Small town I grew up in just got devastated by a tornado

[Martinjmpr]

I was born in Germany (military brat) but we moved back to the US when I was 18 months old so I have no memory of that. When my dad left Active Duty he and my mom moved with me and my older brother back to the small Oklahoma town where my mom was born and raised. So those are my earliest memories of childhood.

The town is called Barnsdall and it's about 45 miles Northeast of Tulsa. The main industry in town is a wax factory that is part of the oil and gas industry. It's located in Osage County which is technically still an indian reservation, although most of the land has been sold off to non-indians in the 1920's (I actually didn't know it had been a reservation until I looked at an old road map when I was in junior high school.)

The town's biggest "claim to fame" is that it had the "world's only main street oil well" which was in Ripley's believe-it-or-not some time in the 1950's. It was also where some of the movie "August, Osage County" was filmed.

It's something of an exaggeration to say "I grew up there" - we moved out just after I started Kindergarten because my dad didn't want to raise his kids in a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere and my mom wanted out, too. We moved to the Washington DC area, and then when I was 10 Dad got a job with the National Park Service and we moved to Denver (1972.)

But even though we didn't live there, my grandparents and aunt/uncle/cousins did, and we usually went back every year to visit, so I've always thought of it as a kind of "hometown." I spent a lot of summers there over the years and watch the little town get smaller and smaller (for example, I clearly remember when there were THREE grocery stores in town. Now the closest thing to a "grocery store" is the Family Dollar that was just built maybe 10 years ago, and some convenience stores.)

Anyway, I just heard from my sister, apparently the town got slammed by a tornado last night.

1 dead after catastrophic tornado levels Barnsdall, Oklahoma | Fox Weather

1 person dead and at least 30 - 40 homes destroyed. That's a lot for a town that has a population that hovers around 1,000 people.

I'm pretty sure I don't know anybody who lives there now. My grandparents passed away in the early 1980's and my aunt and uncle moved away shortly thereafter. My mom passed away in January so I really don't have any living connection to the town anymore.

I was last there 10 years ago (April 2014) when my wife and I were on a camping trip and we stayed at a Corps of Engineers campground nearby.

But it's still awful to see the damage that the tornado did to a place I remember so well.