Picher, Oklahoma: The Mining Town Bought Out Over Lead Poisoning and Cave-Ins

Summary

Picher was a lead and zinc mining town in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, the heart of the Tri-State Mining District that once stretched across the Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri borders. Mining began in 1913 after lead and zinc were discovered on Harry Crawfish's claim, and the boom was so explosive that the settlement — named for O. S. Picher of the Picher Lead Company — incorporated in 1918 and peaked at 14,252 residents by 1926. For three decades the district was among the most productive ore fields on Earth, supplying more than half the lead and zinc used by the United States in World War I and an estimated $20 billion worth of ore between 1917 and 1947.

The ore came at a hidden cost. Beneath the town the ground was honeycombed by hundreds of miles of abandoned tunnels and shafts, while above it rose mountains of crushed mine waste — called "chat" — laced with lead, zinc, and cadmium. Children climbed and swam in the chat piles for recreation, and wind carried fine, contaminated dust across the community for decades after the last mine closed in 1967. By the late twentieth century Picher had become the textbook case of a town that could not be cleaned, only emptied.

In 1983 the surrounding area was designated the Tar Creek Superfund site, one of the first and most intractable on the national priority list. A 1994 study by the Indian Health Service found that roughly 35 percent of local children carried blood-lead levels above the federal threshold of concern, and a 2006 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study concluded that 86 percent of Picher's buildings — including the school — sat over ground at imminent risk of collapse. Federal and state authorities responded with a voluntary buyout funded through Superfund and other appropriations.

An EF4 tornado on May 10, 2008, killed six people in Picher and destroyed scores of homes, accelerating an exodus that was already underway. Most remaining residents accepted relocation checks; the city government formally cancelled Picher's incorporated status on September 1, 2009, and the municipality was fully dissolved in the years that followed. Today Picher survives only as a near-empty ghost town surrounded by toxic chat piles, its name a byword for the limits of environmental remediation.

Timeline

Before It Was Erased

Picher was a classic American boomtown, conjured almost overnight from the prairie when high-grade lead and zinc were struck in 1913. Within a decade it held more than 14,000 people, a downtown of theaters, banks, and storefronts, and a sprawling industrial fringe of headframes, mills, and rail spurs. The Tri-State district around it was so rich that miners spoke of it as the place that armed two world wars, and the town's identity was inseparable from the ore beneath it.

The same prosperity that built Picher also reshaped its landscape into something monstrous. Crushing the ore produced enormous volumes of waste rock, and the tailings were simply piled where they fell, forming gray artificial hills — chat piles — that loomed over streets, schools, and yards. Acidic, metal-laden water filled the abandoned workings once pumping stopped in 1967, and Tar Creek ran orange with mine drainage. For a generation the contamination was treated as scenery rather than hazard; children sledded down the piles and families lived in their shadow.

Even as the mines fell silent, the physical town persisted: churches, a school system, the Ole Miner Pharmacy, and a tight community proud of its hard-rock heritage. Generations of families had been born, worked, and buried there, and the high-school sports teams, civic clubs, and main-street businesses gave Picher the texture of any small American town. That endurance made the eventual decision to dissolve Picher all the more wrenching, because what was being abandoned was not an empty industrial site but a living place — with deep roots and stubborn loyalties — that simply could no longer be made safe for the people who loved it.

The Decision

The unraveling of Picher was driven less by a single order than by an accumulation of scientific findings that made habitation indefensible. The 1983 Tar Creek Superfund listing established federal authority over the contamination, and the 1994 finding that about 35 percent of local children had elevated blood-lead levels reframed the chat piles from eyesore to public-health emergency, especially for the young whose neurological development was most at risk.

The decisive blow came from below ground. The 2006 Army Corps of Engineers subsidence study concluded that the overwhelming majority of Picher's buildings stood over collapse-prone mine workings, meaning that even a perfectly clean town could swallow itself without warning. Combined contamination and structural risk left no remediation path, and federal and state agencies, working with the Quapaw Nation, Oklahoma's Department of Environmental Quality, and the Lead-Impacted Communities Relocation Assistance Trust, funded a voluntary buyout to relocate residents of Picher, neighboring Cardin, and Treece, Kansas.

The EF4 tornado of May 10, 2008, which killed six and leveled large parts of the town, turned a slow buyout into a near-total departure; rebuilding made no sense on poisoned, undermined ground. By June 2009 most remaining residents had received federal relocation checks, and on September 1, 2009, the city cancelled Picher's incorporation. A handful of holdouts — most famously pharmacist Gary Linderman, the "last man standing," who kept the Ole Miner Pharmacy open until his death in 2015 — outlasted the official end, but the community as an entity was gone.

Contributing Factors

What's There Now

Picher today is a near-empty ghost town set against a skyline of gray chat piles that still tower over its abandoned streets. Most structures have been demolished or stand derelict, the schools and churches are gone, and the once-busy downtown is silent. A small local museum and the memories of former residents preserve its identity as a place that armed two world wars before being poisoned by its own success.

The Tar Creek Superfund cleanup continues decades after the buyout, with crews working to stabilize chat piles, address acid mine drainage, and remediate contaminated soil — an effort officials have said could take many more years to complete. The site remains a sobering reminder that some environmental damage outlasts the communities that caused it.

For the scattered diaspora of Picher, the loss is personal as well as physical: reunions, oral-history projects, and the lingering attachment of holdouts like Gary Linderman testify to a community that legally ceased to exist but never fully disappeared from its people's lives. Former students still gather for class reunions despite having no town to return to, and researchers continue to study Picher as a cautionary archetype of the American mining frontier — a place that gave its lead and zinc to the nation and received poisoned water, poisoned children, and a poisoned future in return. The chat piles, visible for miles across the flat Oklahoma plain, remain the most enduring monument to what the town built and what it cost.

Lessons

References

• Picher, Oklahoma Wikipedia
• Tar Creek Superfund Site Profile US Environmental Protection Agency
• Picher (Ottawa County) Oklahoma Historical Society
• Last business gone: Holdout Picher businessman Gary Linderman dies at 60 Tulsa World