Unattended Sentry – Americana Collection
A pre-World War II Bennett 541 gas pump stands as an unattended sentry in Cogar, Oklahoma. The 80 year-old age-value monument, saturated with rusty patina, displays a sales price of 37.9-cents per gallon of leaded gasoline.
W.S. Kelly General Merchandise – Americana Collection
The W.S. Kelly General Merchandise building stands at the intersection of Oklahoma 37 and Oklahoma 152 as an Age-value monument to the America of the 1950s. Age-value in a monument betrays itself at once in the monument’s dated appearance and makes explicit a sense of the life cycle of the artifact, and of culture as a whole.1 This oxidized metal and faded paint became a ground for scenes in the 1988 cross country road trip movie Rain Man. Three subsequent decades of brutal midwest plains weather have enhanced saturation of the site’s representative rusty patina.
Monarch – Americana Collection
Monarch Danaus plexippus butterfly migration brings many Lepidoptera through northern Florida. This specimen was seen around a food source of Seaside Goldenrod Solidago mexicana blooming in uncut fence lines and pond border. It has been verified and accepted in the photographic library of the Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA) project. A sighting details page for this butterfly is available at the BAMONA web site: https://www.butterfliesandmoths.org.
According to the organization’s web site, the Butterflies and Moths of North America project is an ambitious effort to collect and provide access to quality-controlled data about butterflies and moths for the continent of North America from Panama to Canada.
