Route 66 Interpretive Center

The Route 66 Interpretive Center occupies the 1934 Chandler Armory, a handsome Art Deco building on the west side of town that is itself worth stopping for. The museum inside traces the full history of US Route 66 from its designation in 1926 through to its decommissioning in 1985, with particular attention to what the highway meant for the communities along it — including Chandler, which sits almost exactly at the geographical midpoint of the Oklahoma section.

Exhibits cover the Dust Bowl migration, the postwar road-trip boom, the rise and fall of the roadside motel industry, and the nostalgia revival that eventually brought tourists back to the old alignment. Maps, photographs, memorabilia, and a few well-chosen artefacts give the display more depth than many such roadside museums. Plan on an hour. The building also houses local historical exhibits on Lincoln County.

things to do museum sight
A story
The building was constructed in 1934 as a National Guard armory under the New Deal's Public Works Administration programme — one of hundreds of armories built across Oklahoma during the Depression. It was designed in the Art Deco style then fashionable for civic buildings, with a crenellated roofline that gives it an oddly castle-like appearance for the Oklahoma plains. The WPA workers who built it likely had no idea their armory would one day commemorate the highway that ran past its door.