Bartlesville, OK
A 19-story, 221-foot tower at 510 South Dewey Avenue in Bartlesville, completed February 1956 — the only Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper ever built. Commissioned by Harold C. Price Sr. of the H.C. Price Company to house his oil pipeline business, rental offices, and apartments in a single mixed-use vertical. Wright adapted his 1928 unbuilt St. Mark's in the Bowery design for Lower Manhattan and scaled it down to the Oklahoma prairie. The structural concept is radical even today: 19 floors cantilevered from a central concrete utility core, no steel frame — Wright called it "the tree that escaped the crowded forest." Copper-panel facade, asymmetric plan rotated on a 60-degree parallelogram grid, interiors and furnishings designed as a single integrated system. Phillips Petroleum bought it in 1981, donated it to a nonprofit in 2001, which ran it as a boutique hotel and museum until it closed in August 2024 amid the owner's financial collapse. Sold out of bankruptcy to McFarlin Building LLC of Tulsa on May 5, 2025 for $1.4 million; closed for a roughly $10 million restoration, with the new owners targeting a 2027 reopening as a hotel and residences. National Historic Landmark; a UNESCO World Heritage Site candidacy was withdrawn. The tower remains visible from the Bartlesville street grid — it's the only tall thing in town.
Will Rogers — Cherokee cowboy, trick-roper, vaudeville star, newspaper columnist, and the most beloved American of his day — was born near Oolagah and is memorialized in Claremore, on a hill he'd bought intending to build a home on. ("I want to be buried on that hill," he said; he is.) The Will Rogers Memorial Museum holds twelve galleries of his life: the lariat tricks, the films, the folksy wit that made him the conscience and humorist of Depression-era America ("I never met a man I didn't like"). He died in 1935 in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, alongside the famed aviator Wiley Post — a fellow Oklahoman — a loss the whole country mourned. The museum sits in the green hills of northeastern Oklahoma along historic Route 66.
The capital of the Cherokee Nation since 1839 — chosen after the forced removal of the tribe from Georgia and the Carolinas along the Trail of Tears, when an estimated 4,000 Cherokee died on the 1,200-mile march west. Tahlequah was established as the seat of the new Cherokee government in Indian Territory; today it is the headquarters of the Cherokee Nation (the largest federally recognized tribe in the U.S., with 450,000+ enrolled citizens) and of the United Keetoowah Band. The old Cherokee National Capitol (an 1869 brick courthouse on the town square) remains the symbolic center; the modern Cherokee Nation government complex sits south of town. The Cherokee Heritage Center at nearby Park Hill closed in 2022 but is being reconceived; in the meantime, the National Cherokee Museum and several historic sites tell the story. The Cherokee written language — Sequoyah's 86-character syllabary, invented in the 1820s — appears on street signs, in the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper (first Native American newspaper, founded 1828, still publishing), and on the Cherokee Nation flag. Northeastern State University in Tahlequah is the second-oldest college west of the Mississippi (1846).
Wichita has called itself the Air Capital of the World since the 1920s and is one of the only American cities that can claim the title with no asterisks. Travel Air (1925), Cessna (1927), Beechcraft (1932), and Stearman (1927) were all founded here within seven years of each other. Boeing built B-29s in Wichita during WWII. Today Spirit AeroSystems, Textron Aviation (Cessna + Beechcraft), Bombardier, and Airbus all maintain major operations on or adjacent to KICT. The Kansas Aviation Museum occupies the original 1935 Wichita Municipal Airport terminal building, just south of the Spirit factory. The Air Capital Memorial flame on the airport grounds honors the airmen and engineers from Wichita who built American aviation.