Volume 9 , Issue 22

Kendrick/Burdick of Oklahoma

"I'm always interested in ANY Oklahoma history. I was born in Britton (now north part of OKC) and am 3rd generation Oklahoman with NO Indian blood (it's rare to any kind of American without being part Native American)!

My great-grandfather, William Harvey Burdick was a cowboy and sometimes deputy marshal who brought his family with him when he came into the badlands looking for outlaws, and because of this my grandmother, Martha Elizabeth (Burdick) Kendrick was born in a covered wagon at Stonewall (south-east of Ada), Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory in 1886 (three years before the first Oklahoma land run in 1889).

When it was announced that there would be a "run" for free land, my great-grandfather went back outside the territory to make a legitimate run for a city lot of his own and then came back in and staked his claim in downtown Oklahoma City. He later sold his claim to a fellow lawman, Charley Colcord.

Charley became the first police chief of the new city and eventually became a land developer. On the lot he bought from my grandfather, and some other lots he'd acquired, he built OKC's first skyscraper, a building that still bears his name, the Colcord Building (about 3 blocks south of the Murrah Building).

His daughter Martha Elizabeth married Ernest Chasteen Kendrick who'd been born in Harrison, Arkansas and they began a family. First a daughter, Fay and then when they lived on a farm near Lindsay, I. T., my dad and his twin brother were born (just before statehood). Eventually the Kendrick's wound up in Britton, Oklahoma where they operated a grocery store at the corner of Britton Road and Western. About 20 years later, my own parents (and their three sons) had another store just about a block west of that original one." -- Roy
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