Beckham County Courthouse

Beckham County was formed at statehood in 1907, and four years later it replaced its two-story brick courthouse with this one, three stories of brick and stone by the firm of Layton, Smith and Hawk. The county set it half a block from the railroad tracks, the town's link to everything outside, so that people arriving by train would meet a building of some ambition. Massive Tuscan columns frame the entrances, a cornice of copper sheeting runs under the parapet, and on the roof twelve Doric columns hold up a large clock dome, which carries a second, smaller dome on twelve more. Few Oklahoma courthouses have a dome at all.

Route 66 came through Sayre in 1928, and within a couple of years the town had tied its living to feeding and fueling the people on it. To travellers from Chicago this felt like the start of the real West, and the courthouse earned thirty seconds in the final cut of John Ford's 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath. Traffic got so heavy that Sayre built a pedestrian underpass at Fourth and Elm streets so people could cross the highway safely. Interstate 40 took the through traffic around the downtown in 1975.

The courthouse was listed in the National Register in 1984 and still houses county government. Old 66 runs on through the town's historic district along Main and Fourth streets, past the old Owl Drug Store and the Stovall Theater.