A DOSE OF REALTY
Hot property is curing what ailed Medicine Park
MEDICINE PARK — Medicine Park is healing, in guarded condition, its intensive-care days behind it.
The resort community is alive, here in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains, especially on long summer weekends.
A couple of colorful streets of specialty shops and eateries, and special events like the three-day Blues Ball next weekend, compete with natural beauty — rocky outcroppings, majestic buffalo and wiry Texas longhorn cattle
running the federal wildlife preserve.
“There’s a lot of speculation and development getting ready to go on in Medicine Park,” said Tom Dyer, co-owner with his wife, Kim, of Medicine Creek
Olive Oil Co., 213 E Lake Drive, and a member of the Medicine Park Economic Development Authority board. But most Oklahomans don’t know it. People know about Mount Scott and the scenic drive to its summit, the buffalo, cattle and prairie dogs, fishing and rock climbing, and, at the right time of year, the Easter passion play at the Holy City of the Wichitas.
But Medicine Park people said most outsiders don’t know about the quaint and quirky shops, the cabins — or the town’s resurgence the past 10 years or so.It’s more than cosmetic and bigger than a retail revival.
Investors invest
Tom Dyer is looking forward to seeing the new owner raze the shacks across the street to make room for his planned shipping container shopping village, plus a few new cabins. Property values are firm. Home sales dropped in 2015 — the bottom of the crude oil price swoon, which took a lot of real estate investment money with it — but average prices have risen more often than not the past five years.
The average price was $172,833 on nine sales in 2013, rose to $179,410 (11 sales) in 2014, then to $191,150 (six sales) in 2015, and went up again to $209,955 (11 sales in 2016, according to the Lawton Board of Realtors.
The average slipped to $203,501, on 18 sales, in 2017; seven sales so far this year averaged $149,757, the Realtors said.
Something to see here
Not much along State Highway 49, which bypasses the attractions, gives any reason to turn off into town. There’s just an aged, peeling sign with a hand pointing to Medicine Park “town center” and the “business district.” Neither begins to tell the tale.
Dedicated community and business leaders, investors, and the Medicine Park Economic Development Authority are turning things around in the town of 438 residents 15 miles northwest of Lawton, 85 miles southwest of Oklahoma City.
“When I grew up, you were scared to go there” because today’s quaint little shops were lowrent shacks, said Shirley Bridgers, broker-owner of All Terrain Realty LLC, 172 Cobblestone Row — and buyer, renovator and landlord of 32 cabins under Medicine Park Rentals, and builder and seller of several speculative homes.
Now, “Medicine Park is really going great guns,” said Lorna Alexander, partner with Bridgers in The Purple Thistle, which doubles as the realty office. “We have a great little row of shops called Cobblestone Row, and all the shop (keepers) work together to make Medicine Park what it is today.”
Long downhill slide
Medicine Park was founded more than a century ago, as Medicine Park Summer Resort and Health Spa, promoted for the healing powers of Medicine Creek.
It has seen healthier days, the heydays of the 1920s, but it has seen much worse in a long arch of decline that residents says persisted until the 1990s.
Early on, two dams were built, creating lakes for swimming, boating and fishing. Dr. Charles Baird opened the Baird Sanatorium and Health Clinic in 1922.
The two-story Outside Inn and rental cabins, equipped with telephones, attracted vacationers for outdoor activities enhanced by electric power — before phones and lights were common in such an out-of-the-way niche.
Medicine Park peaked in popularity in the mid 1920s with some 200,000 visitors annually. Then founder John William Elmer Thomas sold it, upon his election to the U.S. Senate in 1926, to the first of many corporations that kept letting it slide.
Root medicine
Locals started trying to return Medicine Park to its glory days as early as 1969, when the town was actually incorporated. Water and sewer systems were established.
Bridgers pointed to David and Candace McCoy and others who bought and refurbished cabins and businesses in the 1990s, long before she arrived and fell in love with Medicine Park — “and found peace.”
Edward A. Hilliary Jr., the first mayor and a local business owner, eventually partnered with Edna Hennessee, of Lawton, to develop a housing addition, Big Rock Pointe.
“Some forward-thinking real estate agents came into the area and began to invite investors to buy property to make into nightly cabin rentals, shops, bookstores, things that would draw people to the area,” Alexander said.
It amounted to a return to Medicine Park’s roots.
‘Meant to be’
“Our little town — we are continuing to restore our town to the resort town it was originally meant to be,” said Cyndi Hardesty, a retired Chickasha teacher and owner of White Buffalo Trading Post, 166 E Lake Drive.
Her shop has a good mix of kitsch and authentic art like souvenir decorative teepees by Tim Turtle, who is Comanche. Down the street at 191 E Lake Drive are walls of native art at Red Door Gallery.
Across the street at 159 E Lake is RedNeck Candles.
Close by at 140 E Lake is Old Plantation Restaurant. Up the hill and around are CockEyed Bob’s Cobblestone Cafe at 204 E Lake. There’s a biker shop with a biker name.
A recent addition is Medicine Park Aquarium & Natural Sciences Center, 1 Aquarium Drive, south of Highway 49 west of the main town site. “There’s just a lot of good feelings. The town has finally come alive,” Tom Dyer said. “It’s starting, really, a lot of building. A lot of people have a lot of faith in the community.”