Ask around downtown Locust Grove who runs the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry, then ask who sits on the board planning the new home for the Willard Stone Museum, and you'll hear the same name twice. Shaun Perkins directs ROMP. She's also on the board steering where Willard Stone's carvings will hang next. That overlap isn't two unrelated nonprofits that happen to share a zip code. It's two downtown blocks, two small museums, and a short list of neighbors who decided that Main Street needed both.
One of those moves already happened. The other is still being built, brick by fundraising dollar. Together they're turning a stretch of Main Street that most people drive past into something worth parking for.
The Move That Already Happened
ROMP spent years running out of a small building on East Main Street, the kind of place you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. Last November the museum closed its doors for what it called a move "down the street," and by early 2026 it had reopened in a new space at 114 E. Main St. The timing wasn't random. This year's main exhibit, Rhyming and ROMPing on Route 66, was built around the Route 66 centennial, and the museum wanted a bigger room to do it justice.
If you haven't been inside since the move, the museum keeps regular hours Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with off-hours visits available by appointment. It's still what it's always been: an interactive space built around wordplay rather than glass cases, with a Locust Grove room, a small library, and a gift shop next door at the ROMP Rummage Store that funds the whole operation. What changed is the address, the room, and the fact that this year's exhibit ties a hometown poetry project to a highway that runs through the middle of Oklahoma history.
The Building Waiting on Ross and Broadway
A few blocks from ROMP sits a building most people walk past without knowing its second life is already being written. It's the old bank building at the corner of Ross and Broadway, built in 1912 as Locust Grove's first bank. The Willard Stone Museum's board has purchased it, with plans to restore the structure to something close to its original profile and move Stone's collection inside.
Right now, that collection still lives where it always has: a small building Stone built himself on the family homeplace just east of downtown, the same hillside where he carved for decades with little more than a pocketknife and a chisel. Willard Stone was a Cherokee sculptor whose work sits today in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa and the Cherokee National Museum near Tahlequah, but for most of his career, if you wanted to see it in person, you drove out to his family's land and his wife Sophie opened the door. The new building downtown would change that. It would put a nationally recognized Oklahoma artist's work inside walking distance of ROMP instead of a drive past the edge of town.
The renovation isn't finished, and there's no announced reopening date yet. But the building is bought, which is further than most museum relocation dreams ever get. The board is funding the rest of the work the way small-town nonprofits usually do: one event at a time. The fifth annual Willard Stone Museum Golf Tournament is set for October 5, 2026, and it's the most direct way to put money toward finishing what's already started.
One Name on Two Letterheads
Perkins isn't the only thread connecting these two projects, but she's the clearest one. She directs ROMP and serves on the Willard Stone Museum's board at the same time, which means the person who just proved a small museum move can work in Locust Grove is now helping plan the next one. The Stone museum's board also includes people with day jobs scattered across the region, a retired teacher and artist in Pryor, a corporate accountant in Pryor, a business owner in Tulsa. It's a small circle, but it's the same kind of small circle that keeps a town's cultural life running: people who show up for more than one cause because in a town of roughly 1,371 people, there usually isn't a second person to hand the job to.
That's worth sitting with. Neither of these museums is backed by a foundation or a state agency writing checks. They're two nonprofits run by neighbors, betting that the same two or three blocks of downtown are worth investing in twice.
What You Can Actually Walk Into Right Now
Here's the practical version, if you're deciding where to spend an afternoon this fall:
| Museum | Current status | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry | Reopened, new exhibit running | 114 E. Main St, open Wed–Sat, 10 a.m.–2 p.m. |
| Willard Stone Museum | Building purchased, renovation pending | Original homeplace east of downtown; support the move at the Oct. 5, 2026 golf tournament |
ROMP is the one you can walk into today. The Route 66 exhibit is built for people who think they have no interest in poetry, which is most of the museum's actual audience. The Stone museum is the one to watch. Its move is further along than most small-town preservation projects ever get, and the October golf tournament is a concrete date on the calendar if you want to be part of getting it across the finish line.
Two Blocks, One Bet
None of this was guaranteed. Small nonprofits fold their plans more often than they finish them, and a 1912 bank building doesn't renovate itself. But ROMP already proved the harder part, that a small museum can close its doors, move down the street, and reopen better than before. The Stone museum board bought the building instead of just dreaming about it, which is the step most projects like this never reach.
If both finish, anyone walking Main Street in Locust Grove will pass a poetry museum and a sculpture museum within a few blocks of each other. No planning commission zoned that. No developer pitched it. It's what happens when the same handful of people decide their downtown is worth building around twice, using different buildings and the same short list of names.
That's the quieter story behind two museum moves that look, from the outside, like unrelated local news items. They're not unrelated. They're the same bet, made twice, by the same people.
Locust Grove keeps surprising people who think they already know it. Neokla Legacy Group has spent three generations paying attention to towns like this one, not just the listings in them but the Main Streets, the museum boards, and the neighbors who keep small-town culture running. If you want more of what's actually happening in Mayes County, not the version everyone else already wrote, let's get started.
