The story
Picher was the capital of the Tri-State lead-zinc district that armed both world wars — 14,000 residents at peak, working ground so honeycombed that 'chat' waste piles rose like gray mountains over the schools. The bill came due generations later: lead in the children's blood, cave-in zones under a third of the town, and a federal buyout through the 2000s.
A 2008 EF4 tornado tore through the half-emptied town as if to close the argument; the municipality dissolved in 2009 and the last holdout, pharmacist Gary Linderman, died in 2015. Today the chat piles still loom over empty street grids — the starkest environmental ghost town in America. The site remains a Superfund area: look from public roads, don't climb the chat.
What remains today
Street grids, scattered gutted structures, the mining-field moonscape of chat piles — inside the Tar Creek Superfund site.
From the archives
Zinc mine. Picher, Oklahoma
Zinc smelter worker. Picher, Oklahoma
Zinc miner's home. Picher, Oklahoma
Production. Zinc. A thickener at a zinc concentrator. From the Eagle-Picher plant near Cardin, Oklahoma, come
Picher turns up on 6,854 digitized newspaper pages from Oklahoma — read them free in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection.
Source: Library of Congress digital collections.
Questions from the field
- Why was Picher abandoned?
- Decades of lead-zinc mining left toxic dust, poisoned groundwater, and cave-in risk under much of the town; federal buyouts emptied it through the 2000s and the city dissolved in 2009.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
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Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 1096611
- — EPA — Tar Creek Superfund site
- — Oklahoma dissolution records, City of Picher (2009)