For more than a century, Jenks has been accumulating stories. It has the oil boom that turned a railroad siding into a boomtown, the Arkansas River bridge that carried traffic for nearly four decades, the school district that grew into a statewide athletic power. What it does not have is a single place to put any of it.
"We're the only city around that does not have a museum, and we're losing stories," Wayne Parker of the Jenks America Museum and Historical Society told KJRH. That sentence is the reason a pot of chili will be simmering at Veterans Park on Saturday, October 17, 2026.
The Historic Jenks Chili Cook-Off is the group's biggest push yet toward a building of its own. Admission is free. Cooks gather at 10 a.m. for a meeting, the event opens to the public at 11 a.m., and chili turn-in comes at 12:30 p.m. -- the same moment taster kits go on sale, letting anyone in the park buy a spoon and vote for the People's Choice Award. A cornhole tournament runs alongside the cooking. Live music fills the afternoon: Tom Basler on piano at 11:30, the Cayla Butler ukulele band at 1 p.m., and the Shelby Eicher Trio at 3 p.m. Awards land at 4 p.m.
The society, which goes by J.A.M., is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Its stated mission is to promote "the unfiltered story of Jenks," and its vision is a physical and virtual interactive center that uses technology to engage generations with the city's ongoing journey. Right now that vision lives mostly in storage. The group keeps a small display inside city hall with a few pieces of memorabilia, and it has an arrangement with Jenks Public Schools to house some artifacts. Parker said the society has largely stopped collecting because there is nowhere to put anything.
"We're not in a big mode of collecting artifacts right now because we just don't have a space," he said.
The money problem is straightforward. "Buildings in Jenks are extremely expensive," Parker said. "We have a little bit of money, but to operate the museum's going to cost us $150,000 a year if we hire someone." That figure is the reason for the chili, the taster kits, the cornhole brackets and the sponsorship levels the society is selling to local businesses.
Brian Sherman, another member of the group, framed the stakes simply. "It's vitally important. All museums are," he said. "You gotta know where you came from to know where you're going." And of the cook-off itself: "We're going to cook some chili. We're going to drink some beer. We're gonna have a great time, but most important, we're gonna raise money for the museum."
Jenks has plenty of material to work with. The town was founded in 1905 and named for Elmer E. Jenks, a railroad official, growing up along the Midland Valley Railroad between Tulsa and Muskogee on the banks of the Arkansas River. When oil was struck nearby at the Glenn Pool field, once called the richest small oil field in the world, the settlement boomed. The original Jenks Arkansas River bridge went up in 1910 and stayed in use until 1948. As oil production eventually waned, tank farms came down and agriculture returned as an economic pillar. Downtown later remade itself as an antique-shopping destination, and the Riverwalk district followed.
Even the city's nickname carries a story worth preserving. During World War II, soldiers from Jenks stationed far from home addressed letters to "Jenks, America" rather than "Jenks, Oklahoma" -- a small act of pride that stuck. After the war, Oral Roberts University floated renaming the town "Riverside, Oklahoma" to shed some of the negative associations attached to the state. Residents refused, and the "Jenks America" identity hardened instead, becoming the name the museum now carries.
That is the kind of detail Parker worries will disappear without a place to keep it. "Anything that we have from the Smithsonian on down to local museums we need to have that history to know where we came from, what happened, what made the city here," he said.
The society meets on the first Monday of each month at 6 p.m. at Louie's in Jenks, and it has been building a public record in other ways while it waits for walls -- hosting history talks at the Jenks library, including one with Vic Vreeland, a fourth-generation Jenks Trojan who served on the city council, and another with Rev. John Green, a 1967 Jenks High School graduate who pastors the relocated Rentie Grove Church, a landmark more than a century old tied to the Muskogee Freedman community that once stood near 91st and Harvard.
For now, the museum exists as a website, a storage arrangement, a display case in city hall and a monthly meeting. On October 17 it will also exist as a park full of chili cooks, taster kits and a ukulele band, all pointed at the same goal: giving a 120-year-old city somewhere to keep its stories.