Day 18, Saturday, March 2, 2024: Hobart, Oklahoma to Dallas, Texas
- Mark Carl Rom
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Hobart and Frederick, Oklahoma; Stamford, Texas
Days sober: 270
April served my order of eggs, ham, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, and coffee at the Cozy Diner, which was immediately next door to the Carnegie library in Hobart (tab, with tip: $14.93). The library would not open until 9 this bright sunny morning, so after breakfast I strolled around for a bit.
The film Flowers of the Killer Moon was filmed in Pawhuska, Oklahoma in Osage County, where the Osage tribe was living as white settlers robbed them of their oil allotments. Hobart, in Kiowa County, could easily have been a stand-in historically and architecturally. Hobart was born almost overnight when land taken from the Kiowa-Apache-Comanche Reservation was put up for sale. Hobart had grand aspirations. The Kiowa County Courthouse, in the middle of the downtown square, is a regal red brick building in a mashup of architectural styles with a Greek revival main portal, now on the National Register of Historic Places, as are the Rock Island Depot, the Hobart City Hall, and the Carnegie Library. Kitty-corner from the courthouse is the post office, in yellow Roman brick in a Mediterranean style with subtle classical details.
Today, Hobart is literally a one-stoplight town. Its streets are expansive, but there is no traffic. I walked up and down Main Street for 20 minutes this morning, and only one car passed me. Only one. On a beautiful Saturday morning. I could have stood in the middle of Main Street, shot a rifle down the street, and killed no one.
At the library, I’m again the only patron. Even so, I was unable to engage librarian Debbie in conversation. After an hour of writing, when I went on my way, I found a special treat inside the entryway: a memorial plaque to Herman and Viola Wiegand, the authors of The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism (2018) and In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries (2024), whose research I had discovered while passing through Alabama. What the Wiegand’s connection is to Hobart I am unable to discover. The Carnegie archives mention no women involved in creating the library there.
The Carnegie library in Frederick, Oklahoma, is as quiet as a closed library on a Sunday morning, except it is open this Saturday afternoon. For the fourth library in a row, no local residents were using the library. Two times it was mid-afternoon on a Friday, and two times a Saturday morning. These libraries are no doubt busier on other times, but I would have thought the times I visited would be at least somewhat popular.
As quiet as these towns are, these libraries will probably shutter by first reducing opening times and then the days they are open. Their closures seem inevitable. Like all Carnegie libraries, they are supported through tax revenues. Already most businesses – a prime source of tax revenue – have closed, and many of the residents (another source of tax funding) have left. Taxes will keep the lights on in the county courthouse, pay the police, and keep the public schools (mascot: The Bombers) open. These revenues are not unlimited. Should Frederick lose 13 percent of its population each decade, as it has for the past four, it won’t be long before its library, a light unto the town, goes dark.
Let me spitball an idea. What if the federal government devoted $5 billion to a program allocating $5 million each to 1000 small (say, population less than 5000) towns that were dying? (There are fewer than 20,000 towns with populations this size, and many of them are doing just fine.) The town’s government would receive $1 million directly, to spend as it wished so long as the funds were earmarked for public services. The other $4 million would be allocated to 2000 immigrants at $2000 each (so that a family of five would receive $10,000), with the condition that the immigrants live in that town for at least two years. Visas for the immigrants would be given to those applying in person at our southern border. The numbers presented are not especially important. We could play with the math, adjusting the total spent, the number of towns assisted, the amount they would be required to pay for public services, the number of families and their grants, and so forth, so long as the program’s basic structure remains.
Would there be a sufficient number of immigrants applying for these visas? Certainly. Would this program revitalize these dying towns? Perhaps, especially if the program was renewed every year, bringing a new influx of immigrants to the towns and a new flow of dollars into city coffers.
Would cities agree to participate, given the conditions outlined above? If economic and social development were the towns’ highest priorities, then yes. If fears regarding the changed demographics of the towns predominate, then no. I wonder which it would be. [2025 update: If rural voters are to be believed, it appears that they would rather shutter their towns than welcome a wave of immigrants.]
When I crossed over into Texas midafternoon I was greeted by a massive array of oil derricks. I mean wind turbines. Texas has long been an American leader in “green” electricity generation, with more than a quarter of the electricity it produces coming from wind and solar sources. It leads the country in electricity production from renewable resources, and it has for years.
In my plausible, if not ideal, world, Texas would brag about its place as the national energy powerhouse, as it will continue to provide the oil and gas that the US currently needs as it leads the way to a green and sustainable future. That is not the real world. In recent years, Texas has turned against renewable energy as it has become so big that it threatens deeply entrenched oil and gas interests. In addition to the economic clout behind Big Oil is the politicization of energy production, with green energy portrayed as a liberal priority…and so, in Texas, it must be opposed.
Texas received 32 Carnegie public libraries. Most are long gone, including those in larger cities like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, and only five serve as public libraries today. Stamford has one of those survivors. Its historical records have not been digitized for the Carnegie archives. I would characterize the demolition of the libraries, and the lack of interest in their histories, to the fact that Texas always looks to the future, not the past. Its reverence for the Alamo, and its continuing love for the legacy oil industry, would make that characterization inaccurate.
Will was my second couchsurfing host. He met me, fully naked, at the door of his charming white brick home. Yes, naked. Will’s couchsurfing profile stated that he was a ‘naturist’ and preferred to go sans clothing while at home. He posted this so that there would be no surprises or misunderstandings. I joined him in his preferred attire, and we sat on his deck (shielded by a privacy fence) until it got chilly after the sun set. He explained that his couchsurfing philosophy was that the hosts should live as they normally do, so that their guests could see them (in this case, literally) as they truly are. Will’s reviews left by his guests on the Couchsurfing app were highly complimentary, and none of them even mentioned his clothing optional policy because any potential guests could already have read about that.
Will, the red-haired son of Irish ranchers, had grown up in the tiny town (pop. 331) of El Refugio on the Mexican border in southeast Texas. Before returning to Texas in 2016, he had spent eight years living in the upper west side of Manhattan, where he had been (and, back in Texas, continues to be) the product manager of high end meats and cheeses for a ritzy grocery chain. If you had questions about the different kinds of jamon iberico, he could answer them.
