Erick: The Last Oklahoma Mile on Route Sixty-Six

Erick was founded in nineteen oh one on the edge of what had been Old Greer County, named for Beeks Erick, the townsite developer. It sat quietly on the western Oklahoma plains until nineteen twenty-six, when Route Sixty-Six was commissioned and Erick became the last town in Oklahoma before the Texas state line.

That position made Erick a natural stop for the Dust Bowl migration of the nineteen thirties: the last place in Oklahoma to fill a gas tank, buy a meal, or sleep before crossing into the panhandle. Later generations of Route Sixty-Six travelers stopped here for the same reasons.

The most famous person Erick ever produced was Roger Miller, raised here after his birth in Fort Worth in nineteen thirty-six, who would go on to write and record 'King of the Road' and collect eleven Grammy Awards. The highway through town is now called Roger Miller Boulevard. When Interstate Forty was built, Erick's section of four-lane Route Sixty-Six was the last stretch in all of Oklahoma to be bypassed, finally replaced in nineteen seventy-five. The old road is still there.