Tulsa, OK
Opened 1928. Tulsa was an early-20th-century oil boomtown that funded the city's remarkable Art Deco downtown. Sits along Route 66. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — the destruction of the prosperous "Black Wall Street" neighborhood of Greenwood — happened just north of the present terminal.
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.
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 National Historic Landmark; a UNESCO World Heritage Site candidacy was withdrawn.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.
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).
Founded in 2005 by Alice Walton (only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton) and opened November 11, 2011 — a 200,000-square-foot museum on 134 acres of Ozark forest in a natural ravine fed by Crystal Spring, in Walton's hometown of Bentonville. Eight interconnected pavilions designed by Moshe Safdie, two of them literal bridges spanning spring-fed ponds. Construction was funded by an $800 million endowment from the Walton Family Foundation; admission is free for life thanks to a $20 million Walmart gift. The permanent collection spans five centuries of American art: Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits" (Hudson River School), Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter," Georgia O'Keeffe's "Jimson Weed," plus extensive contemporary holdings. On the grounds, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1956 Bachman-Wilson House — moved from New Jersey and reassembled. The museum has measurably transformed Bentonville: from a Walmart corporate town of 35,000 to a Northwest Arkansas cultural destination ringed by new restaurants, the 21c boutique hotel, and the Momentary contemporary-art satellite. The Razorback Greenway connects it five miles south to Fayetteville.