Will Rogers Gardens
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
This park on the northwest side of Oklahoma City was built by hand during the Depression. Depression-era work crews from New Deal programs cleared brush and laid native sandstone for terraces, bridges, and picnic shelters in the mid-nineteen thirties. The WPA built in a style that suited the land, using Oklahoma sandstone and native plantings.
The park was named for Will Rogers, the Cherokee-heritage humorist from Claremore who had become the country's most beloved entertainer and died in an Alaska plane crash in nineteen thirty-five. It is a textbook New Deal landscape, built by unemployed men to outlast the emergency that created it.
