A little over a year ago, Harmony Hills Ventures bought 85 acres of rolling country a few miles outside Wewoka, in Seminole County, Oklahoma. It came with a house, a second smaller home, a big pole barn, a scatter of older barns and workshops, a creek, a couple of ponds, and a stretch of shoreline on a quiet 52-acre lake, shared with only a handful of neighbors.
It wasn’t a blank piece of ground. It was a place somebody had lived on and worked for a long time. We’ve told you before that we buy land and improve it. This is a good example of what that looks like when the land already has a story, and we thought it was worth telling now that most of it has found new owners.
The Country It Sits In
Seminole County is the old oil country of central Oklahoma, cross timbers and blackjack oak giving way to open pasture and creek bottoms. It’s quiet out here. You’ll hear more coyotes and whip-poor-wills than trucks.
But quiet doesn’t mean far from anything. Wewoka, the county seat, is about a twelve-minute drive: pharmacy, groceries, hardware, a courthouse square, and Friday night football. Seminole and Shawnee are the next stops up the road for a bigger store or a hospital. Oklahoma City is a little over an hour west if you need it, and you mostly won’t.
Wewoka Lake, a 500-acre reservoir with ten miles of shoreline, lies just northwest of town with boat ramps, camping, and a reputation for largemouth bass and channel cat. Sportsman Lake, another 350 acres inside a 1,400-acre wildlife refuge with equestrian trails and campgrounds, is a few miles beyond that.
You don’t have to leave the property to fish or hunt, though. That’s rather the point.
The Homestead
The main house was a solid three-bedroom, two-bath that needed what old farmhouses usually need. We gave it what we call a country rehab, starting underneath. The foundation was shored up and leveled first, because nothing else holds if that doesn’t. Then new paint inside and out. New floors throughout. The list of small things that had been let go, fixed one at a time: doors, fixtures, trim, the things that make a house feel cared for. Landscaping cleaned up and planted so the place looked like itself again from the road.
The second home on the property got the same treatment. It’s the kind of arrangement that works for a grown child, an aging parent, a hired hand, or guests who stay longer than a weekend.
Then there were the outbuildings. A pole barn we put at roughly 60 by 50 feet, which is enough to park the equipment, the trailers, and the boat and still have a shop bay open. Plus the older barns and workshops that came with the place, the kind you can’t build anymore for what they’re worth.
We sold the homestead this year to a young family with small children. They’d been living somewhere denser and wanted the other thing: a house with a porch, a barn, a creek to wade in, room for the kids to get lost for an afternoon and come home dirty. They’re living that life now. We’re glad to have handed it to them in better shape than we found it.
The Rest of the Acreage
The remaining ground we divided into four homesites, each with its own character. One of those sold not long after the homestead did. Three remain, and they’re worth describing.
One has a cleared building site with power already run to it and the creek along one side. You could start a foundation next month. It’s also the lot with the lake. The property line runs down into the water of a 52-acre lake held between wooded banks and shared with only a few other landowners around the shore. The owner has private access for fishing, paddling, and evenings on the bank, with no public ramp and no crowd. Lakefront you own outright, on a lake most people have never heard of, is a rare thing in this part of Oklahoma.
The other two are wilder. Each has the creek running through it and its own ponds, along with timber and the kind of wildlife traffic that tells you the place hasn’t been pressured. Deer bed in the draws. Turkey work the creek bottom in the mornings. Ducks use the ponds in season. These are lots for someone who wants to hunt their own ground, fish their own water, and build a house where the only thing in view is theirs. They don’t reach the lake on their own.
That said, the three lots sit together. A family looking to put a couple of generations on adjoining ground, or a few households who’d like to share a compound, could take all three and run an easement across the lakefront lot so everyone gets to the water. We’re open to that conversation.
What We Learned Here
Most of what we do is raw land. This one reminded us that a good house on good ground, brought back to the standard it deserves, does something raw land can’t. It gives a family a place to move into on a Saturday and be home by Sunday. We’ll keep doing the raw-land work, because that’s the backbone of the business, but we’ll take a homestead like this again when the right one comes along.
Harmony Hills Ventures acquires and improves rural land across the Midwest and South. A portion of every development supports causes we believe in.
