Elk City: Where Oil and the Highway Built Each Other

Elk City sits on the western Oklahoma plains where Route Sixty-Six ran through Beckham County on its way toward the Texas Panhandle. The town was established in nineteen oh one after the Rock Island Railroad arrived, and it grew as a ranching and cotton center before the oil fields of western Oklahoma transformed the regional economy in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Route Sixty-Six brought a second wave of commerce: travelers heading west during the Dust Bowl passed through here, followed by postwar motor tourists who needed motels, restaurants, and gas stations.

Elk City built them. The National Route Sixty-Six Museum, opened here in nineteen ninety-five, documents the full span of the highway's life in a complex that includes a reconstructed nineteen fifties downtown. Country singer Sheb Wooley, born in nearby Erick, played on Elk City radio as a teenager and recorded The Purple People Eater in nineteen fifty-eight, one of the stranger number-one hits in American chart history.