Oklahoma City

“ A man in Oklahoma City when the day’s work is done has before him a prospect of broad red clayey streets, [114] muddy after rain, bristling with dust after a drought, with the sun setting at one end of them into the prairie. He can go to his cottage, or to “The Turf,” where he can lose some money at faro, or he can sit in one of the hotels, which are the clubs of the city, and talk cattle to strangers and real estate to citizens, or he can join a lodge and talk real estate there. Once or twice a week a “show” makes a one-night stand at the opera-house. ”

“ This week, on April the 19th, we mark one of America's saddest anniversaries, the first anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. It is whenthe American spirit is at its best that we find renewal in even the most desolate of our tragedies. And that is what the people of Oklahoma City have managed somehow to do. ”

“ The territory, so young but so dauntless, was already agitating the question of statehood—not only so, but of single statehood, meaning thereby the prospective engulfment and assimilation of Indian Territory, that all the land from Texas to Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas might be called by the one name—Oklahoma; a name to stand forever as a symbol of the marvelously swift and permanent growth of a white people, in spite of its Choctaw significance—"Red People."
Although Wilfred had stayed close to his farm, near Oklahoma City, he had kept alive to the rush and swing of the western life ”

“ Oklahoma City and N. I.; and Rock Island and Pacific railroads. Water-power is derived from the rapids of the river. Industries include a cold-storage plant, packing-houses, flour-mills, cottongins, brickyards, grain elevators, box, cracker and soap and patent-medicine factories. It has a considerable trade in lumber and agricultural products. Oklahoma City has a fine public-school system as well as a parochial one. Among the institutions of learning are Epworth University, Sisters of Mercy College for girls and Oklahoma Military Institute. ”

“ It lies partly in a valley, partly on an upland, in a rich agricultural region. The city is the seat of Epworth University (founded in 1901 by the joint action of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South) . Oklahoma City's prosperity is due chiefly to its jobbing trade, with an extensive farming and stock-raising region, but it has also cotton compresses and cotton gins, and various manufactures. The total value of the factory products in 1905 was $3,670,730. Natural gas is largely used as a fuel. ”

“ They are now as men playing with children’s toys or building houses of cards. Every now and then a Roger Q. Mills or a Henry W. Grady comes out of the South and West, and among these politicians and first citizens of Oklahoma City are men who only need a broader canvas and a greater opportunity to show what they can do. ”

“ A homestead holding is one hundred and sixty acres of land. The proclamation said nothing about town sites, or of the division of town sites into “lots” for stores, or of streets and cross-streets. But several bodies of men in different parts of Kansas prepared plans long before the opening, for a town to be laid out around the station, the water-tank, and the other buildings where Oklahoma City now stands, and had their surveyors and their blue prints hidden away in readiness for the 22d of April. ”

“ In the course of my journey I visited not only Little Rock and Pine Bluff, Ark., but Oklahoma City, Guthrie, Muskogee, South McAlester, and several other towns in Oklahoma, and I confess that I was surprised to note the enterprise which these coloured immigrants had shown and the progress they were making, particularly in material and business directions. I met successful farmers, who, 185having sold their farms in Texas or in Kansas at a considerable advance, had come out into this new country to re-invest their money. ”

“ Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
I was born September 1, 1842, in Bastrop, Texas, on Colorado River. My pappy was named Harvey Wheeler and my mammy was named Carolina Sims. My brothers and sisters was named Alex, Taylor, Mary, Cicero, Tennessee, Sarah, Jeff, Ella and Nora. We lived in cedar log houses with dirt floors and double chimneys, and doors hung on wooden hinges. One side of our beds was bored in the walls and had one leg on the other. Them white folks give each nigger family a blanket in winter. ”

“ It happened in the city of Oklahoma, which would require a book to itself, even considered as a background. The State of Oklahoma is a district in the south-west recently reclaimed from the Red Indian territory. What many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all America is really true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no history. It is glowing with the sense of having a great future—and nothing else. ”

“ March 23, 1889, the President issued a proclamation opening a portion of the lands to settlement at noon April 22, 1889. Before the latter date the railway company had surveyed the line of its proposed railroad through what is now Oklahoma City and market it by stakes along the center line of the right of way and by signs warning that the land was claimed for right of way and station purposes. It appears to have been then known that a townsite would be laid out on the quarter-section in which the Noble tract is located. ”

“ I have given this sketch of Oklahoma City as it impressed itself on me, because I think any man who can afford a hall bedroom and a gas-stove in New York City is better off than he would be as the owner of one hundred and sixty acres on the prairie, or in one of these small so-called cities. ”

“ Oklahoma City, according to the report of the Census Office, has a population of about 4,100, and this donation would be equivalent to nearly $10 per capita. Very little real estate, whether town-site or country property, in this Territory is yet subject to assessment for taxation. The people have not yet had time to accumulate, and Congress has received appeals for aid to relieve a prevailing distress which the Territorial authorities have found themselves unable to deal with. ”

“ Oklahoma is not rising more quickly than the temporary buildings of the workmen's city, which includes 5,000 men at least, and who are mingling the sounds of hammers on the buildings they are putting up for their temporary accommodation, with the crash of the buildings they are tearing down. ”

“ All of those who intended to enter this open-to-all-comers race for land knew that the prairie around the station would be laid out into lots. Hence that station and other stations which in time would become cities were the goals for which over forty thousand people raced from the borders of the new Territory. So many of these “beat the pistol” on the start and reached the goal first that, in consequence, the efforts ever since to run this race over again through the law courts has kept Oklahoma City from growing with even more marvellous rapidity than it already has done. ”

“ People are just as likely to boast of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich; people are just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But in Oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal structure, arrogantly affirming that it wasn't there last week. It was against the colours of this crude stage scenery, as of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that the fantastic figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note of interrogation. I was strolling down the main street of the city, and looking in at a paper-stall vivid with the news of crime, when a stranger addressed me ”

“ If anybody thinks that Americans are mostly mean and selfish, they ought to come to Oklahoma. If anybody thinks Americans have lost the capacity for love and caring and courage, they ought to come to Oklahoma.
To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life. ”

“ The commerce of the chief towns is assuming large and rapidly increasing proportions. The freight into and out of Oklahoma City in 1912 amounted to about $4,890,000, while the value of the buildings erected that year was $885,246. The assessed taxable property of the state (1910) was $860,000,000; while its railway mileage is nearly 6,000 miles. The chief lines traversing the state embrace the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific; Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé; Missouri, Kansas and Texas; Missouri Pacific; Kansas City Southern; and Texarkana and Fort Smith roads. It has 20 railroads in all. ”

“ During the decade the white population increased by 26.1 per cent, while the Negro population increased only 8.6 per cent. The white population of Oklahoma City was 82,847 and that of the Negroes 8,269. The increase in the white population since 1910 was 25,354, or 44.1 per cent, while the corresponding increase in the Negro population was 1,723, or 26.3 per cent. There were in Okmulgee 13,967 whites and 3,372 Negroes. The white population increased since 1910 11,241, or 412.4 per cent, while the increase in the Negro population during the same period was 1,996, or 145.1 per cent. ”

“ Today, every living person who was hurt by the evil done in Oklahoma City can rest in the knowledge that there has been a reckoning. At every point from the morning of April 19, 1995, to this hour, we have seen the good that overcomes evil. ”

“ Members of Congress have various ideas and have made suggestions. Law enforcement people and other concerned folks around the country have. They're going to gather up the best ideas and make these recommendations to me in fairly short order.
Mr. Bradley. Mr. President, do you think that what happened in Oklahoma City is an isolated incident carried out by a handful of people or is part of a larger, more coordinated effort involving a larger network of these groups? ”

“ At three o’clock, just three hours after the Territory was invaded, the Oklahoma Colony declared the polls open, and voting began for Mayor and City Clerk. About four hundred people voted. Other land companies at once held public meetings and protested against this election. Each land company was mapping out and surveying the city to suit its own interests, and every man and woman was more or less of a land company to himself or herself, and the lines and boundaries and streets were intersecting and crossing like the lines of a dress pattern. ”

“ It has developed greatly as a manufacturing community in recent years. It has National banks, and several daily and weekly newspapers, and contains cotton gins, flour mills, packing houses, publishing houses, oil refineries and soap factories. ”

“ A mad race for the best lands and town sites ensued. Canvas towns were laid out and each began to lay plans to secure the capital. There was at once a vast influx of settlers, and the population increased at an extraordinary rate. Additional lands were laid open to settlement in 1891, 1893, and 1901; and the scenes of the original opening were repeated. There was no government in the Territory until Oklahoma Territory was created (March 2, 1890) . ”

“ Facts above what fictions say,
Where the world with haste advances,—
Born are nations in a day!
Where the wigwam stood so lonely,
Lordly cities rise in might;
Where spread desert wildness only,
Fertile farms and homes delight.
Thou hast summoned to thy bosom
From the ends of all the earth,
All the youngest, strongest, bravest,
Full of will and wondrous worth.
O'er thy valleys grow the blossoms
Culled from earth's remotest sod;
Oklahoma! Oklahoma!
Land, O, Land of the Fair God!
Oklahoma! Oklahoma!
There is music in thy name.
There is gladness in thy glory,
There is fondness in thy fame! ”

“ OHIO, Jackson County, Petersburg vicinity, Johnson Road Covered Bridge, SW of Petersburg (08/23/84)
OHIO, Montgomery County, Dayton, South Park Historic District, Roughly bounded by Park, Morton, Hickory, and Wayne Ave. (08/23/84)
OKLAHOMA, Kay County, Ponca City vicinity, Big V Ranch House (Ranching Properties in Northwestern Oklahoma TR) , Off OK 156 (08/23/84)
PENNSYLVANIA, Bucks County, Paxson, Isaiah, Farm, (08/23/84)
PENNSYLVANIA, Cambria County, Ebensburg, Noon, Philip, House, 114 E. High St. ”

“ When, at noon, April 22, the cavalrymen who patroled the borders fired their carbines as a signal that the settlers could move across the line, a great shout went up, and the race for claims began. Hundreds crowded the trains, thousands rode on fleet horses, many rode in buggies and buckboards, others in heavy farm wagons, and some even made the race on foot. In the morning Oklahoma was an uninhabited prairie, at midday it was a surging mass of earnest, excited humanity, in the evening it was a land of many people. ”

“ Others continue in office, escaping the wiles of the enemy, not through a miracle, but through the arousing of the public conscience. Today there are some 2,000,000 people in the State of Oklahoma, and as in every other State, the great majority of them are upright citizens. ”

“ The amount of courage required to invest time and money in a prospective town in a country hitherto closed against white citizens is enormous, and it takes an American, born and bred, to make the venture. The Oklahoma cities are not boom towns, laid out on paper and advertised as future railroad and business centers ”

“ Population. From 1890 to 1900 Oklahoma was a prominent centre for native-born American colonists. The great fertility of the land was an irresistible attraction to home-seekers. The population increased from 61,834 in 1890 to 398,331 (excluding Indians—13,873) in 1900, or 544 per cent. Kansas, Missouri, and Texas have been the largest contributors to the population. The opening of additional territory since the 1900 census was taken has resulted in a large increase to the total population. Naturally the urban population is small, only 5 per cent. ”