Chickasaw White House

Douglas Hancock Cooper Johnston, born at Skullyville in 1856 and orphaned before he was nine, became superintendent of Bloomfield Academy, the Chickasaw girls' school, in 1882. In 1898 he was elected governor of the Chickasaw Nation, and the family moved into a new house on the north edge of Emet, where he kept a store. The Dallas architect W. A. Waltham drew it in the Queen Anne style, with cherry mahogany mantels, crystal chandeliers, fourteen-foot ceilings and a dance floor. Bettie Johnston planted cannas, jonquils, roses, crepe myrtle and trumpet vine, gathered herbs for remedies and called the place Breezy Meadow, a name that never caught on.

The house did the Nation's business in its hardest years. Politicians and members of the Dawes Commission met here, and Johnston appealed more than once directly to President Theodore Roosevelt. The Nation credits those appeals with keeping white adventurers off the tribal rolls, keeping Chickasaw control of its schools and holding Washington to its treaty terms on taxes. William H. Murray, later governor of Oklahoma, married Johnston's niece Alice Hearell in the house, and their son Johnston Murray, governor from 1951, was born here in 1902. Julia Chisholm, granddaughter of Jesse Chisholm, married here too.

Johnston's descendants lived in the house until 1971, the year it was listed on the National Register. The Chickasaw Nation now owns it, restored to about 1900. The Nation's page, last updated in September 2025, says it is temporarily closed for renovations. When open, tours are by reservation for up to fourteen people.