A history buff discovered a street-widening project along Kelley Avenue in Oklahoma City uncovered long-forgotten bricks used along that alignment of Route 66.
Area resident Tony Emig stumbled onto the bricks while in traffic, reported KWTV:
“I was looking at the area where they were doing the construction and eating up the old road and noticed there’s a layer of bricks underneath there. It dawned on me, holly cow those are Route 66 bricks,” says Emig, who safely park his car and grabbed three of the heavy bricks.
Emig said the bricks weigh a surprisingly heavy eight pounds apiece.
Here’s the station’s full video report:
News9.com – Oklahoma City, OK – News, Weather, Video and Sports |
Emig said he’d safeguard a few of the bricks for the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum in Clinton.
Road-construction projects from time to time uncover Route 66 bricks buried by asphalt or concrete decades ago. But with the Mother Road more in the public consciousness, it’s rare that such a discovery gets overlooked.
And Emig is probably right — the station’s report probably will prompt a bunch of souvenir-hunters to scoop up those bricks.
According to the online Route 66 Atlas, Kelley Avenue carried Route 66 from 1926 to 1954. It’s quite likely the bricks predated Route 66, but I’ve been unable to confirm that.
(Excepted image of Route 66 bricks in Kelley Avenue in Oklahoma City from KWTV report)
The same thing happened in front of Shea’s garage/museum in Springfield IL back in the 1990s. North Ninth Street was being repaved, and Mr. Shea noticed large bricks uncovered by some paving removed along both edges of the street. He realized they were original (because of their size), and the construction people didn’t want them, so he stacked several dozen behind his garage. He asked me if I wanted a couple of them, and I said “yes,” of course. They are now part of the edging along a flower bed in our back yard. Yes, I will give them to the Springfield IL Route 66 welcome center/museum. When they get one. In the meantime, there are ants travelling Route 66, and they don’t even know it!
Great find.
Glad you have some of the 9th street bricks…that’s a story I had never heard. I had moved from Springfield to Michigan by then, so I missed seeing them.
OKC ought to keep enough of those for a cross-road stripe of them.
I really like that cross-road stripe idea! Maybe somebody from OK can pick up…?
The section of Kelley in OKC where the bricks are located was a project paid for with municipal funds in 1925. They carried US 66 traffic until 1954, but were covered with asphalt some years before the designation was changed.