Elk City Museum Complex

Before there was a town, cattle drives on the Western Trail from Texas to Kansas passed through this country along Elk Creek. The townsite was platted on March 18, 1901, and the post office opened under the name Busch, which was too close to another office's name and became Elk City in July 1907. Broomcorn, cotton and livestock went out on the railroads, and in August 1931 Dr. Michael Shadid opened one of the first cooperative hospitals in Oklahoma here, where a farm family bought a fifty-dollar share and paid twenty-five dollars a year for its medical care.

The city's museum complex sits on Route 66. Its National Route 66 Museum and National Transportation Museum take the road through each of the eight states it crossed, from Illinois to California, with a 1955 pink Cadillac to sit in and a black-and-white film to watch from a Chevy Impala at a mock drive-in. The Old Town Museum is a Victorian-era house of settlers' rooms and belongings, with replicas of a schoolhouse, opera house, doctor's office and chapel around it, and there are a Farm and Ranch Museum and a Blacksmith Museum as well.

The newest exhibit in the Old Town Museum shows the water drums, sanitation kits and radiation detectors that the federal government stocked in Elk City's fallout shelters from the 1960s until the 1990s, gathered by the historian Landry Brewer.