Hunter’s Home

Hunter's Home is the only antebellum plantation house left in Oklahoma — the Greek Revival mansion George Murrell built in Park Hill in the Cherokee Nation in 1844, on the land his wife's family had been removed to. Murrell was a Virginia merchant who married Minerva Ross — the niece of Principal Chief John Ross — and came west with the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. The house he built in Indian Territory was the Virginia plantation transplanted: the columns, the springhouse, the slave cabins, the whole form of the South reproduced on the frontier the Cherokee were exiled to.

The house was the Cherokee elite's social center — the Murrells entertained the nation's leadership and the Fort Gibson officers, and the plantation ran on the enslaved labor the Cherokee planters, like their white counterparts, kept. The Ross family's faction led the Nation; the Murrells' house was the place where the Cherokee aristocracy's world was enacted in the style of the class they'd been removed from.

The Civil War split the Nation the way it split the country — Ross was Union, Stand Watie was Confederate, and both sides burned the leaders' houses. Hunter's Home survived — one of the few in Indian Territory that neither faction torched, the house that was the Ross family's by marriage and the Murrell family's by blood, standing through the war that destroyed the world it was built in.

Hunter's Home is the archive's Cherokee file — the plantation house in the Nation that survived the Trail of Tears and the Civil War, the Greek Revival on the frontier that was built by a man who'd married into the chief's family and chose removal over separation, the only one of its kind left in Oklahoma.