About Kendall-Whittier

Kendall-Whittier is a neighborhood with a long history, distinct identity, and a lot of moving parts. This page explains where we are, how the neighborhood developed, and what makes Kendall-Whittier Kendall-Whittier. 

Kendall-Whittier takes its name from Kendall Elementary and Whittier Elementary, two neighborhood schools that served the area.

Kendall Elementary was named for Henry Kendall, a Presbyterian missionary leader whose name was given to Henry Kendall College. The college grew out of the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls in Muskogee, part of a broader missionary education system for Native children intended in significant part to assimilate Native communities into white American culture.

Whittier Elementary was named for John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker poet and abolitionist. Whittier wrote about New England life, nature, religion and social reform. He devoted much of his earlier career to ending slavery, working with the American Anti-Slavery Society, editing abolitionist newspapers, writing antislavery poetry and essays, and helping found the antislavery Liberty Party. He also encouraged and supported women writers of his era. 

History 

Kendall-Whittier is one of Tulsa’s older neighborhoods, shaped by early residential growth, Route 66, urban renewal, highway construction, and generations of change.

Kendall-Whittier sits along the boundary of the Cherokee Nation and Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservations. These lands became part of Indian Territory after the forced removal of Native nations from their homelands in the southeastern United States. The tribal nations survived removal, allotment, Oklahoma statehood and repeated efforts to diminish their sovereignty, and both remain sovereign nations today. Kendall-Whittier’s location across this boundary is an important part of the neighborhood’s history and identity.

Before Tulsa

Long before Kendall-Whittier or Tulsa existed, northeastern Oklahoma was Native country. Osage communities lived, hunted, farmed, traded and traveled throughout the broader region, with established villages and an extensive network of trails. The land was neither empty nor waiting to be settled.

During the nineteenth century, U.S. expansion repeatedly displaced Native nations. Osage bands were forced out of Arkansas and Oklahoma in 1839 and removed to Kansas; they later returned to what is now Osage County after purchasing land there.

At the same time, the United States was forcing Native nations from the Southeast into Indian Territory. More than 14,000 Muscogee people were removed west during 1836 and 1837 alone. They rebuilt towns, communities and government in their new homeland. By 1840, the Muscogee Nation had established a national government with council sites in what is now Tulsa.

Tulsa’s story therefore does not begin with white settlement. It begins much earlier, with Native peoples already living in and using this region, followed by forced removal, displacement and Native nations rebuilding their lives and governments in Indian Territory.

Allotment and Dispossession

At the end of the nineteenth century, the federal government set out to break apart the communal land systems of the Native nations in Indian Territory. The Dawes Commission created federal citizenship rolls and divided tribal land into individually owned allotments.

On the Muscogee side of what is now Kendall-Whittier, the 1901 Creek Agreement provided individual citizens with 160-acre allotments. Cherokee lands north of the tribal boundary were divided under a separate allotment agreement. Land that had belonged to Native nations collectively was transformed into individual parcels that could be sold, inherited, taxed and eventually subdivided into the streets, house lots and commercial property of modern Tulsa.

Allotment was presented as reform and assimilation, but it also opened Native land to outside acquisition. Muscogee and other Native landowners subsequently lost enormous amounts of property through sales, fraud, legal manipulation and other forms of exploitation. Historian Angie Debo later described this era as one of systematic dispossession of the Five Tribes.

The modern property map of Kendall-Whittier rests on that transformation of Native land.

Railroads, Streetcars and the Growth of Tulsa

The railroad helped turn a small Muscogee settlement into the city of Tulsa. In 1882, the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway reached the area, serving local ranching interests and bringing workers, merchants and new development. Stores, houses, hotels and other businesses quickly appeared around the tracks. Railroads helped shape both Tulsa and Kendall-Whittier. Tulsa’s first railroad arrived in 1882, connecting the growing settlement to regional trade and transportation. Rail lines later became closely tied to the industrial and commercial development around Kendall-Whittier, and the railroad corridor still forms part of the neighborhood’s northern boundary. The tracks remain a visible reminder of the neighborhood’s connection to Tulsa’s early growth, industry and transportation.

As Native allotments were divided and sold, developers began turning former tribal lands into additions, streets and house lots. Tulsa spread rapidly outward.

Transportation helped determine where that growth went. Tulsa’s first street railway began construction in 1907. That same year, Tulsa business leaders persuaded Henry Kendall College to move from Muskogee by offering money, land and streetcar service between downtown and the new campus.

The college and streetcar helped pull development eastward. What had recently been allotted Native land was becoming part of a rapidly expanding city.

Oil Boom and a Working-Class Neighborhood

Tulsa’s oil boom brought a population and housing boom with it, and Kendall-Whittier grew as one of the city’s early residential neighborhoods. City directories from the period show a working-class community filled with people doing nearly every kind of work imaginable—carpenters, plumbers, pipefitters, boilermakers, mechanics, laborers and many others. Some worked directly in oil and industry; others built the houses, repaired the plumbing, worked in shops, provided services and did the everyday work required by a rapidly growing city. Kendall-Whittier was, above all, a neighborhood where Tulsa’s workers lived.

Restrictive Covenants and Segregation

As Tulsa’s oil and housing booms expanded the city, race helped determine where people could live. Restrictive covenants written into property records in Tulsa barred Black people and other nonwhite residents from buying, renting or occupying homes in many neighborhoods. These private restrictions worked alongside other segregation policies to divide the growing city by race and limit access to homeownership and generational wealth.

Courts could no longer enforce racial covenants after 1948, and housing discrimination was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but their effects remained long after the words lost their legal force.

The Tulsa Race Massacre and Kendall-Whittier

Kendall-Whittier has its own connection to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. While Greenwood was being attacked and burned, Black Tulsans were rounded up across the city and held under armed guard. One of the principal detention sites was the Tulsa Free Fairgrounds at Lewis and Admiral, near the present-day Las Americas. Thousands of Black men, women and children were confined at the Fairgrounds and other detention sites, and many later needed identification signed by a white employer to move freely through Tulsa.

Kendall-Whittier was also part of the predominantly white Tulsa that surrounded Greenwood. The identities and home addresses of many individual attackers remain uncertain, so the neighborhood's direct participation requires more research. What is clear is that white supremacy was deeply embedded in Tulsa at the time. In the months following the massacre, the Ku Klux Klan grew rapidly into a major force in the city.

The massacre was not something that happened in a distant part of Tulsa. Greenwood was nearby, and some of its aftermath took place here in Kendall-Whittier.

The First Route 66

When Route 66 was created in 1926, its original path through Tulsa ran north on Lewis Avenue and east along Admiral Place through Kendall-Whittier. Admiral, then called Federal Boulevard, carried the Mother Road until 1932, when Route 66 was moved to 11th Street.

The highway brought travelers, traffic and commerce through the neighborhood and helped Whittier Square grow into one of Tulsa’s earliest suburban shopping districts. Admiral Place remains Kendall-Whittier’s original stretch of Route 66.

During the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, Route 66 became an important migration route for families leaving Oklahoma and other parts of the southern Plains in search of work farther west. Its later fame was amplified by books, songs, tourism and nostalgia, but for people traveling through Kendall-Whittier during this period, it was first and foremost a working highway.