U.S. Highway 66. Main Street of America. The Mother Road. Route 66.

Those are the primary names the now infamous highway connecting Chicago, Illinois, to Los Angeles, California. Designated in 1926, the highway passed through Oklahoma City, initially using previously established state highway alignments. Its alignment in Oklahoma City would change multiple times, however, over the more than four decades of its designation as a U.S. highway to accommodate the growing city and the rapid rise in automobile ownership.

Oklahoma City Before 1926

 Oklahoma City 1910, Oklahoma Historical Society

The city’s population was over 64,000 residents by 1910. While Oklahoma City’s early economy was based primarily on agriculture, it had become an important commerce and transportation center by that time due to multiple railroads traversing the city. The city also had a bustling downtown business district, an ever-growing network of hard-surfaced streets, and an active Chamber of Commerce promoting development and civic improvements throughout the city. Additionally it had become home to several institutions of higher education, including Epworth University, later renamed as Oklahoma City University.

In addition to the city’s ever-growing network of hard-surfaced streets, Oklahoma City had a street railway system to accommodate residents’ transportation needs. The initial system was established in the early twentieth century and quickly grew to include interurban lines that connected Oklahoma City with other nearby cities, including El Reno and Yukon to the west and Edmond to the north.

Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, the street railway lines crisscrossed the city, defining primary transportation corridors and spurring residential, and to some degree commercial and industrial, development along them. Two of the street railway corridors - Classen Boulevard and N.W. 39th Street - would later be designated as components of U.S. Highway 66.

The national Good Roads movement, which had risen in popularity around the time Oklahoma became a state, promoted the need for a network of better highways to connect cities and towns, provide an adequate transportation network for farmers to more quickly and efficiently get their goods and products to markets, and to get the traveling public out of the mud and onto all-weather roads. In addition to the Good Roads Movement, booster groups promoted a series of named highways that began crossing the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Two of the named highways - the Postal Highway and the Ozark Trail – passed through Oklahoma City, and segments of each highway would eventually become state highways and later, U.S. Highway 66.

At the local level, Oklahoma City officials and businessmen were actively developing a system of improved roadways, as well as parks and boulevards, for the city. In a 1910 article, Oklahoma City Parks Commission Board President Will H. Clark described the current state of the city’s roadway network and infrastructure system as, “84 miles of asphalt paved streets, 25 miles of brick paved streets, .75 miles of macadam, 350 miles of cement and brick walks, no board walks, 40 miles of sewers, and 83 miles of water pipes.”7 This illustrates the rapid of development of the city as city officials and businessmen strove to establish Oklahoma City as a major, progressive metropolis for the region.

Part of those efforts also included the development of a premier park and boulevard system. In a 1910 report entitled Oklahoma City: A Report on its Plan for an Outer Parkway and a Plan for an Interior System of Parks and Boulevards, Kansa City landscape architect W.H. Dunn laid out plans for public improvements focused on beautifying the city, promoting civic pride, and improving the health and safety of residents and visitors.8 One feature of the plan was the construction of the 28-mile-long Grand Boulevard, a loop that would connect four large parks and a number of smaller ones surrounding the city. Grand Boulevard would later serve as the foundation for the third through fifth realignments of Route 66.

The national Good Roads movement was localized by various groups, including the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce’s Good Roads Division. These groups worked collaboratively with the State Highway Department, which was established under a provision of the Oklahoma state constitution in 1911, county commissioners, and other local government officials to develop the network of state roads that would become the basis of Oklahoma’s Federal Aid Highway System. In the State Highway Department’s early years, it was funded by a $1 per vehicle registration fee.

Since the automobile industry was still in its infancy, the department’s total revenue in its first year was only $2,700. Thus, the partners in the endeavors to improve roadways pooled resources when possible. One example of this collaboration was the $2,500 fund the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce and several individuals established then turned over to the State Highway Commission. In turn, the State Highway Commission awarded prizes to townships and counties that constructed the best segments of roads.

In 1915, the Oklahoma County Tax Assessor reported that for the first time, automobiles outnumbered horses 1,900 to 1,353 in Oklahoma City. The rise in automobile culture underscored the needs for improved roads. However, road improvement efforts largely continued as a state and local affair until the United States legislature passed the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 (1916 Act).

This national legislation stipulated mechanisms for the federal government to support transportation improvements, as well as established the Federal Aid Highway System. The 1916 Act appropriated $75 million for roadway improvements across the country over a five-year period and required states to provide a fifty percent match.12 Drawing upon the work they had completed several years earlier with county commissioners and other local government officials to identify the state’s network of highways, the State Highway Department officially designated the Oklahoma’s Federal Aid Highway System and assigned numbers to each of the state highways.

The state highways that would eventually be designated as U.S. Highway 66 through Oklahoma City were numbered State Highway Nos. 3 and 7. State Highway No. 3, also known as the Postal Highway, extended from Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the east to Texola, Texas, in the west. State Highway No. 7, which was oriented northeast to southwest and was also known as the Ozark Trail, connected Baxter Springs, Kansas, to Wellington, Texas.

As federal dollars for roadway improvements began flowing into Oklahoma in the late 1910s, the population growth in Oklahoma City continued at a rapid pace, increasing 42 percent over the 1910 rate to 91,295 residents in 1920. Manufacturing and automobile distribution had become important sectors of the city’s economy by this time. A March 1920 Daily Oklahoman article discussed that approximately half of the automobile dealers were making plans to get larger buildings for their companies. Many of those new, larger automobile dealership buildings were being constructed on North Broadway in the area that would become known as Automobile Alley.

By the next year, there were seventy-six automobile dealerships in Oklahoma City. In 1922, the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce reported that 227 firms of all types were making nearly $70 million worth of products in the city. During the same general period, the city saw progress in other areas, as well. In 1920, municipal bond elections were held to fund new schools and improvements to existing ones, purchase land for the state fairgrounds, extend the city’s sewer and water systems, and to make other civic improvements. Home building in the city, which had slowed in the mid-1910s, was also on the upswing. Developers were building new neighborhoods as the city continued expanding, particularly to the northwest.

Road bonds to fund hard surfaced roads were also included in the 1920 election, the first election in which women were allowed to vote. Leading up to the election, Good Roads Movement proponents, local businesses, and prominent, local women ran advertisements and editorials in The Daily Oklahoman to support the road bonds. Some advertisements were a full page and touted the benefits of good roads for the working man, farmers, and businessman. Others were a simple tag line included on a business’s weekly sales advertisement. After Oklahoma County voters overwhelmingly approved the bond issue, which amounted to $2,158,000, the campaign to promote Oklahoma County’s bond issue became the model for other counties’ bond elections. After the election, Oklahoma County engineers worked with federal and state engineers to develop a map of projects and the associated plans and specifications. The road program took two years to complete.

A second round of federal transportation legislation, known as the Federal Aid Road Act of 1921 (1921 Act), authorized states to designate seven percent of its total highway mileage on which federal money would be spent. To create a network of good interstate thoroughfares, the Bureau of Public Roads (forerunner agency of the present-day Federal Highway Administration) worked with states to approve the designated highways.20 With passage of the 1921 Act, the federal government through the Bureau of Public Roads also mandated, for the first time, specific requirements for roadway widths – a minimum of 18 feet for newly constructed roads. This legislation also placed authority for and responsibility of all construction, contracts, and plans in the hands of state highway departments. Up to that point, the Oklahoma State Highway Department had no authority over the planning and construction of roads; county and local governments held that authority. This change resulted in a substantial shift in the Oklahoma State Highway Department’s role in the development and improvement of the state’s transportation network. However, the shift would not be fully completed until 1924, when state law was enacted to centralize full authority for construction and maintenance of roads with the State Highway Department. To fund the agency’s new role, the state law also stipulated a three-cent per gallon sales tax on gas.

It was within this framework of a newly organized State Highway Department in a period of unprecedented growth in the automobile industry as more and more citizens came to own cars during the 1920s that the next phase of transportation planning and improvements occurred in Oklahoma. In Oklahoma City, the next phase was set against the backdrop of the city’s extensive development up to that point. The city was comprised of 17.3 square miles with 150 miles in paved streets, had 367 industries, 22,857 subscribers to the area’s relatively new telephone system, five trunkline railroads, and almost 70 miles of electric interurban lines. It had also become the largest distribution point between Kansas City and Dallas for automobiles.

By the mid-1920s, areas of Oklahoma City along the future Route 66 corridor varied in their development. As previously discussed, Classen Boulevard from downtown to Edmond and N.W. 39th Street from Classen Boulevard to El Reno were street railway corridors. A review of the 1922 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps indicates these corridors were largely developed with residential properties with small nodes of commercial and industrial development sporadically interspersed along the corridors. The N.W. 23rd Street corridor between the State Capitol and approximately N. Virginia Street also had primarily residential development, with a cluster of commercial and light industrial properties near N.W. 23rd Street’s intersections with N. Robinson and N. Broadway Avenues (in the area near present-day U.S. 77/I-235). The commercial or industrial development near those N.W. 23rd Street intersections included a planing mill, several stores, an auto filling station (gas station), and an animal hospital on the north side of the street, and a lumber mill and residences on the south side of the street. In contrast to the existing development in the city’s northwest quadrant by the mid-1920s, the 1922 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map review indicates there was little development occurring in the city’s northeast quadrant along the N. Lincoln Boulevard and N. Kelley Avenue corridors that would become the original alignment of Route 66.

Gaining the ranking as the largest automobile distribution point between Kansas City and Dallas was one indicator the city’s residents were rapidly adopting the country’s car culture. Another indicator of the upswing in the country’s car culture was the increasing number of Americans traveling by automobile rather than train on leisure trips. As a result, a new type of accommodation became popular for travelers. Tourist camps soon began springing up alongside highways as an alternative to hotels in city centers. Municipalities and private enterprisers established the camps to provide tourists, seasonal migrant workers, and other long-distance travelers an inexpensive way to travel. These tourist camps would also play a prominent role in the lives of Americans traveling on Route 66 between Oklahoma and California to escape the deleterious effects of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl that plagued primarily rural farmers in the 1930s, discussed in more detail below. As with other civic development initiatives, the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce became involved in establishing an official tourist camp in the city.

In January 1921, a committee was formed to plan for the new tourist camp with the hope that it could be established before the spring and summer travel season began that year. An April 1921 article about the planning efforts described the benefits of the tourist camp as such:

In the first place, such camps attract tourists who might not otherwise visit the city. In the second place, they render the stay of tourists here more pleasant, which makes them stronger boosters for the city. These boosters will induce other tourists to come this way. As an advertising proposition of the city, it appears that a tourist camp would pay for itself. 

A July 1924 announcement in The Daily Oklahoman indicated the Log Cabin Park, located at 2600 W. 39th Street approximately one-half mile east of N. May Avenue, celebrated its formal opening and offered a number of amenities, including gas, oil, and tires in addition to camping facilities.

Although research did not yield information about the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce’s planning efforts between April 1921 and the Log Cabin Park’s opening in July 1924, an April 1925 article in The Daily Oklahoman identifies the Log Cabin Park as the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce’s official tourist camp. It also mentioned other tourist courts on roads leading into the city, including one two miles north of the state capitol on the Edmond road. The article went on to say that the average cost per car per night was 50 cents.

*This content is excerpted word for word from the Route 66 in Oklahoma City Historic Context Project Report (2020), prepared by Blanton and Associates for the City of Oklahoma City. The complete report is available online here: https://www.okhistory.org/shpo/docs/okcrt66.pdf. This report has been financed in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service (NPS). The contents and opinions do not necessarily reflect the reviews or policies of NPS, nor does the mention of trade names or commercial products constitute endorsement or recommendation by NPS.