Massive Burgers Keep This Abandoned Oklahoma Mining Town Alive

This is the visit to Meers Store and Restaurant I remember best. It was the summer before my senior year of high school. I’d been swimming with some friends in Lake Elmer Thomas by Fort Sill. It was one of those deceptively gray days, when sunscreen is unwisely forgone. Mildly burnt, we drove our recently acquired cars out to the foothills of the Wichita Mountains for a lunch of hearty longhorn beef burgers, cut into quarters and served in pie tins, before splitting some peach cobblers in flirtatious pairs.

The Meers experience, both then and now, is pretty reliable. There’s almost always a line at the front, presided over by a longhorn’s mounted head and an overwhelmed hostess. That hostess was often a teenager too, up until 2015 when the restaurant faced a lawsuit for violating child labor laws. A sign in the place still hangs that reads: “Teenagers! Tired of being hassled by your stupid parents? Act now. Move out, get a job, pay your own bills… While you still know EVERYTHING!”

We did know everything, my friends and I. We had our eyes fixed on the horizon beyond our hometown of Cache, the gateway to the Wichitas. The topic of discussion for lunch that day, between gossiping about our classmates, was our forthcoming trip to Europe. The world felt totally up for grabs. We were excited for the future, unaware that the excitement is the best part. That’s the Meers I remember.

“Meers” is the name for a few different elements of one place. It’s a general store and a restaurant in the mountains, an enticing destination for kids like me growing up in rural southwest Oklahoma. Nearby residents, farmers, cowboys, Comanche and Kiowa people, transients, and tourists all flock there.

It’s also the name of the unincorporated community where the business sits, a blurry, multipurpose, century-old entity that once included a post office, drug store, and doctor’s office. The restaurant and store have since commandeered them all. Up until very recently, Meers boasted a proud, self-declared population of one, the now-deceased Joe Maranto, who took stewardship from a rancher who decided the place was too much trouble. It’s now run by Maranto’s wife, Margaret, who, I suppose, didn’t figure into her husband’s census.

As you drive up, Meers emerges from the landscape as a short sequence of four shabby buildings squished together, each a different color, each made of different materials, and each with a lot to say. The buildings are covered in aluminum signs touting the “World Famous Meers Burger” alongside ads for Royal Crown Cola, Coke, and Mountain Dew, which sports the soda’s defunct mascot, Willy the Hillbilly. In the parking lot, you’ll find a single old parking meter, an affectionate reminder that the device was invented in the Sooner State. The interior of the restaurant elaborates on this “history” motif: Behind plexiglass sits a dormant seismograph that once monitored activity on the Meers Fault, knocked out of commission by a lightning strike in the mid-2000s, and the walls are covered with vintage rodeo posters, taxidermy, and a portrait of Geronimo, the Apache chief whose body lies buried at Fort Sill.

Meers is a love letter to someone’s idea of Oklahoma’s golden age. But if you squint at the corroded aluminum signs and aged, kaleidoscopic decor, you can make out a sentimental story of loss and wounded pride writ small, flavored with a wistfulness that permeates the whole state.

The boomtown’s heyday began with a “gold rush without the gold,” predicated on folklore about Spanish gold hidden in caches in the mountains. The frenzy to mine the area was fully underway, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society, by 1895, when prospectors started trespassing on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation. The government then opened the area to general settlement in 1901, despite fierce tribal opposition. My hometown appeared during this time, too.

The conquistadors did indeed make it to Oklahoma. And it’s a hypnotic thought, the idea of precious metals extracted near my childhood home making their way to Cadiz or Seville, into the pockets of Spaniards half a world and many centuries away. Miners’ hopes were buoyed by the discovery of a primitive Spanish mill, or arrastra, used for pulverizing ore near modern-day Meers.

The stories persist. My Mexican American grandfather once told me of Moctezuma’s treasures buried in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. But there wasn’t really any gold. Fevered optimism gave rise to Meers, as well as to a smattering of other towns like it: Wildman, Golden Pass, Oreana. When the fever died, it left the town a ghostly shell of a once thriving enterprise.

The Spanish colonial legacy is still visible at the restaurant. Texas longhorns, brought to the area by the Spanish and destined to become Meers burgers, idly graze outside the restaurant. Cowboy attire, reminiscent of Mexican vaqueros, hangs for sale in the store.

The promise of gold lingers too. A sign outside advertises longhorn meat as a “genetic gold mine,” and the menu declares, “Meers gold ain’t in them there hills, it’s in the taste.” There’s a selection of “gold dust desserts,” a burger lovingly named the “prospector,” and Meers Gold Beer, brewed in Krebs, a former mining town, allegedly based on a Choctaw recipe.

Meers has a sense of play about its history, but there’s a disappointed, self-deprecating “well, shoot” underneath it all. All the talk of gold today is homage to a shining hope that never panned out.

This sense of loss isn’t unique to Meers. Across the state, even in areas where gold wasn’t the goal, there’s a sense that opportunity would abound for those willing to seize it, provided you were a white man. It’s the sort of crude idea at the heart of the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. Some 100,000 settlers participated in a mad grab of 1.9 million acres of Indian Territory that the federal government declared open for settlement, free for whoever got there first. Many residents might recall doing a reenactment of the free-for-all, racing to plant flags on plots of the playground (this game has since been banned in some school districts). The real thing was hardly more sophisticated.

Far more settlers showed up than could have possibly been rewarded with “good land.” Many were disappointed to find themselves empty-handed on the other side of the frenzy. Even those who succeeded soon found that life on the Great Plains was rife with hardships — the sort that would later be romanticized — like blistering summers, harsh winters, fires, droughts, outlaws. Maybe that’s why the state, why towns like Meers, like my hometown of Cache, often feel sleepy. People are still dreaming.

The Land Run, like the gold rush, was a heady affair, born of great promise to settlers and broken promises to Native Americans. In both instances, the seductive idea proved more valuable than the reality. This phenomenon contributes significantly to the aesthetics of the region, its rusts and pale yellows and vintage advertisements, as well as its moral constitution, the mystique of the West that both outsiders and lifelong inhabitants embrace.

Oklahoma’s deep conservatism has roots in its allegiance to that past. Not to history, with its dates and sobering facts, but to the past, which is more of an emotional arrangement. There’s a sense things used to be better before modernity complicated everything and made men soft. At the same time, Oklahoma’s rampant poverty and low quality of life are today’s stand-ins for the ambient hardships of the frontier that once defined the cowboy, that chivalrous paragon of masculinity. There’s pride and identity in hardship.

What was the big idea of the West, anyway? It’s hard to define concretely, but it’s perhaps most legible in places like Meers, resting places for the flamed-out passions that birthed them. At the restaurant, a dying breed of hearty men can still get a “seismic” Meers burger advertised as “the biggest burger in Okla.” Patrons are invited to stake their little plot in history too; over the decades, adults have pockmarked the walls with their business cards, while teens carved their initials into the wood. JB + CS = 4 EVER, and so on.

The next time I visit Meers, I want to pay attention to those carved initials, specifically the declarations of love. How many of those couples, I wonder, are still together? How many initials were carved at the absolute height of a relationship, right before things, as they often do, began to sag, wilt, and fade to the dusty, dozy history of Oklahoma?

I wonder what became of my friends that I went to Meers with that day. I’m only in touch with one, and when I asked him about that day, he said he only remembered the lake. As for the others, I either wouldn’t know where to look or it feels inappropriate to reach out.

Well, maybe that’s just an excuse. The truth is, I think I’m more content with the memory of us, sitting in a booth, eating Meers burgers with fries and soda, making promises to each other, anticipating the best time ever.

John Paul Brammer is an author and illustrator from rural Oklahoma based in Brooklyn, New York. He runs the popular advice column ¡Hola Papi! on Substack and is the author of a memoir of the same name.
Jesse Edgar is a professional photographer out of Oklahoma City who gained popularity through his well-received Oklahoma Abandoned project and his ability to story tell through photos. Jesse now has a growing client list that includes the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder and many more.
Copy edited by Laura Michelle Davis