Dispatches from rural Oklahoma: Oney, Oklahoma—International trade hub

From a tiny Oklahoma town, locally grown peanuts travel the world—showing how quiet places like Oney still reach far beyond their borders.

The other day I found myself standing in one of those metal-sided grocery stores on the edge of town in Western Oklahoma. The kind built in the 1970s, where the lighting hums and the produce aisle doubles as a hallway. I wasn’t after anything too fancy. Just some hummus.

“Ma’am,” I asked the clerk, “do y’all have hummus?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Ah, nah. We haven’t had any of that here for five years or so. If we did, it’d be by the cottage cheese.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll just make it myself. Let me grab the ingredients.”

She looked at me like I’d asked if they stocked moon rocks.

“I’ve got tahini at home,” I added.

Now I was just speaking Martian.

That exchange made me laugh, but it also made me think: Around here, “international” isn’t always what we bring in. Sometimes it’s what we quietly send out.

When I was a kid, I helped my Pappy raise peanuts just outside Oney, a place that’s more memory than town these days. Back then, it had a co-op, a school, a couple of churches and one of the smallest post offices in the country. Pappy’s peanut fields sat in its shadow.

One hot afternoon, Pappy bent down, pulled up a plant, shook the sandy soil from its roots and handed me a raw peanut.

“Go on, eat some, they are the finest peanuts ever grown,” he said with his signature chuckle.

I cracked the shell and took a bite. Earthy. A little sweet. Honest. I still love raw peanuts to this day.

But what stuck with me wasn’t the taste; it was what he told me next.

“Some of these peanuts,” he said, “end up in peanut M&Ms all over the world. I like thinkin’ I’m a Pappy to every kid that eats one.”

That was the first time I understood how far Oklahoma could reach. The runner peanuts we grow in western Oklahoma — especially around Caddo and Washita counties — are prized for their size and shelling quality. They go into candy coatings, protein bars or airplane snacks. A harvest here might wind up in Tokyo, Berlin or a corner store in Manhattan.

Not every Oklahoma peanut goes global through the Port of Catoosa, big warehouses and corporate chains, though. We don’t often see where things go when they leave a place like Oney.

The town’s first post office — known as one of the smallest in the country — closed decades ago, but I still wonder how many tons of peanuts passed through that tiny building. How many boxes got weighed on that old counter. How many mail trucks full of peanuts left that gravel parking lot bound for a world far bigger than this zip code ever imagined.

Almost daily, Mary Howe, a CKenergy Electric Cooperative member, drives past those same sandy fields in Oney. But instead of shipping in bulk, she turns Oklahoma peanuts into peanut brittle and confections at the Goober House in nearby Carnegie — hand-stirred, hand-broken, hand-wrapped.

And sometimes, those sweets travel too.

I like to imagine Mary standing in her kitchen, watching over the candy thermometer until it hits the hard-crack stage. Then carefully pouring it out, breaking it up  and packing it for someone she’ll never meet. An online order, a name on a shipping label, a taste of Oklahoma mailed from a kitchen that still remembers the dirt it came from.

International doesn’t always look exotic. Sometimes it looks like Oney — mostly closed up, but never really gone.