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Overview
If it weren’t for Cy Avery’s dreams of better roads through his beloved Tulsa, the United States would never have gotten Route 66. This book is the story of Avery, his times, and the legendary highway he helped build.
In this engaging biography of a remarkable man, Susan Croce Kelly begins by describing the urgency for “good roads” that gripped the nation in the early twentieth century as cars multiplied and mud deepened. Avery was one of a small cadre of men and women whose passion carried the Good Roads movement from boosterism to political influence to concrete-on-the-ground. While most stopped there, Avery went on to assure that one road—U.S. Highway 66—became a fixture in the imagination of America and the world.
Father of Route 66 transports readers to the years when the United States was moving from steam to internal combustion engines and traces Avery’s life from his birth in Stevensville, Pennsylvania, to his death more than ninety years later. Avery came west in a covered wagon, grew up in Indian Territory, and spent his adult years in oil-rich Tulsa, where fifty millionaires sat on the Chamber of Commerce board and the builder of the Panama Canal dropped in to size up a local water project.
Cy Avery was a farmer, teacher, real estate professional, oil man, and politician, but throughout his long life he remained a champion for better roads across America. He stood up to the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan, hatched plans for a municipal airport, and helped build a 55-mile water pipeline for Tulsa. The centerpiece of his story—and this book—however, is Avery’s role in designing the national highway system, his monumental fight with the governor of Kentucky over a road number, and his promotional efforts that turned his U.S. 66 into an American icon.
Father of Route 66 is the first in-depth exploration of Cy Avery’s life and his impact on the movement that transformed twentieth-century America. It is a must-read for anyone fascinated by Route 66 and America’s early car culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806147772 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 09/02/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 292 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Father of Route 66
The Story of Cy Avery
By Susan Croce Kelly
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4777-2
CHAPTER 1
From East to West
"The only object we, of Oklahoma, have had was to have a continuous route number from Chicago to Los Angeles.... We assure you that it will be a road ... the U.S. Government will be proud of."
In that July 1926 letter to E. W. James at the federal Bureau of Public Roads, Cy Avery acknowledged his role in a saga that involved months of maneuvering, weeks of public disputes, meetings with members of Congress, and a day that kept Western Union wires humming minute to minute. No less than the great plan for a national highway system had been at stake. The focus for all the foment was a highway number, and the outcome of those months of contention was not the number Cy had hoped for. Instead, he made a decision to affix the number sixty-six to the still mostly dirt and gravel road that ran between Chicago and Los Angeles. In the years that followed, Cy saw to it that Route 66 held a place on the national stage. What he could not know, however, was that Route 66 would become an American icon.
By the time Cy died in 1963 at the age of ninety-one, his road had been the muse for a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, a long-running television show, and an ever-popular song. The road that Cy created carried travelers into tree-lined, small-town America then swept them across the vastness of the nation's western spaces, through craggy mountains, across Indian reservations, skirted the Grand Canyon, and charged across the great American desert before it arrived in Hollywood and rolled to a stop on a sandy Pacific beach. Today, visitors from all over the world travel to see what is left of Route 66. Some actually ship historic cars and motorcycles from Europe and Asia to "motor west, on the highway that's the best." Others band together on buses or caravans for the 2,400-mile trip. Still others come alone to soak up a part of the United States that most Americans no longer know.
The highway itself was officially bypassed years ago. The once proud concrete pavement is broken in many places and its black tar joints have shriveled. Today U.S. 66 is more a series of dead ends than a cross-country boulevard. In many instances, it is not even on maps. Yet age and infirmity have only heightened its aura. Against all odds, Route 66—Cy Avery's highway—endures.
The story of Cyrus Stevens Avery and Route 66 is one that could not have happened a decade earlier—the technology to build the road was simply not available, nor was the money. A decade later would have been too late. It probably made a difference that Cy was from Tulsa, a rich little city that was an important source of the nation's petroleum supply. The man, too, was singular. No one else could have accomplished the final sleight of hand that took a bitter loss to the governor of Kentucky and, out of what remained, created a legend.
* * *
If you had asked Cy, he would have told you his proudest accomplishment was Spavinaw—a dam and fifty-five mile concrete pipeline that brought good drinking water to the thirsty people of his beloved Tulsa in the early 1920s. But if you were to ask anyone else, the answer would be that Cy Avery had everything to do with the national highway system of 1926—especially the road that began in Chicago, took a right turn in Oklahoma, and sliced its way through the great American West.
Cy's world was one that changed from being dependent on man- and horsepower to one that operated on electricity and petroleum. And for a man who was a farmer, teacher, real-estate magnate, and oil producer, it was a time when a person with the right combination of experience, curiosity, motivation, and know-how could achieve heretofore unimaginable things. In this case, Cy's driving enthusiasm for better roads helped change the nation. He had the foresight to join the "Good Roads" bandwagon early in his career. Reared to believe in himself and his abilities, he also had the personality, technical knowledge, passion, and sheer bullheadedness to bring one of the nation's most important east-west highways through Tulsa. And by so doing, he became the Father of Route 66.
His story began in 1871 in Stevensville, Pennsylvania, a small farming community in the Susquehanna River valley, a region of green hillsides, rock outcroppings, and running streams. Small towns and small farms dotted the landscape, and farmers, like young Cy's two grandfathers, grew tobacco, corn, wheat, fruits, vegetables and raised livestock including thoroughbred horses. Stevensville was named for a family that had settled there in colonial times, and, when Cy was born, a hefty part of the population still bore the Stevens name. Among them was Cy's mother, Ruie Rebecca Stevens Avery, a nononsense schoolteacher.
Cy's father, Alexander James Avery, generally known as A.J., was a ninth-generation descendant from Christopher Avery, a well-to-do Englishman who arrived in Massachusetts with his son James in the early 1600s. James later moved to Connecticut, and his son eventually settled in Groton, where the Avery descendants still maintain the Avery Memorial Association and receive family members at annual celebrations. Christopher Avery's progeny have been a successful group, counting among their numbers heads of manufacturing companies, professional men, and even John D. Rockefeller, whose wife was an Avery.
Since colonial times, Avery men had been well represented in the military, so when the Civil War erupted A.J., then just shy of twenty years old, signed on with a Pennsylvania volunteer regiment. However, when he traveled to Gettysburg to enter active service, he discovered that the requisite quota of volunteers had already been reached. So A.J. was mustered out, went back home, and never served.
By the time Cy came on the scene a decade later, A.J. was a successful merchant and horse breeder in Stevensville, no doubt benefitting from the fact that his wife and children were related in some way to nearly everyone in the community. A.J. was good-natured, quick-witted, and generally well liked, so he and Ruie Rebecca were surely optimistic about their future and their ability to raise their son and daughters, Caroline (Carrie) and Bertha.
Cy, who was named for his two grandfathers, Cyrus Stevens and Cyrus Avery, spent his first twelve years in the heart of this family community. A small, energetic kid with a boundless curiosity about the world around him and a growing knack for storytelling, he played with his many cousins, attended school, and learned even more in the evenings from his mother. He surely listened to stories about the Avery clan and ancestor Christopher Avery's journey with his young son from England to Gloucester, Massachusetts.
When he was not in school, Cy helped his father and grandfather Stevens on their farms and in various commercial ventures. By the time he was ten years old, he knew the aggravation of driving an oxcart along the rutted lanes of Stevensville to deliver milk, for which he was paid a penny a quart. Much later in life he proudly showed a newspaper reporter the yoke he had used to hitch those milk-hauling oxen of his childhood.
During those Pennsylvania years he also began to acquire the basis for his lifelong political affiliation. His grandfather Avery had been active enough in politics to be appointed postmaster under Democratic presidents Pierce and Buchanan, and his father boasted being part of the only Democratic family in Bradford County. Later, an uncle was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention in St. Louis in 1888 that nominated Grover Cleveland for a second term. Cy was to be active in the party all his life and even took a run at the Oklahoma governor's job when he was in his early sixties.
Close knit and nurturing as his hometown was for Cy, northeastern Pennsylvania was probably not the best place to be born in 1871. Even though the state's economy had grown during the Civil War, Pennsylvania suffered huge losses of men, most especially at the Battle of Gettysburg, which A.J. was lucky enough to have missed. And while the northwest corner of the state was booming, thanks to the discovery of oil near Titusville in 1859, not all was well in Pennsylvania. The move to mechanized farming equipment was causing growing pains for agriculture, and the industrial sector was plagued with strikes by underpaid and long-suffering workers.
Just weeks after Cy turned two, the U.S. economy went into a free fall. The Northern Pacific Railroad declared bankruptcy. Jay Cooke and Company, Northern Pacific's primary creditor and one of the nation's largest commercial banks, suspended operations, and the whole country went down with it. Banks closed, other railroads defaulted, farm prices collapsed, businesses of all sizes failed, and obtaining credit became nearly impossible. Large industrial operations like cotton and iron mills closed, throwing thousands out of work. In New York City, unemployment stood at 25 percent. The agricultural economy foundered, especially out west where nature added her own bite to an already difficult situation: clouds of Rocky Mountain locusts swarmed through croplands, leaving farmers helpless to do anything but watch the destruction of their livelihood by the voracious insects.
When the decade-long depression of 1873 came to Bradford County, A.J. Avery watched his business falter, then fail, and his savings disappear. Over the next six years, he probably spent long hours talking with other impoverished farmers and merchants. Possibly he even got to know soldiers who had fought on the western front in the Civil War or served in the cavalry on the edge of the frontier. A good part of those conversations may have involved talk about better times and speculation about better places.
One place in particular must have come up in those conversations: Indian Territory. By the 1870s, there was talk that Indian lands would soon be legally opened to settlers. In fact, despite treaties and federal laws, non-Indians were already flocking into the region just south of Kansas and west of Missouri and Arkansas. In a new country like that, A.J. may have concluded, an enterprising young man could do well.
Thanks to the fact that most western Indians who fought in the Civil War had signed on with the Confederacy, Washington, D.C., saw no need to support the immutability of their treaties. Among the postwar revisions of those treaties were changes that gave railroad companies the right to build lines through Indian Territory. From there, it was only a short step to white settlement. Especially since some of the fiercest promoters of white settlement were themselves Indians.
A.J. and his friends may have learned about this new opportunity for settlement thanks to a Cherokee attorney and Washington, D.C., lobbyist named Col. Elias C. Boudinot II. A tall, striking man with a flowing mane, Boudinot was the son of a New England mother and a Cherokee newspaperman. Raised and educated in New England, he moved west, become a delegate to the Confederate Congress, and also served as a colonel in the Confederate Army under his Cherokee uncle, Gen. Stand Watie. After the Civil War Boudinot moved to Washington, D.C., where he became a popular figure in social and artistic circles. One of his friends was sculptor Vinnie Ream Hoxie, who created the statue of Abraham Lincoln that stands in the Capitol Rotunda.
Boudinot took part in renegotiating the treaties for the Five Civilized Tribes. He argued that Indians should be made U.S. citizens and that they should hold individual titles to land. This, of course, would give them the right to sell it if they wished. Boudinot further argued that Indian Territory should be made an official U.S. territory. Like much else that goes on in Washington, D.C., Boudinot's labors were not without guile. Even as a member of the Cherokee delegation, he was working closely with railroad lobbyists, who were anxious to lay tracks through Indian Territory. Later, he actually platted a town site so he could benefit from the railroad's arrival.
To assure the success of his various ventures, he penned an article that was published in the Chicago Times in February 1879 in which he suggested that two million acres of unoccupied and "unassigned" land in Indian Territory should be considered public domain and open to white settlement. Never mind that these "unassigned" lands had been unwillingly ceded by the Creek and Seminole tribes as part of the Reconstruction treaties and were not then open to whites. Boudinot's article caused a small uproar across the country. It also probably precipitated the arrival of countless illegal "Boomer" homesteaders.
In small, rural Stevensville, it's doubtful that A.J. Avery actually saw a copy of Boudinot's article, but it is very likely that he heard about it. It is also likely that sometime during 1879 or 1880, as the national economy began to improve, A.J. managed to pull together enough resources to make a trip west. Certainly he wasn't living with his family. The 1880 census reports that Ruie Rebecca, Cy, and the two girls were living with Ruie's parents on their Stevensville farm, but A.J. isn't listed.
If he did visit Indian Territory, A.J. probably would have made his way first to St. Louis and then to the far southwest corner of Missouri. He would have heard that just across the state line in Indian Territory people were willing to lease land to white settlers. If he then took time to travel into the Cherokee lands, he would have discovered a country of rugged wooded hills, limestone creeks, and rivers—rougher, but not unlike Bradford County, Pennsylvania. A.J. probably took heart from the similarity of the landscape.
Since 1871, the area closest to Missouri and Arkansas had two through roads of a sort, and thanks to Boudinot, it also had railroads and a town. The two roads ran north to Kansas and south to Texas. One had been developed as a military road; the other was put through to give cattlemen a way to get to railheads in Missouri and Kansas. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway (the Katy) tracks came in from the north in 1871, and Boudinot laid out a town site at what he believed would be the Katy terminus. However, that same year, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, soon to become the St. Louis and San Francisco (Frisco), brought track in from the east. The two rail lines crossed and stopped two miles from Boudinot's platted settlement, and it was there that the new town grew up. Perhaps as a consolation prize, Boudinot named the new community. It was Vinita, after sculptor Vinnie Ream Hoxie.
Of course the tracks didn't end in Vinita for long. In the early 1880s, Frisco crews laid sixty more miles of track, stopping this time in Creek territory, near an existing Indian settlement on the Arkansas River. Rail workers erected a tent city there and that community eventually became Tulsa.
Sometime between 1873 and 1880, A.J. became enamored with the idea of Indian Territory and determined to resettle his family there. Like so many other western-bound easterners, he made his move in stages. In 1884, when Cy was thirteen, A.J. loaded his son and most of the family's belongings into a heavy wagon, bid Ruie Rebecca and the two girls goodbye, and set out.
For the trip, A.J. probably chose a Conestoga wagon. Conestogas had been developed in Pennsylvania and were known for size, strength, and the ability to stand up to the trials of American travel. A Conestoga wagon could carry twelve thousand pounds and be counted on to survive river crossings, wheel-deep mud, and heavy going.
Any kind of journey in the United States in those days required time, stamina, and patience, even in the long-settled states east of the Mississippi. Beyond the Mississippi, it was worse: all the through roads were dirt or, if they had been upgraded, dirt and gravel. That was fine for horses and an occasional wagon but not for the heavy loads carried by thousands of settlers moving west. By and large, roads were dusty and rutted in dry weather, frozen and rutted in winter, and muddy quagmires the rest of the time.
Americans had called for good roads since colonial times. Periodically the government responded with funds and plans but the country had neither the technology nor the focus to accomplish much. The Averys' home state of Pennsylvania was one that had taken road building seriously, perhaps because back in the seventeenth century, when white settlers arrived, the roads they found were good ones. The local Indians had created long-distance highways between rivers with different paths for wet and dry seasons and for war parties or peaceful travel. As early as 1700, the Pennsylvania Assembly began authorizing road building, and in the 1790s the assembly commissioned the Lancaster Turnpike, the first macadam road in the United States. By 1830, there were three thousand miles of turnpike roads in Pennsylvania.
The federal government made a foray into national road construction in 1806 when it authorized the Cumberland Road, also known as the National Road, to go from the East Coast to St. Louis, but that road was never finished. Construction stopped in 1839, several miles short of St. Louis, when funding for highways became a lower priority than for canals and railroads. Today Vandalia, Illinois, still celebrates itself as the terminus of the old National Road. In the early 1800s the government also laid out more than twenty thousand miles of military roads across the west, but even that kind of road building stopped almost entirely during the Civil War.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Father of Route 66 by Susan Croce Kelly. Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
Acknowledgments,
1. From East to West,
2. Tulsan Forever,
3. Good Roads Man,
4. The Do-It-Yourself Highway Movement,
5. Good Roads for the Nation,
6. Water for Tulsa,
7. Highway Commissioner,
8. Building a National Highway System,
9. The Fight over Highway Numbers,
10. Ousted!,
11. U.S. 66 Highway Association,
12. Citizen Servant: The Post-Highway Years,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,