World's Largest Totem Pole

Ed Galloway's Totem Pole Park near Foyil, Oklahoma, is a retirement project that grew into a folk-art environment around a 90-foot pole.

Nathan Edward Galloway was born in 1880 in Springfield, Missouri. SPACES Archives, which documents folk art environments, says he served in the U.S. Army during the Philippine-American War. The National Park Service says he taught manual arts to orphan boys at the Sand Springs Home and retired to live on the property in 1937. He built the main pole between 1937 and 1948; the NPS gives the park's construction as lasting from 1937 to 1961. The NPS describes a hollow pole of red sandstone framed with steel and wood, with a thick concrete skin, rising nine floors with murals inside and sitting on a large three-dimensional turtle. SPACES Archives counts about 200 carved images on it and estimates 28 tons of cement, six tons of steel and 100 tons of sand and rock. TravelOK bills it as "The World's Largest Concrete Totem Pole".