Rose Hill Funeral Home and Memorial Park

05/26/2025

Please accept our apologies

05/30/2024

Please help us identify these flower theives! A Good Samaritan took these pictures, and reported the crime in action to Tulsa Police Department! Please know that we are not removing decorations until Monday June 3rd! If your items are missing please file a police report this can be done online as well as in person!

01/10/2024

Do you recognize this person? We had our maintenance shop broke into early this morning and the person got away with our truck (recovered), hydraulic dump trailer and our John Deere Gator. The hydraulic trailer and Gator are still missing. This person was last seen leaving the truck behind at Teds Hamburgers. PLEASE SHARE! Reward for information leading to the return of our equipment!

06/22/2023

You may have heard of Avant, Oklahoma but do you know the story behind its name?

An incorporated community in eastern Osage County, Avant is situated just west of State Highway 11, twenty-six miles southeast of Pawhuska and thirty miles north of Tulsa. The town was named for rancher Ben F. Avant, a Gonzales, Texas, native who settled in Osage County (the former Osage Nation) in 1895. Avant had first visited the region in 1892. Upon his return he married Rosalie Rogers, an Osage-Cherokee Indian. He leased acreage from the Osage tribe and began farming and ranching in 1896. His land became a part of his wife's Osage allotment in 1906. On August 28, 1923, the Avant town marshall shot and killed Ben Avant over the following dispute;

Defending his right to hitch his horse on a corner of the public square, just as he did years ago when the town of Avant sprang to life on his homestead, cost Ben Avant,
55 years old, his life.
Avant was shot and killed by City Marshal Homer Penequine. Swinging into Avant astride his horse, the town founder rode up to the square and started to hitch where only automobiles now are parked. Marshal Penequine objected. He threatened to ar-
rest Avant. Hot words ensued and Avant is reported to have gone home
and returned armed. Marshal Penequine's gun spurted fire and Avant fell dead. It
was said the marshal just beat Avant to the draw. Angry citizens took Penequine into custody and escorted him to Pawhuska, the county seat, where he was turned over to the sheriff of Osage county. Pencquine came here only a few days ago from Okmulsce where he had served as a deputy sheriff until the revocation of his commission on orders of Gov. J. C. Walton, after a military investigation into mob activities in Okmulgee county. Penequine was arrested last year on a charge of murder in connection with the slaying of Tom Boggus, who was shot to death at Spelter City, Okmulgee county, by a band of masked men. He was released after his preliminary hearing before a justice of the peace.

Ben is buried in our Roselawn section, if you’d like to see his grave or any others or are interested in purchasing one for yourself or a loved one please contact our office at 918-835-4421

06/20/2023

When I realized this controversial man passed away twenty six years ago today, I felt like it was nothing short of a sign to give him his spotlight!

Alberto Magno Rivera Romero (September 19, 1935 – June 20, 1997) was an anti-Catholic religious activist who was the source of many of the theories about the Vatican espoused by fundamentalist Christian author Jack Chick. Chick promised to promote Rivera's testimony even after he died.

Rivera claimed to have been a Jesuit before becoming a Fundamentalist Protestant, and many of the stories Chick published about Rivera involve Jesuit activities.

Rivera was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain. He made numerous claims about his time as a Catholic priest and the inner workings of the Catholic Church. Most of these statements are disputed by the Catholic Church and others and Rivera was not able to provide compelling evidence in support his claims. An exposé by Gary Metz in Cornerstone magazine as well as another one in Christianity Today questioned many of Rivera's statements about his life, alleging that he was a fraud. The two conflicting versions are summarized below.

Rivera's account

According to Rivera,he was brought into a seminary in 1942 when he was 7. Two years later, as his mother was dying, she saw "ugly creatures" coming at her deathbed, and faced a "Christless eternity" because of her Catholic faith. When visiting his mother's grave, Rivera vowed to find answers to the truth. After education at an unnamed Catholic seminary, he was sent to destroy various Protestant organizations and discredit Protestant leaders, but Rivera says that he became disillusioned upon finding that the Vatican was behind Freemasonry and that its reverence of the Virgin Mary was contradicted by the Bible. In 1965, at an Ecumenical Conference in a Guatemalan stadium, he denounced the Catholic Church to an audience of 50,000 people. Rivera says that the Jesuits then sent him to a top-secret psychiatric hospital in Spain to make him embrace the Catholic faith—what Rivera referred to as "recanting his faith." Here he says that he was tortured and given poison until he nearly died, eventually being put into an iron lung because his lungs had broken down from the abuse. According to Rivera, he was "nearly at death" when he asked Jesus to forgive him and was miraculously healed. Rivera said that a senior Jesuit attempted to persuade Rivera to return to Catholicism, but instead was himself persuaded to give Rivera the passport and papers he needed to escape Spain. Afterwards, he flew to London and saved his sister María, a nun, after she nearly died in a convent of an unspecified illness or injury.

Cornerstone's account

According to the Cornerstone exposé, Rivera had a 'history of legal entanglements' including fraud, credit card theft, and writing bad checks. Warrants had been issued for his arrest in New Jersey and Florida, and he was wanted by the Spanish police for 'swindles and cheats'. While in the U.S. in 1967, he said he was collecting money for a Spanish college, which never received this money. The details of his religious statements changed over time. For example, in 1964 he said that he had left the Catholic Church in July 1952. Rivera later put the date at March 20, 1967 – an almost 15-year discrepancy. Despite this second statement of conversion from Catholicism in March 1967, Rivera was still promoting Catholicism in a newspaper interview of August that same year. Although supposedly placed involuntarily in the sanatorium where he said he was nearly murdered in 1965 and held there for three months, he gave the date of his release as September 1967. This leaves a period of more than a year unaccounted for in Rivera's narrative.

The document exhibited by Rivera to prove his status as a Catholic priest was fraudulent. The Catholic Church says his statement of having been a Jesuit priest, or another statement that he was a bishop, are not true. Rivera had only one sister who worked as a maid in a private London home, not as a nun in a convent; the statement that his sister the nun nearly died in a convent in London was a lie. In an employment form dated 1963, Rivera stated he was married to Carmen Lydia Torres, and the couple had two children in the U.S. In his narrative, Rivera said that he was a priest living in Spain in 1963.

Cornerstone also questioned Rivera's statement to various degrees, including three doctorates (Th.D., D.D., and Ph.D.), reporting that his known chronology did not allow enough time to have completed these degrees. Rivera allegedly admitted that he had received these degrees from a non-accredited entity sometimes referred to as a diploma mill located in the state of Colorado.

He is buried in our Moores section in an unmarked grave. If you would like to see his grave or any others or have an interest in purchasing your own plot here please contact us at 918-835-4421 for an appointment!

06/20/2023

06/20/2023

Since Rose Hill has been around since 1916 and is the second oldest cemetery in Tulsa, we thought it would be fun to bring you interesting facts of those who are buried in our historical oasis! And since Fathers’ Day was yesterday we will start this off with none other than our very own J.M. Hall.

Known as "The Father of Tulsa," James Monroe Hall owned the first store in that community and became a strong city booster. He was a pioneer in many early Tulsa organizations that were important to the city's growth. Hall, usually known as "J. M.," was born on December 4, 1851, in Belfast, Tennessee, to Hugh and Esther Ramsey Hall. J. M. Hall graduated from the Union Academy at Marshall County, Tennessee, and then moved west to Oswego, Kansas, at the age of seventeen. In 1872 he relocated to McAlester, Indian Territory, to manage a company store for the Osage Coal and Mining Company. In McAlester he married Lula Pigg. They had three children, Juanita, Lena, and Hugh. Hall wed again during the 1890s to Jennie Stringfield, a Presbyterian missionary based in Tulsa. They had two children, Kathryn and Harry. In 1876 the McAlester mining store that Hall operated was sold, and he returned to Oswego. While there, he opened a grocery business and operated it until 1882.

Hall saw an opportunity with the arrival of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway (Frisco) in the Vinita area. In 1882 he relocated to Vinita to run a store that catered to the men building a rail line from Vinita to an area near a small Creek village that became Tulsa. His brother H. C. Hall, a contractor for the Frisco railroad, was responsible for managing the payroll and supplying the rail crew with provisions. J. M. Hall operated a tent store that moved along with the railroad as work was completed, providing goods for the workmen. In August 1882 the railroad reached the junction of the Arkansas River in the Cherokee Nation near present Tulsa. Hall persuaded the surveyors to move the junction and sidings about two miles to the west into the Creek Nation, because the trade laws were more liberal. The railroad crews moved on, but J. M. and H. C. Hall decided to remain and set up their tent store on the north side of the right-of-way. Other tent stores quickly sprang up, and Hall, in partnership with his brother, built Tulsa's first wood-frame store building, located on the northwest corner of First and Main streets.

In 1884 Hall organized Tulsa's first school, staffed and financed by Presbyterian church missionaries. In 1885 he succeeded Josiah Perryman and became Tulsa's second postmaster, and he also organized the First Presbyterian Church. He was an elder and served as superintendent of its Sunday school for forty years. A Democrat and active in politics, Hall advocated unifying Oklahoma and Indian territories into one state. In 1900 elected chairman of the Indian Territory Central Committee, he held that position until 1902. The J. M. Hall Mercantile operated until 1903, and then he sold it to engage in banking and real estate. He assisted with the creation of the Tulsa Commercial Club in 1902 and served as its president in 1904. He also served on the University of Tulsa's board of trustees for twenty-five years. J. M. Hall died at his home on May 26, 1935.

J.M. Is buried in our Hillcrest section. If you’d like a tour of our historical cemetery, or would like information about being buried here please contact us at 918-835-4421!