Tulsa Area History

Beryl Ford Collection: Unidentified Women

TCCL now has a Flickr collection with sets for events, library locations, and special collections.  Three sets in the special collections are devoted to the digital collections: local history, unknown people, and unknown places. Right now, local history is a small set featuring select images from the digital collections. The unknown people and unknown places sets consist of  images from the collections that have little information. The Beryl Ford Collection, in particular, has thousands of images with little or no information. Resources to provide detailed descriptions and historical context for the many thousands of items in the digital collections are limited. With Flickr, we want to encourage user participation in the identification of the images and to make our resources more available, discoverable, and useful. We hope that both known and unknown audiences will want to comment, share, and engage in community conversations about our shared history. As an ongoing project, we will continue to add to the images that have been uploaded there. We invite you to take a look, let us know if you can identify any of the photos, and come back regularly to see additions.

Our Friends in Portrait and Caricature, a book containing portraits, caricatures, and biographical sketches of prominent men in early Tulsa and the surrounding area, is now available online. The bulk of the work is devoted to oil men, attorneys, and bankers. This image is extracted from the entry on Carl K. Dresser which states “…but Mr. Dresser expects to build a handsome home in Tulsa, Ok.” His home, the Dresser Mansion, was built in 1919 and now serves as a popular venue for local events.

With plans for the demolition of the Downtowner at 4th and Cheyenne, librarians and other downtowners flock to the Coney Island housed in the building and hope for the restaurant’s fast relocation.

The building once enjoyed its heydey but now is in a state of disrepair.  This brochure shows the building when the inn offered guests a pool, “24-hour telephone service,” and “restful Hi-Fi background music in every room.”

 You can read about the Downtowner’s construction is this 1960 Tulsa Tribune article.

from Boing Boing via Brain Pickings

If you’re interested, the library has a number of resources about and by Woody Guthrie.

from the Beryl Ford Collection

Happy Holidays from the Digital Collections Department in the Research Center