Henry & Anna Overholser Mansion

Henry Overholser arrived in Oklahoma City shortly after the 1889 Land Run and quickly became one of its most prominent developers, building opera houses, hotels, and commercial blocks across the young capital. In 1903 he completed the three-story Chateauesque mansion at 405 NW 15th Street as a home for himself, his wife Anna Ione Murphy Overholser, and their daughter Henry Ione, born in 1905. The house — with its slate roof, hand-painted canvas wall coverings, stained-glass windows, and original Belgian and French furnishings — was an architectural statement that helped attract Oklahoma City's wealthier families to what is now the Heritage Hills Historic District.

Henry Overholser died in 1915, but Anna continued to live in the mansion with their daughter until her own death on April 29, 1940. Henry Ione later married David Perry, and the couple lived in the home until David Perry's death in 1969. Remarkably, the Perrys preserved nearly all of the original furnishings, fabrics, and artwork, leaving the mansion as a rare intact record of turn-of-the-century domestic life in early Oklahoma City.

In 1972 the property was acquired by the Oklahoma chapter of the American Institute of Architects through Historical Preservation Inc., then transferred to the State of Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Historical Society managed the site from 1982 to 2003, and since 2003 day-to-day operations and tours have been run by Preservation Oklahoma. The Overholser Mansion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and remains one of the most intact Gilded-Age mansions in the Southern Plains.

Today the museum offers regular guided tours, public programming, and a seasonal ghost-history program titled 'History & Haunts at the Overholser,' organized in cooperation with the Oklahoma Historical Society.