H. H. Champlin House: Enid's Oil Baron Mansion

The sandstone mansion rising behind the trees off South Tyler Street tells a story about what a single oil lease on Christmas Day could become.

Herbert Hiram Champlin arrived in Enid in the late eighteen hundreds as a banker, not a wildcatter. He was a careful man, and when friends pressured him to invest in a lapsed oil lease on a farm called the Beggs place, out in what would become the Garber Field east of town, he resisted. His wife finally persuaded him. He put up twenty-five thousand dollars. On Christmas Day of nineteen sixteen, the first well came in at two hundred fifty barrels a day.

Champlin moved quickly. He bought a small refinery on the edge of Enid in July of nineteen seventeen and began enlarging it to process the oil from his own wells. Within a decade the Champlin Refining Company had grown into something remarkable: for many years it held the distinction of being the largest fully integrated oil company in the United States under private ownership. Integrated meant Champlin owned the wells, the pipelines, the refinery, and the retail gas stations, a chain that ran from Texas north through Oklahoma and into Iowa. A six-hundred-mile pipeline carried refined product from Enid to a distribution hub in Iowa.

By nineteen thirty-nine Champlin was in his seventies, and he commissioned architects Roy Shaw and Norris Wheeler to design a residence worthy of what he had built. The result was this Tudor Revival manor, its walls dressed in Briar Hill sandstone quarried in Ohio and its roof laid with Vermont slate. The D. C. Bass Company did the construction. The Jacoby Art Glass Company of Saint Louis supplied the leaded-glass insets for the Tudor arch windows, each pane depicting scenes from Oklahoma history. The main two floors cover nearly thirteen thousand square feet.

Champlin died in nineteen forty-four, five years after the house was finished. He had gone from Enid banker to oil-industry patriarch in roughly two decades, and he never left this city to do it. The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-three. Today it stands in the Kisner Heights neighborhood, the most architectural record Enid has of what the Garber Field made possible.