Bartlesville
Public
School
Facilities

Bartlesville Public School Facilities

Demolished in the 1980s

A brick school building was begun in 1904 at 6th and Cherokee (611 S. Cherokee) and completed in 1905. The $17,230 facility was named Garfield School and housed all grade levels. On May 5, 1907, two young ladies, Eva Mae Kreep and Lillian Emma Evans, became the first graduating seniors from this site's Bartlesville High School. Classes steadily grew from 469 to 800 students. High school classes moved out of the Garfield facility after the spring of 1910 when the original Bartlesville High School was completed.

The most famous student to come from Garfield School was J. Paul Getty, who attended Garfield as a young teenager during its first year or two of operation. His father, George Getty, was in Bartlesville during the early Osage oil boom. During his two-year stay in Bartlesville, J. Paul Getty sold newspapers as well as attending school. He then moved with his father to California, but returned to Tulsa to work his father's business, and made his first million in a little over a year, before age 20. His oil business would lead to him being named the world's richest man by the late 1950s.

A $64,000 addition to Garfield was constructed in 1929, adding seven classrooms and an assembly hall. The bell tower was eventually removed. Decreased enrollments caused the school to close in June, 1974. It was leased for a time by the First Baptist Church and eventually razed in the 1980s to make way for the Bartlesville Community Center. The light-colored stone from above the school's doorway (visible in photo), inscribed "19 · Garfield School · 04", was placed at the northeast corner of Dewey Avenue and Adams Boulevard to commemorate Bartlesville's first permanent school building.

Please direct any comments or suggestions regarding this page to:
Granger Meador, gmeador@bps-ok.org