Noble, OK

Noble, Okla., Home of the Rose Rocks

Residents of Noble, Okla., admired the unusual rose-shaped rocks found in the area, but no one thought the reddish stones had any value—that is until Fred Shobert began selling the rocks he came across while farming his land east of town.

“He cleaned the rocks with a wire brush and then sold them for $1.50 a piece or 50 cents a pound,” says Randy Shobert, Fred’s son. “He made quite a lot of his living selling rocks.”

Fred Shobert sold the rocks locally, trucked them cross-country, and even supplied the airport gift shop in Oklahoma City with what would eventually become the state’s official rock. At one point, he decorated an outside wall of his farmhouse by attaching the rocks to the frame structure with stucco cement. The 15-foot by 10-foot wall still stands and inspired hundreds of Oklahomans to decorate fountains, wishing wells, fireplaces, and outdoor gardens with the rocks.

Shobert died in 1972 at age 69, before Noble (pop. 5,055) was declared the Rose Rock Capital of Oklahoma in 1983. A year later, the community held its first annual Rose Rock Festival, which now includes a parade, carnival, and crowning of the Rose Rock Queen on the first Saturday in May.

Noble is known for more than rose rocks, however. It’s also home to Thunder Valley Raceway (a premier quarter-mile drag racing track), and the Wild Care Wildlife Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization that takes in sick, wounded, or orphaned animals and nurses them back to health. Many Noble residents commute to nearby Norman to work, but the town’s largest employer is United Design Factory and Gift Shop, a figurine manufacturer. The company makes Stone Critters, among others, but they don’t make rose rock figurines.

Joe and Nancy Stine have been designing handmade rose rock bouquets for nearly 30 years and opened the Timberlake Rose Rock Museum in 1986. They select a rose rock the size of a real rose for the base of the bouquet, suspend dime-size rose rocks on steel wires, add copper leaves, and then attach the design to the base rose rock. One design displayed at Noble’s City Hall is a 3-foot sculpture of a dogwood tree. It features dogwood blossoms made of porcelain enamel, copper leaves, and rose vines with rose rocks attached to the ends.

The museum, in a modest bungalow, displays rose rock sculptures, earrings, shirts, bookmarks, paperweights, and necklaces. One glass display case houses several rose rock clusters in various shades of red.

“The redder ones were probably not as exposed at the surface,” says Joe Stine, who holds a master’s degree in geology from the University of Oklahoma. Rose rocks are prevalent in a narrow strip of land that runs north and south from Guthrie to Pauls Valley, but Stine says those considered the best quality—reddish-brown stones with deep grooves and fragile petals—are found east of Noble. He says the reddish rocks get their tint from the iron oxide that coats the half-barite and half-sand rocks. He clues others in on where and how to find the rocks.

“We use mostly hand tools, garden scratchers, and shovels,” he says. “When you get down to the actual rock, you want to use hand tools to keep from damaging the rock.”

Stine relates tales of his great-grandparents who traveled the Trail of Tears, and tells of a Cherokee legend about the rocks.

“When gold was found in Georgia,” the legend goes, “the government forgot its treaties and drove the Cherokees to Oklahoma. One-fourth of them died on the journey west. But God, looking down from heaven, decided to commemorate the brave Cherokees—and so, as the blood of the braves and the tears of the Indian maidens dropped to the ground, he turned them into stone in the shape of a Cherokee rose, the Georgia state flower. That is why they are so plentiful in Oklahoma, the end of the Trail of Tears.”

Shelley Brinsfield writes from her home in Piedmont, Okla.

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