit against Federal Government for Alleged Land Mismanagement,” Indian Country Today, April 2, 2013, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork. com/2013/04/02/quapaw-tribe-files-suit-against-federalgovernment-alleged-land-mismanagement-148500 (accessed January 1, 2015). ARTIFACTS 1. J ohn Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939; New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 112. 2. M  ihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Why We Need Things,” in History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, eds. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 25. 3. B  arbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, “Objects of Memory: Material Culture as Life Review,” in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader, ed., Elliott Oring (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1992), 331. 4. J ames Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (Harpswell, Maine: Anchor, 1996), 8. 5. C  atherine Palczewski, “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and

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Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 4 (November 2005): 365. 6. Jenny Pachucki, “Robert Gschaar’s Property: Recovered Memories,” in The Stories They Tell: Artifacts from the National September 11 Memorial Museum, eds. Clifford Chanin and Alice M. Greenwald (New York: Skira Rizzolo, 2013), 58. 7. F  uyubi Nakamura, “Memory in the Debris: The 3/11 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami,” Anthropology Today 28, no. 3 (2012), 20–23. 8. J ohn David Sutter, “Picking Up the Pieces: Living through a Tornado is Scary, but the Future Can Be Daunting, as Well,” Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), May 13, 2008. 9. M  artia Sturken, “The Image as Memorial: Personal Photographs in Cultural Memory,” in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England), 1999, 178. 10. E  dward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 176–86. 11. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, 259–60. STRUCTURES 1. “ Barriers’ Removal Reveals Hard-Hit South Side,” Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), May 13, 2008. 2. “ Picher-Cardin Graduation,” YouTube, April 5, 2012, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3m0FuGRvH8 (accessed May 23, 2014). 3. K  yle Dierking, “Town’s Demise Won’t Kill Football Spirit,” NewsOn6.com, November 13, 2008, http://www.newson6. com/ (accessed January 31, 2014). 4. Wally Kennedy, “Fair Deal? Class-Action Status at Issue in Buyout of Former Mining Town,” Joplin Globe, March 3, 2013. 5. J ohn David Sutter, “EPA Tests Toxicity of Picher Air,” Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), May 13, 2008. 6. “ Barriers’ Removal Reveals Hard-Hit South Side.” 7. J ohn David Sutter, “Damage May Push Some to Give up on Town,” Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), May 12, 2008. 8. M  artha Dallago, “Arson Suspected,” Miami (Okla.) NewsRecord, March 3, 2011, http://www.miamiok.com/ (accessed February 28, 2015). 9. Harry Skrdla, Ghostly Ruins: America’s Forgotten Architecture (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 19. 10. Ibid. 11. K  . E. Sturgeon, III, “Mining Museum on National Register,” Tri-State Tribune (Pilcher, Okla.), April 24, 2003. 12. Wally Kennedy, “PSU to House Documents from Picher’s Mining Past,” Joplin Globe, August 8, 2008, http://www. joplinglobe.com/ (accessed May 29, 2014).

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Notes 64–199

13. N  oah Adams, “Rebuilding Effort Rejected for Picher, Okla.,” NPR, May 28, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=90907237 (accessed January 31, 2014). 14. J ohn S. Sutter, “‘Last Man Standing’ at Wake for a Toxic Town,” CNN.com, June 30, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/ US/06/30/oklahoma.toxic.town (accessed January 31, 2014). 15. J ustin Armstrong, “Everyday Afterlife: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Abandonment in Saskatchewan, Canada,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 3 (May 2011), 278. 16. “ Picher Whistle Blower Lawsuit Filed,” Miami (Okla.) NewsRecord, April 24, 2013, http://www.miamiok.com/ (accessed January 31, 2014). LANDSCAPE 1. Picher-Cardin Public Schools Yearbook, 2008–2009 ed. 2. R  ay Glier, “Picher Shows Pride in Face of Tragedy,” Rivals. com, December 5, 2008, http://www.rivals.com/ (accessed January 2, 2014). 3. “ Only a Few Hearty Souls Left in Picher,” Routes, March 11, 2010, http://routes.ou.edu/?p=227#sthash.ltnN8dE9.dpuf (page discontinued, accessed January 31, 2014). 4. M  oody, “Yester-year in the Picher Mining Field.” 5. Parker, “Picher, Oklahoma.” 6. Sutter, “Last Man Standing.” 7. “ Homes Sink as Mine Caves in over an Old Shaft,” Kansas City Star, July 22, 1967. 8. E  d Kelley, “Picher Battles Sinking Image,” Kansas City Star, July 23, 1978. 9. Parker, “Picher, Oklahoma.” 10. J erry J. Herrmann, “Picher Sewer Lagoons Are Closed,” Miami (Okla.) News-Record, July 18, 2012, http://www. miamiok.com/ (accessed January 31, 2014). 11. Wally Kennedy, “Picher Wetlands Back on the Table,” Joplin Globe, September 22, 2010, http://www.joplinglobe.com/ (accessed January 31, 2014). 12. C  lare Rishbeth and Mark Powell, “Place Attachment and Memory: Landscapes of Belonging as Experienced PostMigration,” Landscape Research 38, no. 2, 160. 13. “Toxic Revenge,” Life after People, television episode, season 2, episode 2, directed by Douglas J. Cohen, January 12, 2010. 14. E  mily S. Rueb, “Come on in, Paddlers, the Water’s Just Fine. Don’t Mind the Sewage,” New York Times, August 29, 2013. CONCLUSION 1. “ Ceasing Taxes to Finalize Town of Picher,” Miami (Okla.) News-Record, January 2, 2014, http://www.miamiok.com/ (accessed January 31, 2014). 2. Sutter, “Last Man Standing.”

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