Oklahoma‘s first communications giant was the Pioneer Telephone and Telegraph Company, founded in Perry in 1897. One of the four men who brought Pioneer to Oklahoma City was the man who built this home, David McKinstry. While neighbors John Noble, James Noble, and E.E. Westervelt managed operations for Pioneer, David served as a major financial investor.

David was born in Gardiner, New York on a farm which had been owned by his ancestors for several generations. He was of Scotch-Dutch decent. He moved to Perry in 1893 to work with the Perry Mill while still retaining ownership of his farm. In 1903 he married Leona Herzer of Wichita, Kansas and two years later they moved to Oklahoma City.

In 1907, just as Pioneer was building the first seven-story skyscraper in Oklahoma City, David and Leona decided to construct a new home on 15th Street and bought the land from Anton Classen. The 7000 square foot brick home had six rooms and a large entry hall on the first floor and five rooms and a large hallway landing on the second floor. Downstairs was a full basement and behind the house was a garage with a second-floor living quarters. The exterior was a combination of contemporary styles, with the low, horizontal lines of Frank Lloyd Wright and a low-pitched hip tiled roof, gable, and curvilinear dormers of Mission style, as well as the balance facade of Colonial Revival. The home also features a sweeping shallow roofed porch with massive columns, a porch banister, and oversized symmetrically arranged windows.

David assisted youth in obtaining an education and was a leader in charge of bond sales and Red Cross drives during the war. The McKinstrys remained in the home until 1919, when it was purchased by Judge Samuel & Mamie Hayes.

Judge Hayes served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and as Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court. They later built a new house in the neighborhood at 327 NW 14th Street in 1924. They sold the home on 15th to another innovator, Dennis T. Flynn and his wife, Adeline “Addie” M. Blanton Flynn. Dennis was an attorney with another Heritage Hills resident, C.B. Ames.

Dennis, born on February 13, 1861, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, was raised in an orphanage after his mother died when he was three years old. In 1882 he moved to Kiowa, Kansas where he served as postmaster, city attorney and the publisher of the Kiowa Herald. In 1887 Dennis married Addie who was born in 1859 in Kansas. In 1889, Dennis was named the first postmaster in Guthrie, then served four terms as the territorial delegate to Congress. Dennis and Addie had four children, Dennis, Dorothy, Streeter and Olney.

Dennis died on June 19, 1939, at age 78 and was followed in the home by his son, Olney, and his wife, Ailene, who moved from Tulsa to Oklahoma City. Born in Washington D.C., Olney was a graduate of Harvard, a World War I veteran, and an oilman. His wife was the daughter of William Longmire, co-founder of the Harbour-Longmire Furniture Company and yet another resident of Heritage Hills. In 1943 they moved back to Tulsa, where Olney served a term as mayor and ran as the Republican candidate for governor in 1946.

The house was then sold to oilman, Dave Schonwald, whose family retained the property until 1974 when Sheldon Farber bought the home. Farber added a swimming pool where a short-wave radio tower once stood and also installed central heat and air conditioning.

After the Farbers moved out, the home sat vacant until 1985, when the Women’s Committee of the Oklahoma City Symphony Orchestra selected it as the Decorator’s Show House. After thousands of people toured the home, it was sold to Dr. and Mrs. Paul Stelzer, who lifted, repaired, and restored the tile roof, remodeled the kitchen, and repaired the effects of age.

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