The easiest version of the University of Tulsa’s history begins in 1894, when Henry Kendall College opened its doors in Muskogee. The truer version begins twelve years earlier, with a group of Native girls whose names nearly disappeared from the story.
In 1882, before Oklahoma was a state and before Tulsa had become synonymous with oil, the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls opened in Muskogee, Indian Territory. It was a small boarding school established to educate girls from the Muscogee Nation. The word educate, however, carries considerable historical baggage. Schools such as this one offered literacy and opportunities that could shape a student’s future, but they also operated within a national system intended to assimilate Native children into White American society. Language, religion, culture, and identity were not merely subjects surrounding the classroom; they were often the contested ground beneath it.
Alice Mary Robertson became the school’s director in 1885. Her family had long participated in Presbyterian mission work among the Muscogee people, and the school stood on Robertson family land. She would later enter politics and become the first woman from Oklahoma elected to Congress. For many years, however, institutional memory treated Robertson as the central figure in photographs of the school. Her name was preserved; the girls standing beside her were frequently left unidentified.
That imbalance has only recently begun to be corrected. University researchers, working with the Muscogee Nation’s Historic and Cultural Preservation Department, have undertaken the slow work of identifying the students in those photographs and reconstructing their lives. They have recovered women such as Susan Hampton Tiger, who later taught in Native schools, and Nellie Riley Woodward, who struggled at first because English was not her first language but eventually became active in Native church and women’s organizations. The university’s history becomes more honest when these women are treated not as figures gathered around Alice Robertson but as people with stories of their own.
In 1894, Presbyterian leaders decided that the school should become something more ambitious. At the request of the Synod of Indian Territory, the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions elevated the academy to collegiate status and chartered it as Henry Kendall College. The name honored Henry Kendall, a former leader of the church’s home-mission work. The new college held its first classes on September 12, 1894.
It was an audacious undertaking. Henry Kendall College was attempting to build an institution of higher education in Indian Territory, far from the established academic centers of the East and without anything resembling a secure financial foundation. Ambition may inspire the construction of a college, but it does not reliably pay professors or repair roofs. The institution struggled through much of its first decade. By 1906, its leaders were considering the sale of the Muskogee property and searching for another community willing to support the school.
Tulsa appeared at precisely the right moment.
The city was being transformed by the discovery of oil at Glenpool. Workers, merchants, speculators, bankers, and fortune-seekers arrived with the usual confidence of people who believe prosperity has finally chosen the correct address. Yet Tulsa’s civic leaders understood that a boomtown could not live forever on derricks, boardinghouses, and optimism. A college offered something oil could not: permanence. It suggested that Tulsa intended not merely to extract wealth from the ground but to become a place where people might build lives after the wells had begun to empty.
Tulsa’s business and professional community successfully courted Henry Kendall College, and the institution moved to the city in 1907, the same year Oklahoma entered the Union. Its first Tulsa students attended classes in temporary quarters while permanent buildings were constructed. By the 1908–1909 academic year, the college occupied a new campus east of downtown. Early photographs show brick buildings placed against an enormous prairie sky, looking at once substantial and slightly uncertain—as though the school had arrived before the surrounding landscape had been informed that a university was expected.
The college survived its relocation, but Tulsa’s educational ambitions soon produced another difficulty. In 1919, the Southern Methodist Church began planning a second institution, McFarlin College, named for oilman and philanthropist Robert M. McFarlin. Tulsa may have been growing rapidly, but its leaders concluded that the city was not yet large enough to support two competing private colleges.
Rather than conduct a denominational contest between Presbyterians and Methodists, the trustees of Henry Kendall College proposed that the two projects unite under a broader name: the University of Tulsa. McFarlin College was never constructed as a separate school. On November 9, 1920, the Kendall trustees approved a charter for the new University of Tulsa, with the formal transition unfolding into 1921. The name change represented more than an administrative adjustment. Henry Kendall College belonged to the institution’s missionary and denominational past. The University of Tulsa announced an alliance with the city and its ambitions.
The university acquired its enduring athletic identity shortly afterward. Before 1922, its teams had accumulated a collection of nicknames that included the Kendallites, Presbyterians, Tigers, Tulsans, Orange and Black, and Yellow Jackets. New football coach Howard Acher wanted something more distinctive. He considered the Golden Tornadoes, only to discover that Georgia Tech had already claimed a similar name. Acher then moved, with questionable meteorological logic but admirable promotional instinct, from tornado to hurricane. The players voted, and the Golden Hurricane was born.
There are no actual hurricanes in Tulsa, of course, but geography has rarely been allowed to interfere with college athletics. The name was forceful, memorable, and wonderfully excessive. It has endured for more than a century.
By 1928, the university had revised its governing structure and emerged as an independent institution controlled by its own board of trustees. Its Presbyterian ancestry remained part of its heritage, but the university was no longer governed as a denominational college. That same period brought an academic development almost inevitable for a school in Tulsa: the opening of a petroleum engineering program.
The relationship between the university and the oil industry soon became visible in brick and stone. In 1930, three important buildings were dedicated: McFarlin Library, Tyrrell Fine Arts Building, and the Phillips Petroleum Engineering Building. Their names and purposes captured the emerging personality of the institution. There was oil, certainly, but there were also books, music, theater, and art. Tulsa’s wealth may have risen from underground, yet the university meant to demonstrate that it could be converted into laboratories, libraries, and cultural life.
McFarlin Library became the architectural center of the campus. Its tower rose above the surrounding grounds with considerably more dignity than the average oil derrick. Over time, its collections expanded beyond the needs of a regional college, eventually encompassing rare books, literary manuscripts, historical archives, and millions of individual items. The library became evidence that an institution born from mission work and sustained by oil money could also make a serious claim upon literature, scholarship, and memory.
The Great Depression tested the university’s survival once again. Under President Clarence Pontius, it continued operating while establishing a school of business administration. In 1943, a downtown law school that had previously maintained a loose association with the university formally became the University of Tulsa School of Law. Petroleum engineering and geology helped the school develop an international reputation, drawing students and scholars from oil-producing regions around the world. Petroleum Abstracts, created to organize technical research for the oil and gas industry, further connected the university’s academic work to Tulsa’s dominant economy.
After the Second World War, the university began another period of reinvention. President Ben Graf Henneke, himself a Tulsa graduate and professor, oversaw a modernization effort beginning in 1959. The James A. Chapman Endowment, established in 1966, provided resources for further development. Graduate programs grew, international enrollment increased, and the institution gradually ceased to be understood merely as Tulsa’s local college. It became a small university with a reach disproportionate to its size.
During the 1980s, the university strengthened its academic core, emphasizing mathematics, writing, and languages while investing in computing, research, and endowed faculty positions. The establishment of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1988 offered national recognition of its work in the liberal arts and sciences. In the decades that followed, the campus expanded through new academic buildings, student housing, athletic facilities, and legal and research centers. Petroleum remained an important part of the university’s identity, but it no longer defined the whole of it.
The deeper story of the University of Tulsa, however, is not simply one of growth. It is a story of repeated reinvention. A mission school became a college. A financially precarious college moved to an oil town. A Presbyterian institution adopted the name of its city. A regional undergraduate school developed graduate programs and an international reputation. A university tied to petroleum accumulated literary manuscripts and rare books.
Each transformation preserved something from the past while obscuring something else.
That is why the university’s renewed examination of its Indigenous origins matters. The old institutional story was often presented as a simple ascent: a small school became a college, the college moved to Tulsa, and the university prospered. The fuller story is less comfortable and far more human. The institution owes its beginning partly to Native students whose names were not consistently preserved and to a missionary system that mingled education with cultural assimilation. The legacy includes opportunity and injury, achievement and erasure. It cannot be understood honestly by choosing only the more flattering half.
The recent effort to identify the girls in the earliest photographs represents a quiet but important reversal. For generations, the institution remembered its presidents, trustees, ministers, oilmen, and benefactors. Now researchers are asking who the students were, what languages they spoke, how they experienced the school, and what became of them after they left.
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate task for a university than recovering the names that history neglected to record.
The University of Tulsa resembles the city that adopted it: ambitious, repeatedly remade, enriched by oil, and still negotiating the uneasy relationship between prosperity and memory. Its buildings stand as monuments to confidence, but its archives preserve the quieter lives beneath them—the Native girls in Muskogee, the struggling professors, the civic boosters, the ministers, the oilmen, the scholars, and the generations of students who inherited an institution assembled from all of them.
The university was not born once. It was born first from mission work, then from financial necessity, then from Tulsa’s oil-fueled ambition. It continues to be born whenever it chooses to examine its past more honestly than the generation before it.