Oklahoma Route 66 Museum

The museum's opening gallery covers the 1920s — the decade when Route 66 was conceived, designated, and constructed. The central figure of the gallery is Cyrus Avery, the Tulsa businessman and highway commissioner who is genuinely the father of Route 66. Avery served on the federal Joint Board on Interstate Highways in the mid-1920s and lobbied successfully for a Chicago-to-Los Angeles federal route that would run through Oklahoma — specifically through Tulsa, his home base. The route was officially designated US 66 in November 1926.

The gallery includes original survey documents, period photographs of the earliest paved sections of Route 66 in Oklahoma, vintage 1920s automobiles representative of what travelers actually drove on the new highway, and a substantial exhibit on Avery himself. John Steinbeck's coining of "Mother Road" — which appears in The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939 — is contextualized in this gallery as the naming that gave Route 66 its enduring cultural identity even though the phrase came a decade after the highway's founding.

Beyond Avery and Steinbeck, the 1920s gallery covers the genuinely difficult work of construction. Large stretches of original Route 66 across Oklahoma were unpaved in the late 1920s — the road was a graded dirt or gravel surface that became impassable in heavy rain. The paving program continued through the 1930s, and visitors leave the gallery with a clear sense of how rough the earliest Route 66 travel experience actually was.

The 1930s gallery focuses on the Dust Bowl exodus — the mass migration of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri farm families westward along Route 66 in search of work, primarily to California's Central Valley. The gallery includes photographs of overloaded Model T and Model A vehicles piled with household belongings, period letters and journals from migrating families, and substantial interpretive material on John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, which fictionalized the experience of the Joad family making the journey. Steinbeck researched the novel by traveling Route 66 himself and interviewing migrants in California labor camps; the museum displays research notes and edition copies of the novel.

The 1940s gallery covers Route 66's wartime transformation. With the United States entering World War II in December 1941, Route 66 became a critical military supply and troop-movement corridor connecting the industrial Midwest to the West Coast Pacific theater staging areas. Military convoys ran the road continuously through 1942-1945; thousands of soldiers traveled the highway en route to training bases and embarkation ports. The gallery includes vintage military vehicles, period uniforms, photographs of convoy operations in Oklahoma towns including Clinton, and oral histories from soldiers who remembered the road from their service years.

The transition from the 1940s to the 1950s gallery captures the postwar economic boom that would define Route 66's golden age. Returning veterans, automobile mass production, the rise of the middle-class family vacation, and federal investment in highway infrastructure all converged in the late 1940s to set up the road's most iconic decade.

The 1950s gallery is the museum's most visited and most photographed space — the decade that defines popular cultural memory of Route 66 and the era that the Pixar Cars films draw on. The gallery is built around a full-size recreated 1950s motor court room with period furniture, a working jukebox, and a small adjacent diner booth where visitors can sit. The space is genuinely immersive; many visitors report spending 20-30 minutes in just this single room.

Surrounding the recreated rooms are exhibits on the broader 1950s Route 66 experience — Burma Shave roadside signs (the rhyming series of small signs that advertised shaving cream along thousands of American highways), neon signage from period motels and diners, vintage menus from Oklahoma Route 66 restaurants including several that no longer exist, automobile advertising from the era, and a substantial collection of Route 66 souvenir merchandise sold to travelers in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The gallery also documents the family-vacation culture that made Route 66 economically thriving in the 1950s. The combination of automobile mass production, paid vacation time becoming standard in middle-class employment, federal investment in highway maintenance, and the rise of motel-and-diner small business culture along Route 66 produced a roughly fifteen-year window when the road was genuinely the busiest and most prosperous commercial corridor in the central United States.

The 1960s gallery covers Route 66's decline. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 — signed by President Eisenhower and shaped by his memory of European autobahns during World War II — initiated the federal interstate highway system. I-40, the interstate that runs parallel to Route 66 across most of its length, was built across Oklahoma in segments through the 1960s and early 1970s. Each new I-40 segment bypassed Route 66 towns, and each bypass devastated the small businesses that had depended on Route 66 traffic for two decades.

Clinton itself was bypassed by I-40 in the early 1970s. The construction shifted highway traffic from Gary Boulevard (the original Route 66 alignment through downtown Clinton) to the I-40 corridor a few blocks south. Some Clinton businesses adapted — Pop Hicks Restaurant survived, the Trade Winds Inn kept operating — but many of the original 1950s-era Route 66 motels, diners, and filling stations closed within a decade of the bypass. The gallery includes "before and after" photographs that document the visible decline of the original alignment.

The 1985 decommissioning of US 66 — when the highway was officially removed from the federal highway system after most of its length had been replaced by interstate routes — is presented in the gallery as the formal end of Route 66's working era. The preservation movement, which began organizing in the late 1980s and gained substantial momentum through the 1990s, is the gallery's closing topic and the bridge to the museum's broader role as a Route 66 preservation institution.