Elk City: Where Route Sixty-Six Held a Convention

Elk City, Oklahoma, began in nineteen oh one when the Choctaw and Gulf Railroad pushed through Beckham County and a townsite company bought land along Elk Creek to anticipate the traffic. The original post office was named Busch, changed to Elk City a few months before Oklahoma statehood in nineteen oh seven.

For the first decade it was purely an agricultural trade center, with cotton gins and banks serving the surrounding farmland. Then Route Sixty-Six came through in nineteen twenty-six and the town reinvented itself as a highway stop. In nineteen thirty-one, Elk City hosted the annual convention of the U.S. Highway Sixty-Six Association, drawing more than twenty thousand people to a western Oklahoma town of a few thousand residents. Oil arrived in November of nineteen forty-seven, when Shell brought in a producing well, and the population nearly doubled by nineteen fifty. Today the town celebrates all of it at the National Route Sixty-Six Museum complex, one of the more comprehensive Route Sixty-Six interpretive sites along the corridor.