About Ed Galloway’s Totem Pole Park
A few miles off Route 66, a ninety-foot concrete tower rises above the trees on a rural Oklahoma property. It is covered almost completely with brightly painted figures, faces, birds, geometric patterns, and carved reliefs. Stranger still, the entire structure stands on the back of an enormous concrete turtle.
Ed Galloway began creating the folk-art environment after retiring to the property in 1937. He had worked as a manual-arts teacher and was skilled in woodworking and metalwork. Over the next two decades, he built an increasingly elaborate collection from stone, concrete, steel reinforcement, wood, and whatever craftsmanship the next idea required.
The main tower was constructed between 1937 and 1948. It is only one part of the park. Smaller decorated structures surround it, while an eleven-sided building known as the Fiddle House preserves another side of Galloway’s obsessive craftsmanship.
The National Park Service describes the site as the oldest and largest example of a folk-art environment in Oklahoma. The outdoor grounds and indoor spaces can have different hours, so visitors should check current information before traveling. This is less a single roadside sculpture than one man’s private creative universe hardened into concrete.