600 N.E. 15th Street
This four square tapestry brick with red Spanish tiled hipped roof colonial house has a twin columned wood doric capital palladian entrance porch. There are triple windows with brick voussoirs and in-filled arches on the ground floor. The east two-story wing has an arched enclosed porch on the first floor.
H.B. Houghton 1929-62
Originally a newsboy in Hughesville, Pennsylvania, one of ten newsboys to receive a free trip to the Worlds Fair in Chicago in 1890, H.B. Houghton built a $45,000,000 insurance company in Oklahoma City almost from scratch.
Houghton founded National Aid Life Insurance Company, formerly Oklahoma City Aid Life, in 1921.
In 1902 Houghton returned with his wife and baby, opened a clothing store with $800 capital and did $136,000 in business the first year.
Houghton's business career was hectic. He lost one fortune drilling dry holes while searching for oil in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana, but he made another one when he sank 42 producing wells in the Oklahoma City oil field.
In 1945 he sold his insurance company and retired -- for one week. Unable to stand idleness, he formed the Houghton Investment Co. and opened offices in the Kerr-McGee building where he continued as a financier until his death in 1954 at the age of 78.
In his later years, Houghton reminisced about the good old days from statehood . . . loafing (as a boy) around W.T. Hales' mule barn in the first block of West Main Street, "front row seats" at saloon fights, and teams and wagons bogging down in the mud hole on the site of the Colcord building.
Houghton died of multiple injuries suffered when he walked into an elevator shaft at his home, falling from the first floor to the basement.