A building at the corner of Oakmont’s Delaware Avenue and Fourth Street holds special memories for borough resident Jane Foster.

“I had Virginia Kerr as a seventh- and eighth-grade teacher,” she said about the woman who lived there her entire life. “She was a friend of our family, because my grandparents lived across the street.”

With a shake of her head, Foster acknowledged that her grandparents’ former house bears little resemblance today compared with what she recalls from her childhood.

For the Kerr home, the case pretty much is the opposite.

“The house was built in 1897, and basically things hadn’t been changed,” Oakmont resident Jan Shoup said. “Only three people had ever lived here.”

She and Foster serve on the board that oversees the borough-owned and volunteer-operated Dr. Thomas R. Kerr Memorial Museum, consisting of the physician’s Queen Anne-style home and a small structure that eventually served as his office.

He and his wife, Jessie, had one child. Virginia, who never married, served her hometown as a teacher for 42 years and died at age 91 in 1994.

Eight years later, the property opened as a museum, and a celebration of its 20th anniversary is planned for 12:30 p.m. July 31 at Oakmont Country Club with a Victorian Bridal Luncheon, in conjunction with a vintage bridal exhibit featured at the house through August.

The museum is intended to be representative of a middle-class home as it would have appeared from roughly 1890 through 1910. It is full of authentic items of the period, from a primitive intercom system known as an annunciator to the actual tools of Dr. Kerr’s trade, including his leather saddlebag for making house calls on horseback.

Toward the end of his daughter’s life, Oakmont officials asked her about donating the family home to the borough in the name of historic preservation. Her reply:

“Let me think about it for two weeks,” Foster quoted Virginia as saying.

She agreed after mulling it over, with the idea that the house be used to honor her father, and she donated many of the items that had been accumulating for close to a century, such as the doctor’s original medical equipment, textbooks and daily ledgers.

After she died, the borough formed a committee, Shoup among the members, to determine what would be done with the house.

“It was in very good shape, but everything needed to be redone, basically,” she said, including new wallpaper, fresh coats of paint and varnish, and the installation of air conditioning. “We were very, very fortunate to have a couple of people who were really helpful.”

Shoup credited the late Jane Meyers, a cousin of Virginia Kerr, with drawing on her memory to assist in organizing the home as it would have looked in decades past. And from a professional standpoint, interior decorator Anne Genter and antiques dealer Michael Malley brought their expertise to the re-creation efforts.

Opening day for the museum was June 8, 2002.

“I’ve always been known for being an organizer, and they asked me to organize the opening,” Joan Stewart, who also serves on the museum board, said.

She and other organizers decided to incorporate the town as a whole, with Allegheny River Boulevard taking on a circa-1900 ambience.

“We had people in Victorian dresses walking the boulevard,” Stewart said. “It was hot, and people had parasols.”

Since then, the museum has hosted numerous community events, such as a celebration of Virginia Kerr’s 100th birthday in May 2003, along with providing opportunities for docent-led tours.

“We have a fourth bedroom upstairs that we have converted into an exhibit room. And we would change the exhibit theme at least four times a year,” Stewart said. “We want people to come back, so we try to mix it up.”

The current bridal exhibit features period clothing and wedding-related accoutrements, and the house’s dining room and parlor are set up as if for a bridal luncheon. The theme extends to the 20th-anniversary celebration, which is serving as this year’s major fundraiser toward the museum’s upkeep.

Prior to the covid-19 pandemic, a yearly antique show, also at Oakmont Country Club, supported the cause. In fact, the event was set up and ready to go as of March 13, 2020, when it had to be canceled.

Fortunately, most of the advertisers in the show’s program agreed to donate what they had paid instead of asking for refunds.

“We work really hard in raising funds, and we’ve developed a good rapport and following of people who appreciate what we are and are very supportive,” Stewart said.

She volunteers on behalf of the museum following her retirement as a North Hills School District educator.

“I think that anyone who’s a teacher loves to give information,” she said. “So becoming a docent was very, very easy for me to do, and I’ve loved it.”

For more information about the Dr. Thomas R. Kerr Memorial Museum, visit www.kerrmuseum.com.