Why the Government Bought an Entire Town and Erased It

In the far northeast corner of Oklahoma there are mountains that should not be there. They are grey, they are hundreds of feet high, and they are not dunes — they are chat piles, the crushed rock left over from a century of lead and zinc mining, heaped over a town. Children used to play on them. Families used the grey gravel in their driveways and sandboxes. It is full of lead. By the 2000s the federal government had determined the ground under that town was honeycombed with mine workings and liable to collapse, the water was poisoned, and a devastating share of the children had lead in their blood at levels that damage developing brains. So the government bought the town. All of it. And while it was still emptying out, a tornado came through and destroyed most of what was left. Picher was struck from the map in 2009. Oklahoma has only been a state since 1907, and it has an extraordinary number of dead towns inside that span. In this documentary we walk through 13 of them. Whizbang, an oil boomtown that went from nothing to thousands and back inside twenty years. Doaksville, capital of the Choctaw Nation, where the last Confederate general surrendered two months after Appomattox — not at Appomattox. Clearview, one of more than fifty all-Black towns founded in this state, more than in the rest of the country combined. Lugert, destroyed by a tornado and then drowned by a dam, which still reappears out of the lake in drought years. Kaw City, which the Army Corps moved uphill before flooding the ground it came from. Texola on Route 66. Boggy Depot. And Cardin, which voted itself out of existence. If you're interested in abandoned places, ghost towns, Oklahoma history, Route 66, Native American history and forgotten America, this one is for you. Subscribe for more documentaries on America's forgotten towns and abandoned places. 0:00 The Gray Mountains of Oklahoma 0:56 A State Built on Vanishing Towns 6:14 When the Army Corps of Engineers Moved In 12:18 The Legacy of All-Black Municipalities 16:21 The Final Days of a Mining Giant