Ghost Towns

As we get closer to the launch of the new site I wanted to take a second to introduce myself and talk about one of the newest additions to the site.  Ghost Towns.

First a little bit about me.  My name is James and I have lived in Oklahoma since 1998 after my service in the Air Force.  I moved here with my wife because she had family in the area and it seemed like it would be a good place to live and raise a family.  I am still here and have no plans to move.  Oklahoma  is a great place to live and I love the rich history of the area.  The Exploring Oklahoma History project offers me an opportunity to explore more about the state's history and share with others.

In Nov. of 2009 I started my own project called Oklahoma Ghost Towns.  It was an immediate success, but was lacking in effective user interaction.  After a few conversations with Kevin we decided we could combine our efforts and give Oklahoma a rich history website.  The ghost town database that will be part of the new site currently has about 250 ghost towns cataloged and growing.  It is estimated that there is close to 2,000 ghost towns in Oklahoma.  Oklahoma has a long history of settlement and each has their own towns that came and went.  Many of the towns are not found on any of today's maps.  You have to go back to maps from the 1800's to find some and other towns are only mentioned in writing.

Our goal is to catalog and record the history of as many of them as we can.  We invite the good people from around the state to help us as well.  We realize that traveling to each and everyone of them will take us years (if not decades) to do on our own.  We have submission forms available for members to submit information to us about ghost towns and a Flickr group created just for pictures of the ghost towns that we can share with others on this site.  We are excited about the upcoming launch of the new website and look forward the history we will share.