Norman

Norman is a city in central Oklahoma, south of Oklahoma City on the Canadian River, and the home of the University of Oklahoma. It is named after Abner Norman, a young surveyor whose crew carved the words Norman's Camp into an elm tree near the site.

The town was founded in the Land Run of 1889, when settlers raced in at noon to claim land in the Unassigned Lands of Indian Territory. The territorial legislature placed the University of Oklahoma there in 1890, and its first classes met in a rented building downtown before the first campus hall opened. A naval air station and a training base were built at the edge of the city in the 1940s, and part of their land later passed to the university for its research campus. Cotton and wheat farms surrounded the town in its early decades.

The Sooners, the university football team, play at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium and have won several national championships. The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History shows an Apatosaurus skeleton and a Pentaceratops skull found in New Mexico. The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art holds French Impressionist paintings from the collection of Aaron and Clara Weitzenhoffer, with works by Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh.

Johnson Controls makes heating and air conditioning units at a plant in Norman. The National Weather Center, on the university's research campus, houses the Storm Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which issues severe weather watches for the whole country. Lake Thunderbird, a reservoir east of the city, supplies water to Norman and has a state park with boat ramps and campsites along its shore.