Tag: history

We’ve all done it – driven past an abandoned building and wondered about the story behind the weathered wood and paint, the dilapidated stairs and the unkempt property filled with items from a bygone era. Amy Hedges has turned those musings into a website, appropriately called Forgotten Oklahoma, with more than 70,000 followers. “I remember when I was a kid driving...

Kate Barnard was a woman in politics long before it became a norm and had influence on Oklahoma’s early history … before she could even legally vote in 1920. Barnard took up the causes of children and poor and incarcerated people, and she ultimately paid a high price when her convictions ran perpendicular with popular sentiments. She knew what needed...

Get some fresh Maine lobster, straight from the cold waters of the North Atlantic, add melted butter and you have the recognized king of seafood. Just as we go to New Orleans for gumbo and Philadelphia for cheesesteak, it’s only right to go to Maine for lobster. And when GetMaineLobster.com offers a tour of Portland and its environs at a...

Before gargantuan, high-tech turbines dotted Oklahoma’s plains, pioneers harnessed wind energy with wooden-and-metal contraptions that allowed them to survive. Many are still in use today. That slice of history is chronicled with real-life and functional exhibits at the Shattuck Windmill Museum. Opened in 1996, the project was the dream of Phillis Ballew and her husband, Dan, who showed how windmills...

Tucked between the Ouachita National Forest and the Arkansas River lies an old town with some unusually progressive elements. Poteau pitches itself as “Above the Ordinary,” and two examples – one historically significant; one culturally recent – bear that out. In 1955, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board decision, Poteau became the first Oklahoma municipality to...