They Really Did Come West In Old Wagons

The family Wagon Company in Abingdon.

This year is the centennial of Oklahoma's Statehood. But my memories are going back to the Semi-Centennial in 1957. Some things I learned then are just now coming into focus.

I was twelve years old in 1957. That was the 50th anniversary of Oklahoma Statehood. That was a big deal, that celebration. Most probably it was a big deal cause I was 12 years old.

In my hometown of Frederick (actually I lived on a farm, 3 and1/2 mile west of Frederick on highway five) everybody had dug out their fathers' and gradfathers' pistols and rifles and old stuff from when they came to Oklahoma and displayed it in the store windows all along the full three blocks of main street. There was one display of wagon parts and people and horse bones and old barrels and such that someone had found in a blow out back in the dust bowl. It was a remnant of long ago from some poor soul that hadn’t made across the west. “Killed by Indians” was the placard in the window. Yep the county fair was real big that year, and we had a parade, and Tex Stevens the county commissioner’s son and I rode on the Fire Engine in the parade.

We also went up to Oklahoma City and my uncle JW took me and my two cousins Frank and Jimmy and we went to the Semi-Centennial Exposition at the State Fair grounds. I saw the GM car of the future, my first microwave (ate a hotdog cooked by it in 15seconds), heard my first stereo recording, and stood in line and got myself a commemorative state medal for free.

But the thing that had escaped my memory for all these years was what my father had told me about coming to Oklahoma himself. There were these wagons in Frederick displayed on the street corners as genuine pioneer wagons that had brought people to Oklahoma.
Well, my Dad poo-poo’d them by saying that they were just old farm wagons that people had ridden in to get here. We had one back at the farm that I played on all the time he told me.


This probably what the "old wagon" looked like new.

Combining several of his stories after 50 years it finally dawned on me that he was talking about the old wooden wagon without sideboards that he used to store his scrap metal and stuff on its bed up off of the ground. I knew the wagon was the one his father had brought to Oklahoma, but it had not registered that what he was saying was that his family road to Oklahoma in the wagon. He was saying that they were one of those pioneer families.

My dad was born in March 1908 in Tazewell, Indiana. I knew from family stories that his father had gotten crossways with his own family back in Virginia and had left to come West. My father had told me more than once that his father had built that old wagon, but he forgot to mention that he had built it at his Uncles’ xxxx Wagon Factory in Abingdon, Virginia and drove it westward for several years living in various places until he finally got to Oklahoma. My Dad would have been a toddler or two years old when my grandfather decided to stop in Quanah, Oklahoma and take up a plot of land.


A page from a brochure about the company's Dump Wagon.

Now I look back at that damn old wagon and realize that it was a family heirloom of sorts that connected me all the way back to Virginia and then Pennsylvania and all the way back to Switzerland almost 400 years ago. I don’t even have a photograph of it. The last time I saw it was in February of 1959 when my Dad had given up share crop farming and had sold off everything we owned in the way of farm equipment at auction. Some farmer bought the wagon and everything on it for $25. Now that was good money in 1959. My last visual is of it was it being pulled behind a pickup truck slowly down a dirt road.

Quanah, Oklahoma is long gone now, my dad is gone too. That old wagon was so well made that it might still be around. Maybe someday I'll go down there and scout out those old farms and see if I can find it.