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Ed Galloway's Totem Pole Park

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Ed Galloway's Totem Pole Park, Foyil Oklahoma, October 2016.  

Since it looked like a storm was moving in, we skipped some Route 66 landmarks.  As it turned out, the light drizzle never seemed to get much worse and would continue well into the night.  

Nathan Edward Galloway was born in 1890 in Springfield Missouri.  When he retired in 1937, he had been teaching manual arts to orphans for over 20 years at the Sand Springs Home, an orphanage in Sand Springs Oklahoma.  He moved to this small farm near Foyil Oklahoma and from 1937 to 1961 he built and ran the Totem Pole Park.

The park has eleven sculptures/objects and one building (the Fiddle House) that were built by Mr Galloway.  The most impressive is a 90 foot tall concrete totem pole that is heavily carved with bas-relief designs.  Mr Galloway started constructing this totem pole in 1937 and finnished it in 1948.  The base of it is shaped like a large turtle and is carved out of a sandstone outcropping that was already in place.  The rest of it is primarily made from modern building materials.  A quote from the National Park Service is: "This totem pole is made of red sandstone framed with steel and wood with a thick concrete skin and sits on a large three-dimensional turtle" and Wikipedia states that it was built "using modern building materials, including six tons of steel, 28 tons of cement, and 100 tons of sand and rock".

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMdwNG…

The inside is hollow and has nine "floors".  The interiour walls are painted with a variety of images and murals.  I don't know how much access tourist in the past have had, but we would have needed a ladder to reach the inside opening to the second floor.
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