Miami, Oklahoma: Mining Boom, Toxic Legacy, and the Coleman Theatre

Miami, Oklahoma, sits at the edge of a region that once held one of the world's most productive concentrations of lead and zinc ore. The same mineral veins that ran through the Tri-State district of Kansas and Missouri continued south into Ottawa County, and for much of the first half of the twentieth century, the extraction of that ore defined every town in this corner of northeastern Oklahoma. Miami was the county seat and the commercial center, and its downtown reflected the money that mining produced.

The town was founded in eighteen ninety-one when a developer named W.C. Lykins purchased five hundred eighty-eight acres from the Ottawa and auctioned off lots. The area was already home to ten tribal nations, including the Quapaw, who had been removed here from Arkansas in the eighteen thirties, and the Miami, whose name the town carries. Ottawa County itself was named for the Ottawa Tribe when Oklahoma entered statehood in nineteen oh seven.

When the mining boom peaked in the nineteen twenties, the money was visible. In nineteen twenty-nine, a mining magnate named George Coleman built an opulent theatre on Miami's Main Street that opened on April eighteenth of that year and was immediately billed as the finest entertainment facility between Dallas and Kansas City. The Coleman Theatre's Spanish Colonial Revival facade conceals a lavish Louis the Fifteenth interior with gilded details, ornate balconies, and a Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ that could simulate an entire orchestra. It was Route Sixty-Six showmanship at industrial scale.

Just six miles up the road from Miami sits Commerce, Oklahoma, where a zinc miner named Mutt Mantle raised a boy he named Mickey and spent every evening pitching to him beside an old tin barn. Mickey Mantle signed his first professional contract in nineteen forty-nine and went on to become one of the greatest baseball players in history. His childhood home on South Quincy Street is still there, a modest white frame house preserved by the city.

The mining that built Miami also poisoned it. Decades of lead and zinc extraction left massive piles of toxic chat, mineral waste containing lead, cadmium, and zinc, across the region. Tar Creek, which flows through Commerce and Miami, runs orange from acid mine drainage. The federal government designated forty square miles of Ottawa County a Superfund site in nineteen eighty-three. Cleanup efforts have continued for decades, and elevated lead levels in children's blood remain a documented concern.