Clinton, Oklahoma, Where Route Sixty-Six Lives On

Clinton, Oklahoma, started life as a trading post for the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people, which means it existed before white settlement did. The land run of eighteen ninety-two opened the former Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation to homesteaders, and the town itself was established some years later, in eighteen ninety-nine, taking the name of a local judge, Clinton Irwin.

For the first few decades, Clinton was just another small Oklahoma city on the Southern Plains, its economy running on cattle, cotton, and wheat. Then in nineteen twenty-six, United States Highway Sixty-Six was designated, and Clinton found itself sitting directly on the most famous road in America.

The Mother Road brought a different kind of commerce. Motels, diners, service stations, and tourist courts lined the highway through town. Pop Hicks Restaurant opened in nineteen thirty-six and became a local institution that travelers remembered long after they had forgotten the road itself. During the Dust Bowl years of the nineteen thirties, Route Sixty-Six was the road that Okies drove west, the road Steinbeck wrote about, and Clinton was one of the human-scale towns strung along it where people stopped, rested, sometimes stayed.

When Interstate Forty bypassed many of those towns in the nineteen sixties and seventies, Clinton found itself with a choice. The highway that had made it famous was being decommissioned in sections. Route Sixty-Six was officially removed from United States highway designations in nineteen eighty-five.

Clinton's response was to lean harder into the history. In nineteen eighty-nine, the city's Western Trails Museum began a deliberate pivot, transforming a regional history collection into a Route Sixty-Six focused institution. After a million-dollar expansion, the Oklahoma Route Sixty-Six Museum reopened in nineteen ninety-five as one of the most comprehensive celebrations of the highway anywhere along its twenty-four hundred miles.

Today Clinton is the kind of town where the interstate and the old highway run almost side by side, and travelers who know what they are looking at can see both centuries at once.