Oklahoma USA

Oklahoma USA 🌾 The people. The places. The memories. Showcasing the beauty and spirit of the Sooner State, one photo at a time.
📍 Oklahoma, USA

08/28/2026

A whole city could be born between sunrise and sunset. 🌅

At noon on April 22, 1889, a gunshot sent thousands racing across the Oklahoma prairie to claim two million acres of what had been Indian Territory. By dark, Guthrie and Oklahoma City were tent towns of thousands. The people who slipped across the line early were called Sooners, and the name stuck to the whole state.

Imagery: public domain, Library of Congress and National Archives.

08/28/2026

When you were a kid was it Mazzio’s or Pizza Hut?

08/28/2026

When every American code had been cracked, the answer came from Oklahoma in a language centuries old. 🌎

Late in World War I, the enemy had broken through nearly every code the Army used. Then officers realized a group of Choctaw soldiers from Oklahoma could simply speak to one another in their own language over the field telephone. The enemy had no way to understand a word of it. Within days the messages were flowing safely and the tide of the fight had turned.

Their language, once nearly forbidden in schools, helped win a war.

Why do you think it took so long for these men to be honored?

A teenage girl in Tulsa wrote a book that has been breaking hearts in classrooms ever since. 📖🌇S.E. Hinton was just a hi...
08/28/2026

A teenage girl in Tulsa wrote a book that has been breaking hearts in classrooms ever since. 📖🌇

S.E. Hinton was just a high school student in Tulsa in the 1960s when she wrote The Outsiders, a story of greasers and socs pulled straight from the streets around her. Years later Francis Ford Coppola brought a cast of soon to be stars to Tulsa to film it, and the words Stay Gold left the page for good.

It all came from one young Oklahoman paying close attention to her own city.

Do you remember the first book that truly stuck with you?

In a near ghost town at the foot of the Wichita Mountains, one old store still serves a legend. 🍔🏔️Meers, Oklahoma was a...
08/27/2026

In a near ghost town at the foot of the Wichita Mountains, one old store still serves a legend. 🍔🏔️

Meers, Oklahoma was a gold rush town that never quite panned out, and today almost nothing is left of it. Almost. The Meers Store has stood since 1901, and it grills a burger so big it comes on a plate, made from a special breed of longhorn cattle raised right there. People drive from hours away just to sit at those worn wooden tables.

One store, one burger, and a town that refuses to fully disappear.

What is a spot worth a long country drive where you live?

An oil man built a Florentine palace on the Oklahoma prairie, then lost almost all of it. 🏛️E.W. Marland struck it rich ...
08/27/2026

An oil man built a Florentine palace on the Oklahoma prairie, then lost almost all of it. 🏛️

E.W. Marland struck it rich in the oil fields around Ponca City and decided to build a home worthy of an Italian noble. Finished in 1928, his mansion held 55 rooms, hand painted ceilings, and its own ballroom. Within a few years the same man had lost nearly his entire fortune to Wall Street and rival oil barons.

The Palace on the Prairie still stands today, open for anyone to walk through.

If you struck it rich, would you build something grand or keep it simple?

08/27/2026

A one eyed farm boy from Oklahoma taught the whole world how to fly higher. ✈️

Wiley Post lost an eye in an oil field accident, then used the small settlement to buy his first airplane. In a plane he named the Winnie Mae he flew solo around the entire globe in under eight days. Then he built the first practical pressure suit, the direct ancestor of the gear astronauts wear in space today.

He kept pushing past every limit others thought was final.

Had you ever heard the story of the Oklahoman who helped invent the space suit?

A Broadway musical gave this state its official song, and it started with a Cherokee writer from Claremore. 🎶When Rodger...
08/27/2026

A Broadway musical gave this state its official song, and it started with a Cherokee writer from Claremore. 🎶

When Rodgers and Hammerstein opened Oklahoma on Broadway in 1943, it changed American theater forever. Ten years later its soaring title number became the official state song. The whole story grew out of a play called Green Grow the Lilacs, written by Lynn Riggs, a Cherokee playwright who set it in the territory he grew up in.

A corn field, a surrey, and a love story turned a state name into a song the whole world knows.

Can you still hear that big opening note in your head?

That giant disc on the back of the plane is a flying radar station, and Oklahoma helps keep it in the air. ✈️Just outsid...
08/27/2026

That giant disc on the back of the plane is a flying radar station, and Oklahoma helps keep it in the air. ✈️

Just outside Oklahoma City sits Tinker Air Force Base, one of the largest military installations in the country and a major employer for the whole region. The 552nd Air Control Wing flies the E-3 Sentry, an aircraft that works as an airborne command post, watching the skies for hundreds of miles in every direction.

Thousands of Oklahomans keep machines like this flying every single day.

Did you know Oklahoma City had a base this big right on its doorstep?

No state has more of the old Mother Road than Oklahoma, and no state guards its roadside wonders better. 🛣️🐋Route 66 run...
08/27/2026

No state has more of the old Mother Road than Oklahoma, and no state guards its roadside wonders better. 🛣️🐋

Route 66 runs clear across Oklahoma, and along it sit some of the most beloved stops on the whole highway. There is a smiling blue whale beside a pond in Catoosa, a perfectly round barn in Arcadia that folks swore would collapse, and a little stone cafe in Stroud that helped inspire a Pixar movie.

These are the kinds of places you pull over for on a whim and remember for years.

Which stretch of Route 66 have you driven yourself?

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Tulsa, OK

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