Oklahoma ghost stories

One of my favorite places in Oklahoma is the former State Capital Publishing Museum in Guthrie. 
Owned by the State Historical Society  and closed because of lack of repair money for six years now, my interest was reawakened when it made the news recently when my friend Richard Mize reported on a local group trying to raise money and save it.
We drove up to Guthrie today on the back roads, savoring the lush and peaceful countryside, before driving around town. 

Four years ago, from inside the historic Blue Belle Bar

Long ago, I took groups of university students there when it was open, because you could go in and the staff would use old printing equipment to set type and actual print handbills, the way it was done when Guthrie was Oklahoma Territory's actual capital.
So many stories and ghosts there, for the state, and for me, an old newspaperman who started in hot metal printing and is still in love with it.
To me, the condition of the building speaks as  a depressing metaphor for the condition of our state, dreams gone bust and broke except for funding high paid coaches and athletes. 
I remember the excitement of touring the place, of soaking up Oklahoma and publishing history, and haunted by its closing and the loss to generations to come. I hope Guthrie can make this happen.
Here are links to Richard's story, and the story of the building.
Group forms to save Museum
Group announcement
Museum Closing
Documentary

I knew I was home when I saw the ...

...statue...gray marble, in the courthouse square, at Bentonville, Arkansas. Yes, I'm a Texan, but the word "Confederate" at the bottom and "To the Southern Soldier" says "Southerner," like my ancestors.
People of many races gathered in the square in the evenings, listening to music, talking, strolling, eating ice cream in front of Sam Walton's original five-and-dime, enjoying a cool southern evening. 
The statue is dedicated to James H. Berry of Bentonville, who served both of his countries honorably. Just a short trip from Indian Territory for a breath of fresh air and relaxation, while the sentinel stands watch, looking westward, my wife says to the future, rather than to the north, and the past.

Infant graves--the hard life in Indian Territory

I stopped counting the infant graves, as I wandered through the Oakwood Cemetery on east 15th street near Arcadia Lake yesterday. There were so many.

I don't know why I'm drawn to cemeteries, except there are so many stories there, and perhaps somber realization that someday I'll visit one permanently.

But after photographing the Civil War veteran's grave, and seeing an infant's tombstone near by, I kept walking, and kept seeing small red bricks with infant names on them, and some without a name. That next tombstone was the oldest with a date, 1892, of an infant boy named Loid, the same year Central Normal School for teaching teachers was founded on a treeless prairie less than 10 miles miles northwest.

A darling baby daughter

There were others too of one year olds, and darling daughters. Most were undated, but the other early graves made it likely they were before statehood. Many have little lambs curled up on top of the stones,or doves carved into stone, eroded by time like the letter on the stones.

A few months old son

They may be gone and forgotten, but they're monuments to the grief and hard times the first settlers of Indian Territory endured to stay here. No air conditioning in brutal heat. No heating other than a wood stove. No running water. Manual labor. And the hard times that killed mothers in childbirth and children as infants or only a few months old.

At Oakwood, there are new graves, up into the 1990s at least. A central display shows all the plots and available names is near an American flag. The grass is recently been mowed. Someone is attempting to care for this small plot of history. There are phone numbers to call. They've updated the infant graves and marked them the best they can after all these years.

A lonely Civil War vet's long shadow

Another Civil War vet's grave stands at a tilt, lonely. I can make out that he was from Iowa, but that is about it. Then there are the decorated graves of what I think must have been related, an eight-year-old girl who died in 1943, and a five-month old boy in 1940, linked with gravel and trinkets and other offerings. Nearby, you can sit on a broken marble bench and stare down at an eroded stone almost covered with grass, the name illegible. Flowers and more decorate the shrines.

Double heartbreak...two graves of a boy and girl

The old stones, the pillars and crosses and different shapes that catch my attention most. Unlike most modern gravestones that are boring in their uniformity, the old ones have so much individuality and tell stories of grief and love and hope eternal, read in the simple words, "Infant." 

Come and sit a spell and ponder mortality, and eternity

I think these people were much more in touch with life than we, because they were so much in touch with death, while we try to isolate ourselves from it.

The old stones...stories of hard lives and faith, and so much individuality