Meador Manor

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is from what was once Platt National Park. The image is of Bear Falls, a surprising choice to me given the other opportunities there of Sulphur’s artesian Vendome Well, the old mineral water fountains, or Lincoln Bridge. I believe that flood damage eroded away some of the upper layers of the falls dam over the decades since the postcard image was taken.

I have been to the park many times, but I don’t recall ever photographing Bear Falls, which vary seasonally with the level of Travertine Creek. So I draw upon the photographs shared by others in recent years.

The park was pretty small in 1941. Those who study the map below will see that a State Tubercular Hospital used to be adjacent to it; that 1921 facility is now the Sulphur Veterans Home. It is about 3,000 feet southwest of Bear Falls.

When I visit the area, I’m much more likely to visit Little Niagara farther upstream, which has upper and lower falls. When I was a kid, my parents usually camped in their Yellowstone trailer over in the Rock Creek campground at the west end of the park. It was near the Buffalo Pasture, which had a small herd of bison brought over from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in the 1920s. In 2023, the recreation area shifted the small herd from the 84-acre pasture used since 1934. The old pasture had built up too much woody overgrowth, and a new 42-acre one offered better grazing. There are plans to use both pastures over time to allow for prairie restoration and maintenance.

When I was an adult, my father and I once camped at the park in one of his Volkswagen campers. We rode our bicycles eastward for miles along Perimeter Road to visit Little Niagara. I have fond memories of a local bluegrass instrumental group performing at the Travertine Nature Center at the east end of the park.

The CCC at Platt constructed five dams along the creek, including one at Bear Falls and the lower dam at Little Niagara. One of the falls at Bear Falls and the upper dam at Little Niagara appear to have been natural features, although there is evidence of some concrete work at the upper dam of Little Niagara.

Farther downstream along Travertine Creek, just before it empties into Rock Creek, is Lincoln Bridge, which was built in 1909 on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth as the first major improvement in the park, seven years after the federal government purchased 33 mineral springs from the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations to create the Sulphur Springs Reservation. It was renamed Platt National Park in 1906 in honor of Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut, who had helped establish the area.

Platt was not a very big national park, but it attracted people with its “healing waters” which came out of the ground cold at about 63 degrees Fahrenheit. A 1941 park booklet, published about the same time as the postcard, addresses Pavilion Springs, Bromide Spring, and Medicine Spring. The most significant sulphur springs in the park are Hillside, Pavilion, and Black Sulphur Spring, which still flow, although Hillside and Black Sulphur have bacterial contamination and are no longer safe to drink. The major bromide springs were Medicine and Bromide, but those have stopped flowing.

After World War II, Platt became more popular, hitting one million visitors for the first time in 1949 as people were now more attracted to recreational and outdoor opportunities than water cures. The Lake of the Arbuckles was constructed in the 1960s in the Arbuckle Recreation Area, and in 1976 that and the old national park were combined into the Chickasaw National Recreation Area that is mapped below. To get your bearings, Cold Springs Campground at the upper right is where Bear Falls is located.

The water cure movement was long gone, vanquished by modern medicine, and Platt was demoted since it was small and lacked scenic grandeur. The act was part of my education in the frequent humbling of my home state.

My favorite attraction is Bromide Hill near the Rock Creek campground where my parents often camped. That long mound of conglomerate rock rises 140 feet above Sulphur and the park.  For millennia rivers washed rocks down from the Arbuckle Mountains and lime in the water cemented them into what is now Bromide Hill, which is tall enough to transition from oak, ash, and elm trees into short grass and prickly pear cacti.   An overlook provides a great view of Sulphur and is called Robbers Roost since local legend says outlaws once used the location.

The Vendome Artesian Well was drilled in 1922 about eight feet outside the park’s main entrance, and it produced 2,500 gallons of water per minute from the Arbuckle-Simpson aquifer due to hydraulic pressure. It became part of the recreation area in 1979, and in 1998 a new well was drilled about 20 feet west of the original one, featuring a steel casing to resist corrosion. Visitors may safely drink from it, but most of my friends have declined to do so thanks to its distinct aroma of hydrogen sulfide.

Interestingly, the chloride-to-bromide mass ratio of its water suggests that the 1% of its output that is brine is a product of evaporated seawater from ages ago. The groundwater flowing from the well is about 10,500 years old by Carbon-14 dating, which is quite different from the freshwater springs and wells flowing from unconfined portions of the aquifer.

Wendy and I enjoy visiting Sulphur, where we stay in one of the special suites at The Artesian Hotel, which is run by the Chickasaws. We eat in its Springs at the Artesian restaurant and browse its shops, purchasing some of the tribe’s Bedré Fine Chocolate treats.

Tomorrow’s postcard will take us much farther south, to Lake Murray.

Today’s postcard from a 1940 Oklahoma souvenir pack is of downtown Tulsa. Years ago I did a self-guided Art Deco tour of the fabulous lobbies and the like constructed in downtown Tulsa in the roaring 1920s, when it truly was the Oil Capital of the World.

A 2009 survey identified 23 Art Deco ZigZag, 13 Art Deco PWA, and 7 Art Deco Streamline buildings. Below I have tried to identify the major buildings in the 1940 postcard.

Many of those survive, although the Hotel Tulsa at the right center was demolished in 1973 to be replaced by the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.

The above image from Google Earth only renders some of the buildings in 3D, exaggerating the issue, but a reality is that 50% of all the surface area of downtown Tulsa is now streets or surface parking. Streetsblog and other publications have named it one of the worst downtown “parking craters” in the country. A lot of low buildings and trees were wiped out in the past 65 years.

The tallest building is now the BOK Tower, which has 52 stories in its 667 feet. Architect Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center towers in New York City, originally proposed a pair of small towers for John Williams’ corporate headquarters in Tulsa. Williams famously grabbed one of the model towers and put it atop the other. That led to a building almost precisely half the scale of one of the World Trade Center towers, interrupting Boston Avenue.

• Tom McCarthy’s reel about the BOK Tower

It opened as One Williams Center in 1976 but became known as the BOK Tower in the 1980s thanks to the bank being the primary tenant and signage holder. It was the tallest building in Oklahoma until the Devon Tower in Oklahoma City surpassed it in 2011 on its way to topping out at 844 feet.

In 2001, Williams Communications built a 15-story glass office building just to the east of the BOK Tower. It was designed to use about half of the energy for a building of its size. However, a telecom bubble burst and took down the company. Tulsa leaders opted to buy it for $52 million and consolidated 940 city employees into their new City Hall at One Technology Center.

The Mid-Continent building is an engineering marvel. Josh Cosden built a refinery on the west side of river in Tulsa, and in 1918 his neogothic 16-story building was completed downtown. In the oil boom of the 1980s, a twin building was added to the side, and an amazing 20-story addition was built atop the new building, cantilevered above the original building with a 10-inch gap separating them. Tom McCarthy’s great short reel about it is a treat.

A Bartlesville Connection

110 W 7th was constructed in the early 1970s as the new national headquarters for Cities Service. I was familiar with it as a kid because my father worked for Cities Service Gas in Oklahoma City, and when Cities Service Oil moved its headquarters out of Bartlesville in the late 1960s, its corporate headquarters moved to the new building in Tulsa. My father would point it out to me when we drove through Tulsa on our way to visit relatives up in Independence, Kansas.

Additional Bartlesville connections are the Philtower and the Philcade, which were both built by Waite Phillips, the brother of Bartlesville’s own oil tycoon, Frank Phillips. Waite sold his oil company for $25 million in 1925, and beginning that year, he and his wife Genevieve gave away half of everything that they earned.

He built the 24-story Philtower in 1928, with a mix of Gothic Revival and Arto Deco stylings. The marble lobby has an impressive English fan-vaulted ceiling and bronze chandeliers.

• Tom McCarthy reel on the Philtower

A church across the street moved, and Phillips bought that property and had the Philcade constructed, with his plans becoming increasingly ambitious. It scaled up from six stories to thirteen by its completion in 1931. In 1937, it became the first fully air-conditioned office building in Tulsa and gained a penthouse on a 14th floor. Its lobby was the city’s first indoor shopping mall. The lobby ceiling was originally painted with classical designs, and when Phillips walked in upon completion he ordered it redone in gold leaf with a glazed overlay of Art Deco designs.

In 1938, he donated his 72-room Villa Philbrook mansion in Tulsa to the city, and it became the Philbrook Museum of Art. Waite and his wife Genevieve moved into the 23-room 3,000 square foot penthouse atop the Philcade. A popular attraction on architectural tours is the 80-foot tunnel under 5th Street connecting the Philtower and the Philcade. Phillips brought in miners to dig it in secret as a safe way for him to go between his residence atop the Philcade and his offices in the Philtower in a time when some wealthy people had been kidnapped for ransom.

In 1938 and 1941, he donated 127,000 acres of his ranch in New Mexico to the Boy Scouts and threw in the Philtower as an endowment. Waite and Genevieve moved to the Bel Air neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, where he died in 1964, with the University of Southern California as a primary beneficiary of his estate.

There are lots of other fascinating buildings in downtown Tulsa, even with all of its parking lots. Take a look at the reels by the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture.

Symbols of Merger Mania

My view of downtown Tulsa, bracketed by the former Williams and Cities Service towers, is colored by the petroleum industry merger mania of the early 1980s. I knew about Cities Service Oil in Bartlesville and Tulsa, but over three decades my father had risen to lead Gas Measurement for Cities Service Gas in Oklahoma City.

In June 1982, the corporate raider T. Boone Pickens made an offer to take over all of Cities Service. Cities announced it planned to resist, and then Gulf Oil entered the bidding war. The companies battled until August, when Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum entered the fray and took on sizable debt to take over Cities.

Hammer sold off many of the old company’s assets, and that included Cities Service Gas, which was sold in September 1982 to Northwest Energy of Salt Lake City. My father flew out to Utah many times as the companies merged their operations. However, in August 1983 Allen & Co. began talking of merging with Northwest Energy, prompting the Williams Companies of Tulsa to take over Northwest Energy, and thus the former Cities Service Gas.

Williams reneged on promises and announced that the Oklahoma City offices would be closed and the remaining employees transferred to its headquarters in Tulsa. When I was a high school senior, my father took an incentive retirement package offered to all employees age 55+ and thus ended his career at age 58 after 32 years with Cities Service Gas and a couple of years with Skelly.

My own career would be indirectly impacted by the petroleum industry’s periodic convulsions. T. Boone Pickens would go on to attack Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville in 1984, followed by Carl Icahn, and the company’s successful defense against those takeover attempts led to an immense amount of debt and restructuring. Phillips finally fell victim to another era of consolidation when it merged with Conoco in 2002, changing the demographics of Bartlesville. Those rippled along, finally leading me to leave the classroom in 2017 and spend almost a decade in administration before my own retirement at the end of June 2026.

Tulsa lost its “Oil Capital of the World” claim to Houston by 1980, and since then over 100 energy companies relocated their corporate headquarters or established major operations centers in Houston, including Oklahoma’s Chesapeake/Expand, Devon, ConocoPhillips, Kerr-McGee, CITGO, and Halliburton. Texas now has a stronger association with oil than does Oklahoma, but the Sooner State will always retain its association with First Peoples. Tomorrow’s postcard will remind us that a large part of Oklahoma was once Indian Territory.