Ed Galloway's Totem Pole: A Retired Schoolteacher's Life's Work

What you are looking at is the result of eleven years of retirement.

Ed Galloway was born in eighteen eighty in Springfield, Missouri, and spent his working life as a manual arts instructor at the Sand Springs Home, a children's orphanage outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. For two decades he taught boys woodworking and craftsmanship. When he retired in nineteen thirty-seven, he and his wife Villie moved to a small farm outside Foyil, a few miles east of Route Sixty-Six in Rogers County. He was fifty-seven years old. He had a lot of work left in him.

Galloway built the totem pole using six tons of steel, twenty-eight tons of cement, and a hundred tons of sand and rock. He mixed much of it by hand, five-gallon bucket at a time. The finished structure stands ninety feet tall and thirty feet wide at the base, resting on the back of a sculpted concrete turtle, a reference to the Native American creation story of the world carried on a turtle's shell. More than two hundred carved bas-relief images cover the surface: Native American portraits, eagles, bears, wolves, dancers, and ceremonial scenes. Galloway completed the main pole in nineteen forty-eight, eleven years after he started.

He was not Native American. He was a white schoolteacher from Missouri who had spent decades teaching boys to work with their hands and who had developed, during those years, a deep respect for the art forms and stories of the Indigenous peoples of North America. The totem pole was his attempt to honor what he understood of those traditions. Scholars of folk art note that his images blend traditions from different tribes without a consistent regional logic, the result of a self-taught craftsman working from books and observation rather than cultural membership. But the ambition and the scale are undeniable.

Galloway also built an eleven-sided Fiddle House on the property, housing hundreds of inlaid fiddles he carved over his lifetime. The fiddle-making was a separate passion, partly inspired by a brother who played. He worked on the park until he died in nineteen sixty-two, still planning additions.

The Rogers County Historical Society restored the site in the nineteen nineties. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-nine. It remains one of the most singular pieces of American folk art produced by a single person in the twentieth century, built by a retired schoolteacher in a field in northeastern Oklahoma, one bucket of cement at a time.