By Robert Medley
Managing Editor
The word Piedmont is spelled out in cursive lettering on the side of a building from another century.
About 32 miles from the dusty intersection where the city of Piedmont started in northeast Canadian County, the same name has been uncovered during renovation of the former Rainbow Records building on the northwest corner of NW 23 and Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City.
The building in Oklahoma City had been an abandoned vacuum cleaner store before a wall was torn down and the word Piedmont was found. The word Piedmont was painted in yellow. The background was blue. The underlined lettering looks like it could have been on a past Piedmont High School baseball jersey, at least one from the turn-of-the-century.
Piedmont was founded in 1903, said Lois Dickerson, a longtime resident of Piedmont and member of the historical society today.
The former Rainbow Records building is just blocks south of a park that a sign declares was dedicated in 1905, and during the early part of the 1900s, advertisements were common on the side of buildings such as grocery stores or corner drugstores.
A closer look at the Piedmont ad on the old Rainbow Records wall reveals it was once the name of a cigarette.
“10 for 5 cents. The cigarette of quality,” reads the words of the past ad on the building at 2401 N. Classen Blvd. in Oklahoma City. The year the building was constructed was 1914, according to the Oklahoma County Assessor’s website.
Workers have covered the old ad with plywood boards to protect it from the elements during the renovation work in Oklahoma City near the historic Gold Dome bank.
Was Piedmont, Oklahoma named after a cigarette?
How Piedmont got its name is covered in a book by the local historical society. Tobacco did not have an influence, according to the history book.
Dickerson has a copy of the book, “Bridging the Centuries: 1903 to 2003 Piedmont, Ok.,” that tells the history of Piedmont. The book was started through the vision of Virginia Simpson and Odessa Moffat in 1976 and a number of contributors helped make it happen, Dickerson explained.
The town was almost named Mildred, according to the book. The story is that the original settlers had apparently agreed on naming the town Mildred, but then it was an unknown settler from Virginia who came up with Piedmont, and why that one stuck is unknown, Dickerson said. Piedmont is a word that is used to describe a region of foothills. A piedmont is defined as a gentle slope leading from the base of mountains to a region of flat land. Piedmont was certainly flat enough, and far enough away from any mountains, to be a word that also could describe what became Piedmont, Oklahoma.
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