The Beaches of Anadarko

     At least once a year, Joel and the kids and I pack up the car and drive south for eight hours to spend a week or so on the Gulf Coast. Sometimes we go with friends or family and sometimes we go with just us, but we always go.  On our most recent drive down to the beach I saw a herd of buffalo grazing on a farm and I pointed it out to the kids because, you know, it was a herd of buffalo.  I started to tell them about how when I was little my parents and I would go to Oklahoma every summer and how we visited a town called Anadarko where they had lots of buffalo-es (what the heck is the plural of buffalo?).  Sarah, never one to be impressed by much of anything, said "Anadarko!?  That sounds weird.  Why would you go there?  Was there a beach there?"  Um, no - there were no beaches in Anadarko. There were buffalo-es and cowboys and if I'm remembering correctly, a whole lot of heat.  Oklahoma is hot in August. Also, it's very flat - but it's flat all the time, not just in August. 

Welcome to Arkansas.
Only 300 miles to Oklahoma.

    We spent a week in Norman, Oklahoma almost every summer because that's where my dad's brother and his family lived.  We would take two days to drive from Knoxville across Arkansas and into Oklahoma because my dad is one of those "all about the journey" kind of travellers. We stopped here and there and everywhere in between because, why not, right? Um yeah - and don't get me started on the Burl Ives 8 Tracks my dad played in the car. Childhood - it leaves its scars.

     What I didn't know until very recently was that my mother's side of the family has some connections in Anadarko, Oklahoma as well.  My gg-uncle, J.L. Williams*, moved there with his wife, Nellie Ann Wolfe, sometime between 1903 and 1910.  The photo below shows J.L. and Nellie with four of their children. I can't imagine how long it took them to get from East Tennessee to Oklahoma in the early 1900s, longer than two days I guess.  I wonder if they ever got homesick for the hills and ridges they left behind in Tennessee.

The J.L. Williams Family
1959

* J.L. (Jake Lillard) Williams was born in 1887.  He was the older brother of my great-grandmother, Mary Williams Hurst.  They also had a younger sister, Catherine, and a younger brother, John.