1910- Wright City, Oklahoma and the Bonner Family

Well, it's been since May that I have written on this blog. Since then I have continued to research great grandfather, Thomas Henry Bonner. I have made some progress and will soon blog some of the information I have gathered. In the process of gathering information, I have realized that the 1910 census in Wilson, Choctaw, Oklahoma was an important one in my collection of information.

On that census, great grandmother Edna Bonner is widowed, working as a laundry woman and has five children. She indicated that the children's father was from Maine. The older of her sons was working at the Choctaw Lumber Company, probably to help support the family. Her other three sons also worked there as seen on their draft registration cards. I have since come to learn of the importance of the Choctaw Lumber Company to the area since 1910 and the importance of lumbering in the Bonner family.

The Choctaw Lumber Company became known as Dierk's Choctaw Lumber Company, named by the Dierk's brothers. They originally established the company in Bismark, OK which was not too far from Wilson, where the Bonner family was living. Bismark had it's first post office in 1910. So, here I am 100 years later trying to learn about the Choctaw Lumber Company and the reasons for Edna to have moved to that area after great grandfather died. Around 1920, the name of the town of Bismark was changed to Wright City. This year Wright City celebrated it's 100th Anniversary and had a celebration with parades, bar-b-ques and rodeos.

While exchanging emails with my friend and cousin, Muriel Sims Manning from Wright City, I began asking her questions about the area and the lumbering business. As she started to tell me about Wright City, I realized I could learn a good bit from her. Although she moved there 30 years after the Bonner's moved to the area, things might not have changed too much.

Muriel wrote several descriptions of the area for me and I would like to share one of them today. She wrote this in July 2010 at age 77. What follows are the words of Muriel Sims Manning and I think they paint a pretty clear picture.



"I moved to Wright City, OK in March of 1944 from Cove, Ark. I was 11 years old on March 31. The hwy.3 & 7 ended at the North Pole store, a short road ran from there to old 98 that ran from Idabel across a low water bridge on the Glover River thru Wright City to Valliant.In Wright City there was a saw mill, a planer, a box & window plant, a reworking plant, dry kilns, power house and a log pond where they unloaded logs into from the Dierks log train that had hauled the logs from the woods & Clebit called (the front). The train came in late evenings unloaded the logs and went back to Clebit that night. The T.O.& E. train hauled logs and ran from Dierks, Ark. to Valliant, Ok. There was a passenger car and a Depot. People rode the train to Valliant, OK and shopped then rode back to Wright City the same day. The Depot had an office and two waiting rooms one for whites and one for coloreds. There was a company office, an ice plant where they froze blocks of ice to sell.The town had an empty bank building, a post-office, a cafe, a barber shop with a dry cleaners in back. There was a doctor’s office on west side of the street and a boarding house and a hotel, an empty apartment building at the back. On the east side there was a movie theater, a big department store with groceries and clothes in the middle, on left side hardware, on the right side a drug store with a drink fountain & ice cream. In the middle, upon a platform, there was a thing where when people charged things. They put the ticket on a t and pulled a string that sent it to the platform. And Mrs.Bush, the store manager’s wife, took the ticket off and sent the carrier back to the department that it came from. If things were paid for with money, there were round paper mills for tax. On pay day there were two check lines, one for whites and Indians and one for coloreds. Another line to go thru to cash the checks and pay for the things charged that week. Some were lucky to have a few dollars left, a few dollars a week for house rent.There was a jail, a rock school for whites & Indians, a grade school for coloreds, they had a colored high school the other side of Valliant. There was an Assembly Of God Church, a Baptist church, a Methodist church, and a Colored church, a cemetery across the rail road tracks and behind the plants. This was our old town. Dierks sold to Weyerhaeuser about 1968/9. The mills closed down in 2009."

By Muriel Sims Manning, age 77 years old
July 8 ,2010