Cardin

One hundred and fifty people, then three, then none

Cardin is a ghost town in Ottawa County, in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, between Commerce and Picher on County Road E0030. Its end is unusually precise. The census counted 150 people in 2000 and 3 in April 2010, and in November 2010, when the last family received its final buyout payment, the population went to zero.

It began in 1913 as a boisterous mining camp called Tar River, or Tar Creek after the stream nearby, in the middle of the Tri-State lead and zinc district of southwest Missouri, southeast Kansas and northeast Oklahoma, which in the early 20th century produced more than 43 percent of the country's lead and zinc. In June 1918 William Oscar Cardin, a Quapaw, and his wife Isa Wade Cardin had his 40-acre allotment surveyed and platted, and in 1920 the town took his name. That year it held 2,640 people, many of them mine workers, and it ran eighteen to twenty grocery stores alongside rooming houses, drug stores, banks, theatres, speakeasies, pool halls, gambling dens and dance halls. Vice and graft reached all the way to the county offices, and an editor nicknamed Rounder published a paper called the Anti-Hijaker to expose the crooks. By 1930 only 437 people were left, and in 1938 the town disincorporated.

Cardin came back to life on paper in 1983, reincorporating so it could apply for federal money for a sewer lagoon and new water lines, and in the early 21st century it was a quiet bedroom community with a beauty shop and four churches. Merlyn Mantle, wife of the baseball player Mickey Mantle, grew up here.

But 1983 was also the year the area was designated the Tar Creek Superfund site. Decades of mining had left lead pollution throughout the district and the ground riddled with workings that threatened to cave in under buildings. Cardin, Picher and Hockerville became part of a $60 million federal buyout run by the Lead-Impacted Communities Relocation Assistance Trust. Cardin's last business, the post office, closed on 28 February 2009; by that April only seven homes were still occupied and the water was about to be shut off. It was the first town in the Superfund area to be closed down completely.

The state and the EPA expect years more of work before the contamination is brought down to acceptable levels and some of the land and habitat restored.