Frank Phillips Home

Frank Phillips was an Iowa barber who became a bond salesman. In 1903 he heard about the oil country of Indian Territory, and by early 1905 he and his brother L. E. had moved to Bartlesville, where the first commercial oil well in what became Oklahoma had come in eight years earlier. Their first two wells were dry. Running on borrowed money, they drilled the Anna Anderson No. 1 just north of town, and on September 6, 1905 it came in, the first of eighty-one producing wells in a row. Big wells on a lease in eastern Osage County in 1917 kept them in oil, and that year they incorporated Phillips Petroleum Company with twenty-seven employees.

Phillips bought the land in 1908, and the house, designed by Walter Everman, was finished by the end of 1909. A wing went on in 1917. In 1930 the family spent $500,000 on a remodel by Edward Buehler Delk, the architect of Frank's brother Waite's villa in Tulsa. The house was air-conditioned in 1938, and Jane Phillips reportedly gave Frank the elevator for Christmas in 1947. Little was changed inside, so nearly everything in the rooms is original. The third floor still has a room for the butler, Henry Einaga.

Elizabeth Irwin, the Phillipses' granddaughter, gave the house and its contents to the state in 1973. In 2018 the Historical Society passed it to the Frank Phillips Foundation, which also runs Woolaroc, the family ranch. Guided tours start in the Interpretive Center in the old garage behind the house.