Luther, Oklahoma's

Heart & Hand Society

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2002 Calendars & Related Photo Projects

In 1913 the women of the First Christian Church organized a group to share the problems and responsibilities of the Church, calling themselves the "Heart and Hand Workers" and adopting the motto "Hearts to God, Hands to Service".  Eventually, the name was shortened to just the "Heart & Hand".

This site is dedicated to those ladies, their successors, and all family members and friends whose help they enlisted for various Church and Community projects down through the years.  

It has now grown, however, to embrace the entire community.  

You'll probably find things of interest here even if your family did not attend the First Christian Church.  The Photo Gallery,  especially, includes many other people and places.  If you're familiar with Luther, you'll see a lot of familiar faces and places.  If your family once lived there but you've never seen the town for yourself, we hope this virtual tour will give you a feel for the community. 

Do you know which houses are the oldest in town?  Which families arrived before statehood?  Where the first schools were located?  This section is set up to preserve the memories of our old-timers.  Our first project started with a sketch from the early 60s, and we've traced backwards in time recording what we know of who lived in each house - sometimes all the way to the original owner.  We hope you not only enjoy these puzzles, but have some of the missing pieces.   

People and places around Luther, starting with those we can identify but some of the old group shots hold a lot of mysteries.  Do you have the answers?  Do you have pictures you'd like to share?

The Heart & Hand published a number of cookbooks over the years.  After I submitted an early one to Oklahoma's oLD tIME rECIPES site (see First Cookbook for all of the surviving pages of that one) a friend asked if it would be possible to present the recipes in large type for the visually impaired.   Of course it is, so this has become our first on-line service project. Roberta's Recipe Index  is a clickable index to all large-type recipes presented on this site.   

OUR FRIENDSHIP COOKBOOK was published by the Heart & Hand  in 1948. To old-timers, this was the "new" cookbook -- but it was so much larger than earlier ones that some have called it the "first" H&H cookbook.    You may use the clickable index that takes you directly to a scanned image of the appropriate page, or you may browse by category:  Breads, Cakes (a very large section, slow to download), Candies, Cookies,  Desserts, Drinks, Meats and Meat Substitutes, Pies, Pickles & Relishes, Salads, and Vegetables.   

Recent cookbooks have been copyrighted, so no recipes have been posted from them --but after learning that many of today's cooks are unfamiliar with the techniques that those of 50 to 100 years ago took for granted, I added commentary to some of the older recipes and have also posted a few of my own modern adaptations.   

Ceil's Corner - genealogy of families who came to the Luther area in Territorial days.  Both sites are currently being remodeled, and the search engine already covers all the pages of Ceil's Corner, too.