Turner Falls Oklahoma: The Waterfall and the Unfinished Castle

 Turner Falls, Oklahoma: The Waterfall and the Unfinished Castle

By:  a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures

Dear Henry,

You would never guess it, but about an hour outside of Oklahoma City, there is a little watering hole tucked into the hills, complete with a half-finished, hand-built castle and a seventy-seven-foot natural waterfall.

The place is called Turner Falls Park. Let me tell you all about it.

First of all, despite popular belief, Oklahoma is not completely flat. Not even close. There are actually four mountain ranges in the state: the Wichita, the Ouachita (pronounced like “Wash-i-taw,” which is not at all the same as Wichita, and yes, that distinction matters 200 miles more than you would think), the Arbuckle, and the Ozarks.

Turner Falls sits in the Arbuckle Mountains, just outside the town of Davis.

The park itself traces back to Mazeppa Thomas Turner, a Scottish immigrant who, while establishing his ranch in what was then Indian Territory, came across the canyon and falls.

To his credit, and this is not always how these stories go, Turner didn’t try to fence it off or turn it into something exclusive. He allowed people in. Over time, it became a local place for picnics, wading, and summer afternoons spent in the water.

The falls and the pool beneath them are genuinely beautiful, cool water spilling over limestone into a wide basin, with trails and smaller access points along the creek.

Unfortunately, I managed to arrive at exactly the wrong time of day for photographs, which feels like its own kind of tradition by now.

And then, there’s the castle. Sort of.

The adjacent land belonged to Dr. W.H. Collings, a local physician who, sometime during the 1930s, began building a castle out of native stone. By hand.

There does not appear to have been an architect involved in this endeavor, and it shows, in the best possible way. The structure is a maze of narrow stairways, odd corridors, and rooms that don’t quite resolve into anything recognizable. It feels less like a house and more like an idea that kept changing as it was being built.

It was never finished.

There’s no clear explanation for why he started it, and even less for why he stopped. A summer home is the most reasonable guess, but it’s hard to ignore the timing. This was the middle of the Great Depression, hardly the era of second homes and leisure projects.

Which leaves you wondering if perhaps it wasn’t about practicality at all.

Maybe it was simply an act of creation, a way of building something that might last, at a time when so much else did not.

It is a strange, charming little place to explore, and I found myself wishing he had seen it through, if only so we could better understand what it was meant to become.

As for the park itself, it is beautiful. Truly.

But it is also, from everything I can tell, the place to be in the summer. And with that comes exactly what you would expect: crowds, noise, and very little space to sit quietly and take it in.

If you go, and you should, go in the off-season. Go early. Go when the place has room to breathe.

xoxo a.d. elliott 

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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life

She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.

You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.

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