The Kerr Museum in Oakmont gives a rare glimpse into late 19th century middle-class life

Just before dawn near the turn of the 19th century, when Oakmont was little more than a grid of muddy streets and tidy front porches, Dr. Thomas R. Kerr returned home on horseback. The black saddlebag slung across the horse’s back was heavy with glass vials, a leather strap, and the worn tools of a general practitioner who treated everything from fevers to farm injuries.

Back then, Oakmont was still a young borough, incorporated in 1889, perched on the banks of the Allegheny River. Families came for the promise of clean air, tree-lined streets, and a buffer from Pittsburgh’s sooty industrial core. In those days, you were either very rich, working-class poor, or, if you were lucky, someone like Dr. Kerr: a physician who occupied a rarefied slice of the professional middle class.

He tied his horse to the post in front of his 1897 Queen Anne house, climbed the steps, and walked past the beveled glass door into a world that, remarkably, has survived him.

Today, that world is known as the Kerr Memorial Museum. Tucked along Delaware Avenue in Oakmont, it is not a reconstruction or a decorator’s vision of the Victorian era, but the preserved home of one family.

The rest has been added piece by piece, sourced by antique dealers to match precisely what would have been there.

“It’s the kind of place where you could spend a full day in just one room,” Alatheia Nielsen, who’s visiting the museum in full Victorian dress, tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “What made it most memorable was how the docents effortlessly wove the Kerr family’s story into the broader history of middle-class life. They were just as giddy to share their knowledge as I was to learn.”

Dr. Kerr’s property (the house and the adjacent medical office built in 1905), added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, is one of the rarest things in Western Pennsylvania: a Victorian house museum that doesn’t just look like the period, it is the period. About 60% of the furniture and belongings once belonged to the Kerr family. Though some parts were modernized while Virginia Kerr, the doctor’s only child, still lived there, the restoration returned the house to its 1890–1910 glory. Today, the Kerr Museum offers a rare glimpse into the emerging middle-class experience, often overshadowed by narratives of either extreme wealth or severe poverty during the Industrial Age.

“What we learned about Dr. Kerr was that he was a respected family doctor who cared about his patients and his family,” Joan Stewart, a docent and Kerr Museum board member, tells City Paper. “He was a man of faith and an upstanding member of the community. Virginia wanted to preserve the legacy of her father by giving her house and contents to the Borough of Oakmont to share with future generations.”

In its heydey, inside the kitchen, Minty, the family’s servant, was already at work. Flour sifted through the crank of the Hoosier cabinet: a marvel of late-19th-century design that combined storage and workspace in a single piece of furniture. In one drawer sat bags of sugar; in another, an egg holder; above it, hooks for tea towels, tin measuring cups, and a lemon squeezer. On summer mornings, peaches from local orchards lined the counter. Today, it is the scent of lemons that hangs in the air. Minty would press them into juice, sweeten them, and perhaps, if the doctor looked particularly worn from his rounds, bring a glass of lemonade upstairs before he even had time to remove his coat.

Dr. Kerr was a graduate of Western Pennsylvania Medical College, the institution that would later become the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In an era when local physicians shouldered every emergency, he was Oakmont’s first call. His telephone number, written on early ledgers, was simply “41.”

Visitors to the Kerr Memorial Museum tour all three levels of the house — first floor, second floor, and even the basement — as well as Dr. Kerr’s medical office.

The home’s annunciator, a speaker tube working as an early intercom device, is still mounted in the kitchen. It maps the domestic hierarchy. Arrows point from the family’s rooms toward the kitchen, where Minty would have listened for the bell summoning her upstairs.

In the formal dining room, an Arts & Crafts-style beaded chandelier, meticulously restored by the late Janet Shoop, the museum’s president, throws light across polished oak furniture. The dining room remains exactly as it was when Jessie and Thomas were newlyweds.

The table is set with Jordan almonds, candlesticks, and a delicate glass salt cellar, reminders of a time when small luxuries marked social standing. A tall celery vase sits on the table — a period-correct detail that feels oddly extravagant until a docent informs you that, in 1900, celery was an imported delicacy, shipped from the Mediterranean and displayed proudly in water-filled crystal.

The Kerr Museum complements its permanent room displays with rotating exhibits that explore themes from 19th- and early 20th-century life. One upstairs bedroom serves as a dedicated gallery, with at least three new exhibits each year. These displays, drawn from both the museum’s collection and local donations, have featured Victorian christening gowns, bridal wear, and early household tools. A standout in 2024 was The Brown Collection Exhibit, showcasing Gilded Age-to-Roaring Twenties fashions from the prominent W.H. Brown family, including ornate dresses worn by socialite Margaret Brown.

“Touring a house like Kerr helps us in the 21st century see people from the past as they really were — smart, funny, creative humans just like us,” Nielsen says. “Learning how something as ‘simple’ as a dual gas-electric light fixture worked radically changed my understanding of what life was like then.”

Currently, the featured exhibit “Thomas, Jessie, Virginia: Meet the Kerr Family” runs through October 2025. This special tour invites visitors to look beyond period objects and fully enter the lives of the Kerrs themselves — what they loved, how they worked, and why it matters now. Their family stories frame the experience, weaving together medicine, education, and domestic life through original tools, anecdotes, and personal passions.

“As our guests explore the house, they begin to see how much of it still feels familiar,” Stewart says. “We hear people say, ‘This reminds me of my grandparents’ house,’ or even, ‘This is exactly like the house I grew up in.’ It’s as though the Kerrs have just stepped out for a walk.”

On your way to the basement, you’ll pass the pie safe, ventilated to keep desserts cool and critter-free. In the basement, stone walls close in. Under rows of empty canning jars, a feather basket waits, once used to catch the down from plucked chicken or geese, later stuffed into pillows. It’s a small, strange slice of Victorian life.

There’s the root cellar, dug deep into the earth to keep vegetables preserved through Pennsylvania winters, and beside it, the coal cellar, where deliveries once came by wagon and were sent sliding down a chute, broken into chunks, and carried to the furnace.

On the second floor, the past feels even closer. Dr. Kerr and Jessie’s bedroom, furnished with a brass bed, is small and spare.

The nursery feels paused mid-play: a rocking horse caught mid-gallop, dolls seated neatly for tea, waiting. Down the hall, Virginia’s room catches the light books, a vanity and vases of flowers, books still perched on the dresser.

In the sitting room, a Victorian curiosity cabinet stuffed with seashells, porcelain figurines, and fragments of a world far larger than Oakmont, speaks to the era’s obsession with collecting and displaying knowledge.

If the rooms feel so alive, it is because the museum was never conceived as an interpretation. It was a bequest.

Virginia Kerr never married. She lived in the family home until her death in 1994 at the age of 91. By then, Oakmont had paved streets and electric lights, but much of the house had gone unchanged. Rather than allow it to be sold or modernized, she left it to Oakmont Borough, along with every piece of furniture, every book, every household tool.

Today, the Kerr Memorial Museum stands as one of Oakmont’s most extraordinary civic gifts. Volunteers and local historians have honored Virginia’s will with painstaking care. The Museum is owned by the Borough of Oakmont and operated by an all-volunteer staff and board, reflecting a broad base of community support.

Education and community engagement are central to the Kerr Museum’s operations. All tours of the museum are guided by docents, many of whom are local volunteers with a passion for history (including retired educators like Virginia herself).

Beyond tours, the Kerr Museum hosts year-round programs that bring 19th-century life to the present. Spring features a Victorian May Day celebration with flower crown-making, garden tours, and May Pole re-enactments. October brings spooky yet historical Halloween tours exploring Victorian mourning customs, while December offers candlelit Christmas displays, caroling, and visits from Santa.

A fan favorite is “Tea with the Kerrs,” an off-site Victorian tea fundraiser with themed talks and costumed hosts. The upcoming event, “A Garden Party,” will be held on Sun., Sept. 14 at the Oakmont Country Club. Guests are invited to wear hats or fascinators and enjoy tea, sweet treats, and period flair, all to support the museum’s preservation efforts.

“Experiencing historical life up close — whether in a beautifully staged house or a full Victorian dress — helps us move from thinking, ‘I don’t know how people ever lived like that!’ to ‘These people faced the same problems I do, and I can learn a lot from them,’” Nielsen says.

The museum regularly partners with local groups, joining Oakmont festivals and marking milestones like Virginia Kerr’s 100th birthday. These events invite the community to see local history not just as preserved, but as alive and shared.

This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2025.