Bartlesville History

In 1923, my paternal grandfather Frank Meador and his wife Effie left hill farming in southwest Missouri to travel in a covered wagon to Dewey. Frank’s brother-in-law, Enoch Weston, was working as a power plant operator at the Dewey Portland Cement Company, and Frank was hired as a machinist.

My father was born in Dewey in 1925, and local historian Edgar Weston was his double first cousin. In 1936, amidst the Great Depression, my grandfather moved his family north to Grabham Station, a Cities Service facility about five miles south of Independence, Kansas.

I was born and raised in Oklahoma City, but my parents drove me through Bartlesville throughout my childhood when we visited Dad’s relatives living in Independence. We would usually stop in Bartlesville to have lunch with Frank and Alice Rice, former Cities Service employees who lived in the Madison Heights addition near Sooner High School. My knowledge of the town was limited to Washington Boulevard, a Pizza Hut, and their place.

As an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I worked in Scholars Programs at the University of Oklahoma, so I knew how Bartlesville then graduated many Advanced Placement and National Merit Scholars. I was thrilled to be hired in the summer of 1989 to teach physics at Bartlesville High School, and I taught that for 28 years before spending another nine years managing the district’s technology and communications efforts. I retired in June 2026.