Oldfields
historic house museum in Indiana, USA
Oldfields, also known as Lilly House and Gardens, is a 26-acre (11 ha) historic estate and house museum at Newfields, the campus of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The estate, an example of the American country house movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 2003.
Oldfields was built between 1909 and 1913 by architect Lewis Ketcham Davis for the family of Hugh McKennan Landon, who occupied the home from 1913 until 1932 when it was sold to Josiah K. Lilly Jr. Lilly, the late Indianapolis businessman, collector, and philanthropist, renovated and expanded the estate throughout the 1930s and 1940s, updating interiors as well as adding a number of new buildings to the grounds.
Now known as Lilly House, the 22-room mansion has undergone historic restoration and is now open to the public. The historic house is currently interpreted to reflect the 1930s era when the Lilly family occupied the residence. The rest of the Oldfields estate, which was given to the Art Association of Indianapolis by Lilly's children in 1967, now makes up a major portion of the Newfields campus. In addition to the home's significance as a representation of the American country house movement, Oldfields' gardens and grounds are a rare example of a preserved estate landscape designed by Percival Gallagher of the Olmsted Brothers firm.
History
Oldfields was established as part of the Town of Woodstock, a tract of land purchased and developed by Hugh McKennan Landon and Linnaes C. Boyd around 1910 as a suburban neighborhood north of Indianapolis. The area was adjacent to the 555-acre (225 ha) Crown Hill Cemetery and the White River, and included residential lots, a reservoir, and a country club.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Oldfields” is historic house museum in Indiana, USA. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Oldfields, historic and house, not as a finished interpretation.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7085605. Authority coordinates are 39.828, -86.185. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 1909, 1913 and 1932.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oldfields” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.