Museum recreates pioneer life
FREDERICK, Okla. - FREDERICK, Okla. (AP) — The stories of Frances Goodknight and of the Pioneer Townsite Museum go hand in hand.
Goodknight, who turned 90 in August and still volunteers every weekday at the museum, said the idea for a museum that recreates the pioneer days of Southwest Oklahoma came to her in a daydream.
"I went to a one-room school as a child," she said. "And in later years we bought a farm, and when I stood at my kitchen window washing dishes I looked out at that school and saw the schoolhouse deteriorating. I realized within a very short time the school children were not going to realize what kind of school their grandparents went to."
It was in 1977 that Goodknight, with the help of the local Rotary Club, moved the old Horse Creek schoolhouse north of Manitou to what is now the museum site on the east side of the Tillman County courthouse.
But the founding of the museum and the formation of the Tillman County Historical Society goes back even a few years before that.
Goodknight said she and two other local women worked overtime in the mid-1970s on a two-volume historical record of the county the families, the prosperous towns, the ghost towns, and all the schoolhouses, cemeteries and churches in between.
Goodknight said they worked for years compiling the collection from personal and written interviews, and she remembers working late into the night on the books.
"I would tell my husband I'd be home at 10 or 11, and then I'd tiptoe in so I wouldn't wake him at 1:30 or 2:30 in the morning," she said. "But it was very enjoyable."
When the Rotary Club volunteered the labor to move the Horse Creek School to Frederick, the history book committee, as Goodknight called it, evolved quickly into the historical society that maintains a solid membership to this day.
She remembers when she was first asked if she had any suggestions for a historical project by one of her fellow editors on the history book committee.
"I started grinning, and she said, 'All right sister, what's up your sleeve,'" Goodknight remembers. "I said that I would love to see a one-room schoolhouse preserved."
The building was dedicated and opened in 1979, and shortly afterwards, Goodknight said, a museum collection begin to build.
"As they came in we started putting them all in place," she said of the historical displays. "You wouldn't believe how we did it, but we did it."
Frances Goodknight moved to Southwest Oklahoma from Clay County, Texas, in a covered wagon when she was 3 years old. Her dad, she said, was looking for some good farmland, and they settled on some land a few miles northeast of Frederick.
She spent most her life as a farmer's daughter until she married her husband, Arthur, in 1941.
After traveling around the world with Arthur during World War II, the couple moved back to Tillman County, bought a farm, and she became a farmer's wife.
Goodknight said the big transition in her life from the farm to "city" life happened in 1970 when the couple and their three children moved to an acreage only a mile and a half northwest of Frederick.
She gained employment as an assistant librarian for Frederick Schools in 1978, when her mother died, and began to speak out about preserving the area's history.
"When you're raised on a farm and don't have society and associations with the townspeople, you don't do those things," she said. "But when the opportunity just fell into my lap, I spoke up."
Since her work bringing the one-room schoolhouse to the site now known as the Pioneer Townsite Museum, 11 other historical buildings from the area barns, train depots, churches and mills, among others have been moved to the site for restoration and preservation.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
