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That objective was to explore a Ghost Town!
I have always been fascinated by the idea of Ghost Towns, places which no longer can support a community and have been abandoned. In England there are very few of them, mostly because we value the land too highly to be able to just abandon it. In the States land must have a use to be lived on, if there is no use for the land people leave. One of the things we often remark on is that Americans do not dispose of things, they just leave them (I wrote a blog about it a couple of years ago), so when driving round you will often see houses with old cars, lawn tractors, boats just abandoned, because people have moved on. The same with houses, you often see a new house alongside a complete wreck, they have so much land that it easier to leave an old house to fall down and simply build a new one than it is to have it cleared away and reuse the land. So Ghost Towns are more common in the States and Oklahoma has a whole pile of them, for which there are a lot of good reasons (perhaps explain later).
I suppose the 'Ultimate Ghost Town' would be to have complete buildings abandoned, with no people living there at all, but that is very rare. There are also many documented Ghost towns (http://www.ghosttowns.com/) etc. But we were on our own mission, to explore a ghost town which is not in the Ghost Town Register, our very own Ghost Town! It is a town called Meridian (I shall speak more of the significance of the term Meridian in a later blog). In its Hey Day it had more that 200 inhabitants (1940).
We had been told of this town because it was where our friend Don had been raised.
We first had to find Meridian, it was an 8 mile drive to the East of our trailer park on route 105, across gently rolling hills, with plenty of creeks (a lot appearing very dry) and then 2 miles south down an old and bumpy road.
The road was red, because the earth was red and mud and dust had blown on to it and never been cleared. We had not appreciated this until we were driving north from Texas, but everywhere the earth is red coloured. We approached the village, which was eerily quiet, the first building we came to was a modern looking school and a church. To the right was a sandstone building, which Don had told us had been the original school, now a community building, then... well that was it really. There was a grid of roads, running North to South was Meridian and Horner, running East to West was 5th, 4th, Main, second and Prairie Grove. There were some houses that were occupied, but they were quite far apart, in between were big grassy spaces, or a concrete area where a house had been and been removed. Many lots were overgrown with various vehicles left on them, old cars, farm stuff. Sometimes you could make out what had been a wooden building, but was no more.
Don had given us information about his old house and the family stores his Dad had owned, a General store, which we think we found, although it is now just a pile of rubble, where you could make out the apex of a store front, across the road a shell of a store, with three arch ways, what would have been a window, a door and another window, now just spaces that showed the tangle of weeds inside. Next to that a store which was just four walls, at the front, at the top, the name W. KINCAID 1911 had been carved into the stonework. there was no woodwork left to identify the nature of the store. At this point we jumped when three ferocious dogs ran out of the one house we could see and jumped up barking wildly, as we drove round the block they followed still barking wildly. We drove along 2nd st to find the house Don grew up in, which was still there, but quite dilapidated. Driving back to Meridian st a the south end of the village was a gas station. Though sheet metal it was twisted and buckled, you could only recognise it as a gas station because of two old and rusted gas pumps (I suppose it may not have been a gas station, just someone had left gas pumps there). By this time we were feeling a) quite depressed, b) wary of the dogs and c) nervous that someone may approach us in a hostile manner, because we were 'poking around', however we saw no one, apart form the dogs the place appeared deserted. It was faintly disturbing to see buildings with no life in them, to drive through a community which had only left echoes of its past.
Fairly quickly we returned up Meridian St and left Meridian by the only road, the one we had come in on. No Tumbleweed, but a rarely disturbed layer of red dirt on the road betraying the thought that here was a road that went anywhere.
I have published some pictures below, Thank you Don for letting us share your story, I hope that they are not too painful.
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