Davenport, Oklahoma

Davenport sits in Lincoln County on a piece of ground with a clear founding story. When the Sac and Fox lands opened to settlement on September twenty-eighth, eighteen ninety-one, after the run was postponed from its originally planned September twenty-second date, Noah and Annie Sutton Davenport staked a homestead claim. Their daughter Nettie became the first postmistress when the mail route was established in March of eighteen ninety-two, and the community took the family name.

By the eighteen nineties Davenport supported cotton gins, a gristmill, a sawmill, and a general store. In eighteen ninety-eight the Frisco line connected it to outside markets. Then town leaders campaigned hard for the Ozark Trail highway to come through.

It did, designated in nineteen sixteen, and became State Highway Seven in nineteen twenty-four, and then United States Highway Sixty-Six in nineteen twenty-six. Davenport has been a Route Sixty-Six town ever since, seven miles east of Chandler, the kind of place where the Mother Road still feels like it belongs.