Cyrus Avery and the Road He Named

In nineteen twenty-six, a Tulsa businessman and Oklahoma Good Roads Association advocate named Cyrus Avery convinced the federal government to assign a number to a highway route that would run from Chicago to Los Angeles. He wanted the number sixty-six. He got it.

Avery had been lobbying for better roads since the early nineteen tens, when the stretch of mud and ruts between Tulsa and Springfield, Missouri constituted the primary commercial route between the midwest and the southwest. He understood that a numbered federal highway, with a single designation from Lake Michigan to the Pacific, would rationalize commerce, enable automobile tourism, and put Tulsa at the midpoint of the most iconic road in America. He was right on every count.

The highway was officially designated on November eleven, nineteen twenty-six. Avery is credited with authoring the alignment and driving the political effort to give it a round, memorable number rather than the odd number originally proposed. He is remembered as the Father of Route Sixty-Six, a title so well established that the city of Tulsa placed a bronze statue of him on the bank of the Arkansas River near the bridge that Route Sixty-Six originally crossed.

Route Sixty-Six ran directly through Tulsa. It entered on eleventh street, crossed downtown, and exited on the other side of the Arkansas via what is now the pedestrian-accessible Cyrus Avery Centennial Plaza. During the Dust Bowl years of the nineteen thirties, between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand Oklahomans, Kansans, and Texans drove west on Sixty-Six toward California in the migration that John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath, which called the highway the Mother Road. Tulsa was a waypoint for all of them, and the highway that Cyrus Avery numbered carried every one of them past his city on their way out of it.