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Ghost Town Continued from Page 35


Then the buyout rumors started in the early 2000s. Journalists, fi lmmakers, gawkers and glory hunters started to arrive. The government was evacuating the towns in the Tar Creek min- ing area, making offers to the remaining resi- dents to purchase the homes or relocate them to safer areas. In 2010 the last family left Cardin. All the buildings came down, the homes leveled or moved off. The town was scrapped, retired, abandoned. The EPA be- lieved the chat piles and the many ponds and streams that surround the area were fi nally too unfi t for human inhabitation. Cardin sits to- day, in ruins and peopleless.


Cardin’s Kids “We played in the waters. We drank it and we ate the fi sh. Everyone went swimming in the Cardin pool next to the Beaver mine,” says Cook, who receives electric services from Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative in Vinita. Cook stands in the now-vacant lot where his boyhood home once stood. He looks deeply at thorns and the overgrowth. “This is where the front door would have been and that was the front gate there,” he says. “Every night before quitting time they would blow the dynamite down in the mines so by morning the dust would have time to settle. You always knew it was quitting time when you heard the dynamite. It was like having an earth- quake every night.” “There is something different about Cardin people,” says Susie Jo Stone, a lifelong Cardin resident—until six years ago when she left town during the government buyout program. “I lived there all my life and it didn’t matter if you


FAST FACTS


✓ Former Yankee great Mickey Mantle’s wife Merlyn, along with Mantle’s twin sons Roy and Ray, were born in Cardin.


✓ Lead and zinc tunnels in the Tar Creek area were large enough to drive large trucks and mining equip- ment through.


✓ Several national documentaries have been made about the Tar Creek area including “The Creek Runs Red” made by PBS and “Tar Creek” by Matt Myers.


✓ Although Cardin is offi cially U.S. Government property, it is open to visitors.


✓ More information about Cardin can be found at www.cardinkids.com.


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were rich or poor, we were just a community of hardworking people. The people are what made Cardin, Cardin.”


Stone especially remembers the good times when she passes through town now and tries to see past the empty streets and vacant lots. “The ‘70s and ‘80s were the most fun in Cardin. Everyone had a motorcycle and camped on the chat and out at Red Clay like it was a resort,” Stone says. “There were little camps everywhere. It was just like living near a mountain. If you were in the chat you were safe.”


Bill Crawford, Stone’s father, is one of the last great Cardin men. At 90 years old he was a miner for 55 years with the Eagle-Picher com- pany. He returns from time to time to check up on things and to look over his lots. Crawford, who played baseball in the mines with Mickey Mantle, stands in the spot on the north end of town where his home once stood. “I built that cellar with my wife. We dug it out by hand, built it all by hand,” he says. Cardin today isn’t the contaminated disaster most reports would have you believe. Though there are few people around, there is still life. The waters beneath the chat are clear as glass. Willows and cattails thrive. Deer, hawks and geese are abundant. Much of the surrounding land has converted back to productive hay and wheat and cattle land. Cardin is alive. The story of Cardin is a story undoubtedly told best by the folks who were raised there— the daughters of miners, the sons of lumber- yard owners, cousins from out of town, dropped off for summers to play baseball in the chat and picnic at Clear Pond. They are Cardin’s Kids—the ones who deeply remember the good years, the bells, the whistles and the dynamite, the ones who cried when the build- ings were leveled, the houses and town auc- tioned off. Visit Cardin today and you’ll fi nd a surreal landscape and if you’re lucky, you’ll meet a Cardin Kid.


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