History

By the 1930s, Tulsa had become one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the United States, the capital of the American oil industry and a place where the revenues of the petroleum economy were translated directly into civic architecture of unusual ambition. The city had built three senior high schools by 1920 — Central in the downtown area, Booker T. Washington in North Tulsa, and Clinton in West Tulsa — but by the mid-1930s, the population growth that the oil boom had driven into the city’s eastern neighborhoods had created demand for a fourth. The Tulsa School District purchased the 26.984-acre site in September 1936, the same month that the federal Public Works Administration approved the grant that would fund the building. Bids were opened in July 1937; construction began using Works Progress Administration labor.

The architects were Joseph R. Koberling Jr. and Leon B. Senter, two figures central to Tulsa’s Art Deco building program of the late 1920s and 1930s. Senter had designed the Philcade Building (1931), one of the masterpieces of Tulsa Art Deco and a National Register property. Koberling had worked on the Medical and Dental Arts Building and was known for his ability to translate the Deco idiom from the commercial skyscraper scale to the scale of civic and institutional buildings. Their design for Rogers High School — completed in 1939 — was named for the Cherokee Nation humorist, film star, radio personality, and syndicated columnist Will Rogers, who had died in an Alaska plane crash four years earlier alongside the aviator Wiley Post. The school’s Roper mascot and blue-and-gold colors referenced Rogers’s identity as a ranching man who could rope cattle and spin a lasso as easily as he could deliver a one-liner.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 6, 2007 with a designation of national significance — a classification that placed it in the company of the most important historic properties in the United States rather than merely in its state or region. The National Park Service citation identified it as one of the best examples of Art Deco high school architecture in the United States, a judgment that reflects the ambition of the design and the quality of its execution. In 2011, Tulsa Public Schools converted Rogers to a dual enrollment institution, allowing students to complete up to 66 college credits — the equivalent of an associate degree — through the program. The school was renamed Will Rogers College Middle and High School in connection with the conversion, though the historic building retains its original character.