Weatherford

Western Oklahoma Route 66 city known for astronaut Thomas Stafford and an unusually strong air-and-space museum

Weatherford is a small city on Route 66 in western Oklahoma, home to Southwestern Oklahoma State University. The main reason to stop is the Stafford Air and Space Museum, which honours Weatherford native Thomas P. Stafford — the astronaut who commanded both the Gemini 9 and Apollo 10 missions and later led the American side of the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous. The museum's collection of aircraft and space hardware is surprisingly extensive for a town this size. The town also sits on a well-preserved stretch of the old Route 66 and has a small local history museum.

Guide

Day Trips

Weatherford sits in the middle of a largely flat stretch of western Oklahoma, and the honest answer is that the surrounding country is better suited to drives than to day-trip destinations. The one excursion that draws curious visitors is Dead Women Crossing, a rural crossroads on Deer Creek about fifteen minutes northeast of town. Named for the 1905 murder of schoolteacher Katie DeWitt James, it has become a minor stop on the dark-tourism circuit — the location itself is unremarkable, but the story behind the name is genuinely strange and the drive out through Custer County farmland is peaceful.

Guide

Things to Do

Weatherford is a Route 66 stop with one essential attraction — the Stafford Air and Space Museum — and a handful of minor sights related to the town's role as a 20th-century western Oklahoma university town. Half a day will cover everything worth seeing.