A place with history
Plans are underway to celebrate stories of historic places at Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture.
For years, Oklahoma popular culture sites have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and plans are underway to celebrate their stories at the Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture, aka OKPOP, to be built in Tulsa’s Brady Arts District.
These historic sites include the 1910 Blue Hawk Peak ranch home of Gordon W. “Pawnee Bill” Lillie on the west edge of Pawnee; the 1910 Muskogee Manual Training High School for Negroes; and the Oscar B. Jacobson House in Norman. Others include Oklahoma City’s Farmers Public Market, a Spanish-style building opened with great fanfare on June 16, 1928, and Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, opened in 1939 as an outstanding example of Public Works Administration Art Deco architecture.
“Historic sites that once served as a showcase for popular culture combine the power of shared memory with a strong sense of place,” said Bob Blackburn, Oklahoma Historical Society executive director. “These crossroads of creativity help define our cultural history and bring us together as a community.”
Lillie, who thrilled worldwide audiences with stagecoach robberies, covered wagon attacks, trick roping and shooting in his Wild West Show from 1888 to 1913, hired architect James Hamilton of Chester, Pa., to build a home at Blue Hawk Peak for $75,000. Lillie bought the land in 1902. The National Register nomination describes the property as including 280 acres with Blue Hawk Peak, a rustic stone 14-room mansion built in 1910, and several original ranch buildings.
“When the state purchased the ranch in 1961, it stood much as it had when Pawnee Bill died 20 years before,” said Kent Ruth, who prepared the National Register nomination. “The house, outbuildings, garden, original log cabin and three-story barn were essentially unchanged.”
Visitors can tour the mansion to see Lillie family memorabilia, photographs and original artwork. The ranch also has covered picnic shelters, picnic tables and a meeting room that can be rented. The Pawnee Bill Ranch re-creates Pawnee Bill’s Original Wild West Show each June.
The Manual Training High School for Negroes is one of the oldest remaining black secondary schools in eastern Oklahoma. Muskogee’s 25,278 population in 1910 included 7,831 African-Americans, about 31 percent of the population. The thriving black community included retail stores, physicians, attorneys, a blackowned bank and a black-owned newspaper, the Muskogee Cimeter.
For 70 years, the Manual High School was a significant educational institution in Muskogee, and its faculty nurtured nine nationally recognized jazz
NONPROFITS IN BRIEF musicians, including eight African-Americans born in Muskogee, according to Rogers State University professor Hugh Foley.
The Oscar B. Jacobson House is associated with a director of the University of Oklahoma’s School of Fine Arts who revolutionized art study for the university, said William A. Mathes, who prepared the National Register nomination. The house is a unique example of Italian Renaissance architecture in Norman.
As director, Jacobson embraced the work of five young Plains Indians artists. In 1928, the Kiowa Five were accepted by OU as special students — a significant event in Plains Indian art history, Mathes said. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Jacobson House became a focal point for artistic and literary projects through interaction between the artist communities of Norman and New Mexico’s Santa Fe and Taos.
The Farmers Public Market in Oklahoma City became the hub of farm produce marketing in Oklahoma, and its second-floor auditorium was a dance hall that featured famous bands headed by Bob Wills and Merl Lindsay.
Lindsay and his Oklahoma Night Riders became a popular Western swing band during the 1940s and 1950s. He also broadcast a daily radio and television show in 1947. After the dance hall burned that year, Lindsay and the Oklahoma Night Riders opened the Lindsay Land Ballroom in south Oklahoma City, where they recorded and enjoyed regional popularity.
In 1957, Red Foley featured them on his “Ozark Jubilee” television show and then hired them as the regular show band. The name was changed to the Ozark Jubilee Band. Lindsay was inducted into the Western Swing Society Hall of Fame in 1992.
In Tulsa, Will Rogers High School was nominated for the National Register as one of the nation’s best examples of Art Deco school architecture, said Cathy Ambler, who prepared the nomination. The school was built by Manhattan Construction, of Muskogee. The building is associated with the book, “The Outsiders,” written by S.E. Hinton while she was a student at the school. Oklahoman Gray Frederickson was a producer on the film version of the novel.
OKPOP will be proud to celebrate the major roles these and other major sites have played in the development of Oklahoma’s culture and to preserve their stories well into the future for Oklahomans, Blackburn said.