Look for the massive three-story home constructed of rough-cut grey limestone, featuring a red clay tile roof and a wrap-around porch defined by heavy, cavernous stone arches.
A.C. Trumbo, whose home we just passed, was actually A.W. Patterson’s son-in-law. It really was a tight-knit circle running this city. In nineteen-o-one, these two men co-founded the Bank of Muskogee together. It makes sense that they built their homes within shouting distance of one another. It wasn't just about family barbecues... it was about consolidating influence.
This house, completed in nineteen-o-six, is a perfect example of what they call Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. That is a bit of a mouthful, but it essentially means the architect wanted the building to feel permanent, weighty, and immovable, like a fortress. You can see it in those heavy, rough-cut limestone blocks. That stone was quarried all the way over in Carthage, Missouri, and they actually brought the stone masons down from Missouri just to install it. Patterson was trying to make a statement here. In the chaotic days before Oklahoma officially became a state, he was planting a flag that said Muskogee was civilized, stable, and here to stay.
Patterson used that same drive to put Muskogee on the map commercially, playing a key role in the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress we mentioned at the Trumbo House. He wanted the world to see this city as a cosmopolitan hub, not a dusty frontier outpost.
After the Patterson era, the home passed to L.R. Kershaw in nineteen-forty-one. Now, Kershaw was a lawyer and a banker, but he was also a cattleman with a flair for the dramatic. Long before he bought this house, during World War One, he donated a prize steer named "Muskogee Boy" to a charity auction for the Red Cross. The auction took place in a hotel lobby, of all places. That steer sold for nearly six thousand dollars. In today's money, that is well over one hundred thousand dollars.
The story goes that the meat was shipped to France for General Pershing’s staff, and the hide was tanned to make an overcoat for President Woodrow Wilson. That is the kind of reach these Muskogee businessmen had. They weren't just local big shots... they were dealing with Presidents and Generals.
Kershaw lived here for decades, raising five children. He even installed an electric elevator to make getting up to the third floor a little easier. The house eventually passed to Dr. Phil Couch in the late seventies. He and his wife had to do some serious work-rewiring, plumbing, the works-because for all its grandeur, the house was a bit of a dinosaur by modern standards. But thanks to them, it is still standing tall.
It is a lot of house, built by men with a lot of ambition.
Our final stop is the home of the people who made sure we didn't forget any of this history. Let’s head over to the Grant Foreman House.
