Elk City Museum Adds Civil Defense Display

May 18, 2023

By Landry Brewer

The Old Town Museum is reminding the public of a time when locals prepared for nuclear war.

In November 2020, SWOSU-Sayre history professor Landry Brewer helped Tom Ivester, City Manager of Elk City, transfer several of the city’s decades-old Cold War civil defense supplies to the Oklahoma Historical Society. Brewer provided some of the remaining artifacts used for the display that was recently placed in the Military Room inside of the Old Town Museum.

Brewer collaborated with museum curator Charles Wren to provide the museum’s new display.

“The display is fresh and interesting,” Wren said. “We got through the Cold War without a nuclear war, but a renewed threat in Russia and Eastern Europe makes the topic of nuclear war survival relevant.”

The display features items that the federal government provided to Elk City in the early 1960s, including water barrels, food, sanitation kits, and radioactivity monitoring devices, and part of a civil defense siren that would have warned locals of a nuclear attack is also included.

The 1961 Berlin Crisis war scare began when President John F. Kennedy met Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, Austria, that June. Khrushchev issued a six-month deadline for the United States presence in the western portion of the German capital to end, or the result would likely be nuclear war.

“The federal government began a nationwide program then to identify existing buildings to be used as public fallout shelters and stock them with supplies,” Brewer said.

Brewer also said that as part of this program, the federal fallout shelter sign—one of which is included in the display—was created to be placed on buildings that met the federal government’s criteria, and these would be stocked with survival supplies.

The Elk City fallout shelter supplies that Brewer used for the display were a result of this program.

Last October was the 60th anniversary of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba capable of reaching the United States with nuclear bombs.

“This was the closest that the United States and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war, and newspapers in Elk City and Altus and even the SWOSU student newspaper in Weatherford carried stories about civil defense measures being taken to possibly survive,” Brewer said.

As with the rest of the nation, fallout shelters were identified and stocked in western Oklahoma’s cities, including Elk City.

When the Cold War ended after the Soviet Union disbanded in the early 1990s, many civil defense supplies were placed in storage and, eventually, thrown away.

Wren’s assistant also created a virtual component with VoiceOver for iPhone and TalkBack for Android for the benefit of individuals with sight or hearing limitations by accessing a posted QR code which takes visitors to https://elkcitymuseumcomplex.weebly.com/exhibit.html.

Wren plans to add a virtual component to other museum displays as well.