Nice News - “If you ever plan to motor west,” Nat King Cole crooned in 1946, “travel my way, take the highway that’s the best.” He was singing, of course, about historic Route 66, which spanned more than 2,400 miles from downtown Chicago, Illinois, to seaside Santa Monica, California — winding over the Missouri Ozarks, across Oklahoma, and through the Mojave Desert. The Threatt Filling Station in Luther, Oklahoma, was once the only Black-owned gas station along the route, and it provided one of the few respites for people of color who were driving, CBS News reports.
“This was literally, literally a safe haven for people during the Jim Crow era,” Edward Threatt, whose grandfather owned the station, told the outlet. “My grandpa, he was a smart man, to be able to acquire 160 acres of land, because we had so much property they could stay out back.” In 2021, the filling station, which hasn’t been in use for decades, was named one of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places — a list of over 350 culturally significant sites generated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Each year, 11 locations are added to the roster. The 2023 iteration included another Route 66 business: the Osterman Gas Station in Peach Springs, Arizona, considered “a focal point of the Hualapai Tribal community for generations,” per the organization.
1 comment:
I went to a meeting in Tulsa Oklahoma once. Rt 66 runs through town. It as quite interesting to walk downtown along it, a slice of history. I did get my kicks on Rt 66
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