The Old Camp Gruber Shower House

Erin with local historian Judy, beside a former Camp Gruber building © Erin Faith Allen

When Camp Gruber was deactivated after the war, most of its buildings were sold off or dismantled. Some of them are still out there, scattered across the countryside of eastern Oklahoma, repurposed and quietly continuing their existence in backyards and farms, holding their history without announcing it, and hiding with all the other white clapboard structures.

I have been looking for them for years.

I found one. A former shower house from Camp Gruber, now sitting in a backyard in the area, still standing, still solid. And this is Judy, a local keeper of knowledge, and one of the most generous people I have encountered in years of this work.

Judy knows this land and its history in the way that only someone rooted in a place for a lifetime can know it. The connections she has made for me, the bridges she has laid down for me to walk across in my research, I cannot fully account for their value yet because I am still walking across them. What she has shared with me will find its way into my forthcoming work on Camp Gruber and I am deeply grateful for all of it.

This photo looks like two people standing in front of a red and white building on a summer afternoon, but is the culmination of two determined women: one determined to hold on to it and preserve it, and the other determined to find it.