Murrell Home: The Only Antebellum Mansion in Oklahoma

A few hundred yards from the Cherokee Heritage Center stands one of the few antebellum buildings to survive in Cherokee lands. George Murrell was a merchant who married Minerva Ross, the niece of Principal Chief John Ross of the Cherokee Nation. When the Cherokee were forced west on the Trail of Tears, Murrell chose to accompany his wife's family to Indian Territory. In Park Hill, he built a two-story Greek Revival house between eighteen forty-four and forty-five and called it Hunter's Home, after his love of foxhunting.

Murrell established a plantation alongside the house, with outbuildings, enslaved workers' quarters, a mercantile operation, and orchards. The house is a National Historic Landmark because it is one of the few surviving examples of antebellum architecture in Cherokee lands, a reminder that the Five Civilized Tribes included enslavers, that the plantation system extended into Indian Territory, and that the Civil War divided the Cherokee Nation along the same fault lines it divided the country. The Oklahoma Historical Society preserves and interprets the property today.