Volume 9 , Issue 22

Early Day Perry, OK

"The photo of early day Perry is the one included here. The barn with the sliding doors (near the top) was in about the middle of the 10 lots of the former lumber yard where my antique mall now sits. That barn was (I think) a livery stable plus feed store and coal storage for sale. There are still a couple of concrete coal bins at the back of my property next to the alley. I think that the large building across the street south was a bottling plant and an ice plant. The land that it sat on was part of "Hell's Half Acre". The view is looking towards the northeast.

That brick building I mentioned still has a dug well in one corner that was used by the cowboys to water their horses and other livestock when they came into town. There is an underground stream (perhaps a river) that meanders back and forth across Fir (it comes from somewhere up north of Perry) and is thought to feed a part of cow creek somewhere, and perhaps goes on south to Lake Carl Blackwell. It feeds a well that's also on the courthouse square and has never been known to run dry. In the days of drouth, the grass and trees have been watered by a pump there in order to not deplete the towns' water supply. All during our previous two years of drouth, my well still maintained 8 feet of clear water in it!

Those buildings you see across the road south of my property are sitting on the grounds of the "Hell's Half Acre"! So far as I know, the only two buildings in the photo that "might" still exist, are the brick building on my property, and that cotton gin mentioned before. To my knowledge, everything else has been razed and new buildings built on the land. The Santa Fe tracks on the other side of that wooden depot are still in use (we have 5 tracks currently in use by the BNSF and they've been replacing ties under them for several weeks now. Last week they were unloading more ties from a work train to use under the old Frisco tracks and yes, I took some pictures of the unloading process.

Incidentally, while some of you folks were getting flooded that past few days, here in Perry my rain-gauge only collected about 2-1/2" of water and our gas prices have hovered around $3.099 for regular unleaded." -- Roy K.
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