Flowers for Perry, OK

Phone in a sunflower arrangement at Thornoriginals on a Tuesday morning and by mid-afternoon it has usually crossed the whole town: past the Noble County Courthouse in its shaded park — Perry is one of the few Oklahoma towns that kept a true courthouse square — around corners that have watched Cherokee Strip Days parades since 1893, and out toward the Charles Machine Works campus, where Ed Malzahn's Ditch Witch trencher was born and where a good share of the town still clocks in. Perry earned its outsized identity in a single September afternoon in 1893, when the land run filled it with tens of thousands of claim-seekers overnight; the town that settled out of that chaos now sends flowers for Maroon wrestling-title celebrations, Perry Memorial Hospital rooms, and anniversaries on farms that have held the same family name for four generations.

Other Oklahoma cities.