Life and Legacy
Long-time area resident, teacher, businesswoman, and anti-nuclear activist Carrie Barefoot Dickerson died peacefully in her sleep early on the morning of Thursday, November 17, 2006 at the age of 89. Well-known for her determination and her ability to bring together disparate groups, she lived the principles of American democracy that her generation defended during World War II.
Barefoot Dickerson, born May 24, 1917 to a pioneer family in Okmulgee County, attended the Rocky Hill and Nuyaka Mission schools there before beginning undergraduate studies in home economics education with emphasis on nutrition at Oklahoma State University, where she also earned an M.S. degree.
Through their prize-winning 4-H work, she met her late husband, C.R. Dickerson, later an award-winning dairyman and veteran's agriculture teacher, on an Oklahoma Farmers' Union-sponsored trip to Washington, D.C. in 1936. They married in 1938, as undergraduates, and made their home on the Dickerson Farm east of Claremore.
Barefoot Dickerson began her teaching career in 1943 at the German-speaking Mennonite Pleasant View community school east of Inola. She went on to teach in several Rogers and Mayes County schools and served as a home demonstration agent in the Cherokee communities of Muskogee and as a 4-H Club leader.
About 1957, she resigned as home economics teacher at Claremore High School to begin a bakery offering whole-grain organic breads to customers all over northeastern Oklahoma.
In 1964, she and her late husband founded Aunt Carrie's Nursing Home (later Wood Manor) in Claremore, where they, their late daughter, Mary, and their dedicated staff provided the loving care and nutritious meals that frail community elders needed for physical and mental health. At the age of 50, she began studying nursing at St. John's Hospital in Tulsa to fill a need at the nursing home.
Then one day in 1973, Public Service Company of Oklahoma (PSO) announced plans to build Black Fox nuclear-power plant near Inola. Then began the environmental work that pervaded the remaining four and a half decades of her life. Finally in 1981, an anticipated Corporation Commission decision prompted by the work of CASE (Citizens' Action for Safe Energy), the organization she founded to teach the public about the dangers posed by nuclear power, led to PSO's cancellation of the project.
During the nine years of hearings, she became a master quilter, designing and creating works to occupy her fingers while she listened and that she could use to help raise money for legal fees once they consumed the proceeds from selling the nursing home. After Black Fox was cancelled, she supported herself by teaching quilting and with a health-foods store she and her daughter Mary operated.
Barefoot Dickerson is survived by three sisters, her twin, Clara Barefoot-Sehorn of Olympia, Washington, Florence Gaskill Cahalen of Broken Arrow, Paula Bentley of Barada Hills, Nebraska, a brother, Marvin Barefoot III of Davis, California, two daughters, Florence Dickerson Snelling of Claremore and Patricia Dickerson Lemon of Justus and Warwick, Massachusetts, five grandchildren, Signe Lemon Friedrichs of Herndon, Virginia, Sandra Snelling Patterson of Justus, Ted Lemon of Tucson, Arizona, Melissa Dickerson of Verdigris, and J.J. Dickerson of Justus, four great-grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews.
Two children, J.R. Dickerson II and Mary Dickerson, and her husband preceded her in death.
Preceding her death, Barefoot Dickerson had been in good health and spirits, having received excellent physical therapy and care at Wood Manor Nursing Home in Claremore, where she had recently completed, under the auspices of the not-for-profit Carrie Dickerson Foundation, a children's history of wind power in collaboration with Drumright artist Gwen Ingram and her daughter Patricia.