Pioneer Camp 2011

The pioneer girls with their baskets and babies.

Martha ready to peel apples

Beautiful Baby Emma

Tired little pioneer girl

Jessie in her pioneer clothes dress and sunbonnet.

Making a cornhusk doll.

Jacob making butter from cream in a pint jar.

Good cooking!

Grandma and Ashley getting a turn on the rope swing.

Old Lantern

Prairie Rolling school

Matthew eating chicken and beans by the campfire.

Audra eating camp wagon style

Ms.  Sally Pritchit with her students.

Sarah in the sunshine

Pioneer children playing with their dolls

Old Basket Full of History

 Basket
 By Elece Hollis

Old basket, you make me wonder
You make my mind twist back
Into the spaces where time was still young.

In a thrift shop, I found you
Unwanted, uncared for, unrecognized
I saw you and took you home.

I washed dust from your weave in hottest water
Your vines drank in that liquid like gold.
I hung you on my porch to dry.

Who made you? A pioneer housewife?
I think so. I say she carried you to town with her
Saturdays on the seat of the buckboard.

Her daughter salvaged you from the leanto  later
and used you for storing her scissors,
her sewing threads, and needles.

She left you behind when
The family left for California. No room
For fragile wicker baskets.

A grocer picked you from the auctioneers goods.
He painted red letters across your front.
He set you on his countertop to hold gardening trowels.

When he retired and the store closed
You went to the small house at the edge of town.
There you carried eggs to the water pump to be washed.

You hung and dripped and the eggs dried.
The egg business drooped and you
Hung in the sun until your red letters faded.

You were stashed in a corner of the garage.
You held old gloves and dust.
Dust again like those depression years.

After the sale where noone claimed you,
You went to live in the bin of the thrift store.
You were tossed aside until I walked in.

Now you are mine. I chersihed your legacy.
I love your history. I admire your longevity.
I hope you will stay a long time here at my house.

A piece of the past. My piece of history,
Your handle still straight ready to be of service,
Waiting on my porch in the sunshine.

Old Stone Church Tahlequah

Amish Encounter

I was amused to come up behind this buggy pulled by a horse near Westville, Oklahoma recently.

 A passed the trap and waited with my camera to catch another shot when it would pass by.

 Even buggies pulled by horses must stop at the traffic lights.

 Notice they have an ice chest for hot weather rides.

The little boy looks so precarious perched on the buckboard seat.

Old Churches

Stained glass windows on the Presbyterian church. I love this one.

These two churches are located in Haskell, Oklahoma.

One ought, every day at least,to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Three Small Towns in Oklahoma

Yesterday I visited three small towns on my trip to see my granddaughter's school program. These once thriving communities are now quiet and all but abandoned. Boynton, Oklahoma is east of Okmulgee and Morris and west of Muskogee. I think a train once passed that way carrying loads of coal from Henryetta to Muskogee. 
The remains of a cotton gin greeted me as I entered the town from the north as well as a curious tall building that might have served as an office.

The gin is self deflating, like a giant amusement park ride. Its sheet metal is rusting and falling in.

I passed a post office and some old brick buildings that were all that remained of the downtown main street. The bricks were likely made in the Boynton Brick Factory. Most of the windows were out.The brickwork was nice but sadly far from restored.

 Parts and pieces had been modernized and were housing offices.

This one lost its back wall and all the windows.

 I couldn't tell what this had been, perhaps a hamburger place.

An old stone barn that can be seen through the trees across a field. 

A cemetery north west of Boynton had two signs. 

Roses bloomed at the site of home that had burned.

Boynton is the hometown of a famous Christian songwriter,

Dennis Jernigan.