Shockingly, there are still a number of people living in the area, fewer inside what would be "city limits." Ingalls Not much is known about the history of this town to anyone outside this town. A post office operated in Lenora from Mato June 30, 1955. The community was founded in 1892 and had a population of 400 in 1900.
Lenora is an unincorporated community in Dewey County, Oklahoma, United States. In fact, the Wikipedia entry on this old town consists of just the following. If you were to Google "Lenora Oklahoma," you'd find very few results. It's still too early to know the results of the 2020 census, but odds are, there's at least one holdout still living in Picher. As more and more of these toxic discoveries were made, the population eventually dwindled to just 20 residents in the year 2010.
Amazingly, even as late as 2000, there were still some 1600 people living there. The horrors of unregulated industry left deep scars across the lives of those who had no idea. Abandoned and illegally dumped waste sites lead to horrifying discoveries among the children of Picher, nearly a third of them suffering from lead poisoning in their youth. They provided jobs, workers provided revenue, and when the Environmental Protection Agency realized they'd been mining unrestricted for some hundred years, the discoveries were devastating.Ĭave-ins became a regular thing, houses crumbled, foundations fell. Naturally, some big corporation sprung up to capitalize on it. It was a piece of land heavy in minerals like zinc and lead. Corporations took as much from the land as they could and left every resident there wondering what to do next. It's a famous town known for its insane failure. You know, it's not the first time I've talked about Picher, Oklahoma here. It's admirable, but once in a while, you have a need for easy access to Buffalo Wild Wings. People do still live there, managing to carve out a living in whatever industry they've chosen. It built up around an oil boom, produced millions of dollars, and when the wells went dry, all the money moved out leaving scraps and agriculture for those still homesteading generational properties. Now that's a small, dead town.įunny enough, it's a town that got its start like so many long-gone Northern Oklahoma towns. It's such a remotely located "ghost town" out in the middle of nowhere, even Google hasn't been through there to get a street view map built.
but I hadn't heard of it before seeing it somewhere online. You'd think, is located in my childhood backyard, I would have heard of Skedee before. Once adorned with long-removed neon letters, it was once exactly the type of service station you would picture on Route 66. It earned "Historical Registry" status back in the 90's, even though it's decrepit and falling apart still today. Funny enough, the Magnolia Service Station there is the big draw.