Ghost Towns of Oklahoma

by John Wesley Morris

In the past 150 years as many as two thousand Oklahoma hamlets, villages, towns, and even cities have bloomed and then died. Some have faded away, with not even a fallen chimney to mark their location. Others have left ghostly marks of their past--mounds of rubble grown over with grass or crumbling walls of buildings. A few still cling tenaciously to life, with a few inhibitants left to call them home. In these pages John W. Morris tells about 130 of the towns. He describes how and why each was established, the activities of its people in its heyday, and the conditions that cuased it to fade away. Of course, to tell about the towns is also to tell about the people who built them and lived in them--and once had high hopes for their success.

Genres: History

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1978

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book for my dad when we first moved out to Oklahoma. To those of us raised in the east- ghost towns are interesting places, haunted, deserted, interesting.

When we arrived, we liked to travel to Oklahoma ghost towns. We'd pack a lunch, hop in the car, and head out to explore these long-forgotten places. But what we found once we started exploring was quite different than the romanticized western ghost towns we'd fantasized about.

First thing- sometimes people still lived in this dying places. There were barely surviving shops sitting next to hollowed-out buildings with fallen-in roofs. I'll never forget an eerie trip to Earlsboro, Oklahoma. The residents were wary of us, one fellow circling us in his truck as we walked down the broken main street.

I knew then that these places weren't tourist traps- these were places that were once thriving, but were coming on hard times, and the residents wanted to protect them.

I picked this book up and got to find out what happened to Earlsboro and many of the other towns we'd poked around. It was a fascinating read, depressing at times, but enlightening. Living now in a place that has been constantly inhabited since the 1600s, Oklahoma's an interesting place to learn about.

[James Corbridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall this was a good book. It only touches on a small number of the nearly 2,000 estimated ghost towns through Oklahoma's history. There are pictures for most of the towns that gives you an idea of what they looked like in their hey day. A brief history is given for each of the towns in the book and the reasons for the towns becoming a ghost town.