Commerce to Afton, Oklahoma. On Route 66 in Oklahoma last month.
During week two of the Route 66 road trip in February I drove the entire length of the Mother Road through Oklahoma from east to west. As in Missouri and Illinois there were many opportunities to get off the interstate and take surviving portions of the old road.
This first set covers the eastern portion of Route 66 in Oklahoma immediately after crossing over from Kansas. As with the short stretch of Route 66 through Galena and Baxter Springs KS and the western part of the road in the area around Jasper MO, many of the communities are very challenged. This is part of the same former “Tri-State” mining area. The region has experienced significant depopulation, and a number of the communities on the drive are near ghost towns. Others appear to be in a perilous state with near empty main streets full of boarded up store fronts.
The end of Route 66 in the 60s certainly hasn’t helped things. There are numerous Route 66 relics.
We start in Quapaw and Commerce. There is a statue of the great New York Yankee Mickey Mantle by the high school in Commerce; it’s where he grew up. His father worked in the mines.
The Commerce main street is semi-abandoned. There’s a very odd former Conoco gas station there built onto an old brick wall and across the street from another old station, a Marathon station, now the Dairy King Ice Cream Café.
Miami is in decent shape. (It is pronounced Miamuh.) The Coleman Theater there (1929) is a real beauty with a Spanish Revival style exterior . Waylan’s Ku-Ku in Miami is a classic.
Down the road is Afton which is not doing well at all.
This has been a very different reality on 66 which started as I approached Jasper, and then continued on the 13 miles of Kansas and on my way to Tulsa in eastern Oklahoma. I was wholly unprepared for what I saw. There is not a lot of outward prosperity along large parts of the Mother Road in eastern Oklahoma. The thing about byways and back roads is that one sees things that are not visible from the interstate. In this case, another America. The invisible America. Places like Afton struggling along in a parallel universe. People have it very hard, as I understand it.
That’s Dorothy in her car in Afton. She owns the garage and the old Palmer Hotel in Afton. The building across the street from the car was burning. It was the remains of a fire that started during the night. She said that it had just been fixed up. She mentioned that she owns several buildings, too. She is not sure what do with them. Nice woman. We got to talking for a bit. Her family was from there but moved to Miami. Her husband has cancer and dementia. A nice woman. I sensed the sadness and weariness as we talked.
When I parked down the street to take pictures of a few other buildings in Afton I got to talking to another resident who walked over to his fence to speak after I shouted a hello after seeing him. I do that on the drive when I stop to take pictures. I say something, or I wave. He lives right on Route 66 across the street from the abandoned service station. He works in Baxter Springs at a bag factory. Good guy.
I saw my first buffalo on the drive near Afton.
Lots of trailers. Lots of little churches.
The only remaining original 9 ft. section of Route 66 is in this part of Oklahoma. A portion is graveled but on another portion the original 9 ft. concrete road is exposed.