Clouds over Stroud

 Stroud, 1900

Soon to be available in print as WHISKEY TOWNS OF OKLAHOMA at Amazon.com under my

name as author. Wayne Pounds

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Author’s Note

I must be forthcoming and confess my own ancient stake in Stroud. Though I was born and reared in Chandler, where two sets of my great-grandparents homesteaded, my roots in Stroud are a generation older. They come from my mother’s family, the Earps. Her grandparents, William and Mary Frances (Wright) Earp homesteaded about four miles northwest of Stroud, and her great-grandfather Martin Van Buren Wright (1837-1914), started a United Brethren church out in that area, with the school at Oak Valley serving as the church for fourteen years. In 1926 a gusher of oil came in on the William Earp land, and his widow (he’d passed away two years before) bought each of his eleven children a farm and a new A-Model with the money. Another part of the oil money was used to build a Church of God at 9th Street and Fifth Avenue and a home for the widowed Mary Frances a few blocks away. She would soon be cheated out of the rest of the money by Bible-toting city types who sold her worthless gold bonds. Mary died in 1961 at the fine old age of 98, and the church is still standing, though for many years now it has been used as a rest home. Martin Van Buren Wright lies in the old Black Cemetery with the shades of ancestral Earps and Wrights. The discovery well is still pumping, and the land still belongs to the Earp family. Every year I get a royalty check from the oil company for about $10. I give it to my teenage daughter to bank, and tell her that when she makes her debut in society she can bill herself as an Oklahoma oil heiress.