Southern Heights Heritage Center and Museum
Unexplored Ethnic Indian Country
Our Museum Is Set To Begin Expanding!
The Need For More Space Is Crucial
The Southern Heights-East Park Neighborhood, in which our Museum sits is perhaps the oldest in the City of Enid and certainly in Garfield County. It is the gateway into the Enid community. Homes and structures in the neighborhood built before 1950 may be eligible to be considered Historic due to their style, plus the fact that they haven’t been significantly altered and have attained age criterion.
Area Preservationists and Citizens led by the Administrators of the Leona Mitchell Southern Heights Heritage Center and Museum have indicated a desire to tie into Enid’s new Preservation City Status as the perfect opportunity to seek funds to improve the Southern Heights-East Park Community.
The Leona Mitchell Southern Heights Heritage Center and Museum has actively been working to preserve our Museum, which began it's life as a Church attended by International Opera Singer Leona Mitchell and her family during their youthful formative years. Her father was an area Pastor and Influential COGIC Bishop (Rev. Hulon Mitchell, Sr.).
Included in Museum Expansion Plans is a dynamic program to revitalize, beautify, upgrade and enhance the Southern Heights-East Park Community for comfortable, safe and attractrive Tourism.
Museum Administrators, and a core of Tribal interests seek to restore Ethnic Indian Economic Infrastructure, Sustainable Development Projects, including the provision of jobs and employment for the constituent Freedmen Descendants left out of the United States' Native American Reservation Economy Programs benefitting all Native Americans, but excluded Indian Freedmen and all of their historic autonomous extent Tribal Communities. Indian Freedmen Settlements represented the exiled Tribal Nations, including those in the Northwestern Oklahoma Cherokee Outlet Region, along the Chisholm Trail around the historic "Springs" (Government Springs) since the 1830s, including an influx of Indian Freedmen from the Southeastern Indian Nations (1866 through 1940).
Museum Administrators are taking the opportunity to expand existing space and to take advantage of a recently donated historic building, to save it from demolition while at the same time gaining more exhibit space for distance learning projects, room for children's programs, and a Studio for Voice Lessons and Master's Classes associated with Leona Mitchell and her Special Collection.
External Structures associated with the Museum also includes the Burn's Place Exhibit that will be rehabilitated on site and outfitted with period furniture that was also donated to the Museum from an area family inhabiting the Southern Heights-East Park Community from the same period.
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