Kell House Museum

Frank Kell was born in Clifton, Texas, in 1859, left school at eighteen for a store job, and went into grain and then milling. In 1885 he married Lula Kemp, whose brother Joseph A. Kemp was building a business in Wichita Falls, and in 1896 Kemp and Kell bought control of the Wichita Valley Milling Company and the Kells moved to town. Kell ran the mill, which survived a fire in 1900 and grew to 3,500 barrels a day by 1917, and added plants and a hundred small-town elevators across Texas and Oklahoma before selling the business to General Mills in 1928.

He was also a railroad man. From 1905 he owned or shared in six lines with more than 1,300 miles of track, the first of them, built with Kemp, tying Wichita Falls to wheat country and coal. He served as a director of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas from 1914 to 1927 and as a state food official under Herbert Hoover in the First World War.

In 1909 the Kells built their house on Bluff Street in the Classic Revival style. It has seven fireplaces and hand-stenciled decoration, and it was restored with much of the family's own furniture, including a baby grand player piano. The house is recognized as a local, state and national landmark, and guided tours tell both the Kell family's story and the early settlement of Wichita Falls.