Will Rogers Memorial Museum

Will Rogers was born on November 4, 1879, on his family's ranch near Oologah in the Cooweescoowee District of the Cherokee Nation. Both his parents were Cherokee, and the Nation still counts him as its most famous son. He went from trick roping in South Africa to the Ziegfeld Follies, seventy-one movies, radio and a column carried in more than five hundred papers. He died on August 15, 1935, when Wiley Post's plane crashed in Alaska, near Barrow.

In 1911 he had bought twenty acres on a hill over the Tiawah valley at Claremore, meaning to retire there. After his death Betty Rogers gave the land to the state for a memorial, and the legislature paid for the building. John Duncan Forsyth, who also designed the Marland Mansion, drew it in limestone. Rogers's sister Sallie Rogers McSpadden turned the first spadeful of dirt in April 1938, and the memorial opened on November 4, 1938, which would have been his 59th birthday.

In the rotunda stands Jo Davidson's statue of Rogers, a cast of the one in the National Statuary Hall, with his best-known line on the base: I never met a man I didn't like. The museum holds his writings and, by its own count, the world's largest collection of Will Rogers material, in twelve galleries with a theater, a library and a children's museum. Rogers, his wife Betty and several of their family are entombed in the sunken garden outside. The U.S. Highway 66 Association named the old road the Will Rogers Highway.