Amarillo & Route 66

Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.

The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.

Hereford's county museum in an early Catholic school: the Windmill City's pioneers, a half-dugout and caboose outside, and work by the Italian prisoners held south of town in the war.

Barbed wire and the Texas road in McLean's old brassiere factory: the fence that closed the open range, from the salesmen who sold it to the Panhandle ranches it divided.

The Route 66 town split by the New Mexico line, where the depot was in Texas and the post office in New Mexico, and county law and state tax sorted bars from gas stations.

The 1886 stone jail of the Panhandle's first county seat, the buffalo hunters' Hidetown on Sweetwater Creek that ran the courts for fifteen counties before losing its fort, railroad hopes and county seat.

The 1884 stone courthouse of the Canadian River cowtown, later a ranch headquarters and the first home of Cal Farley's Boys Ranch, now a museum on the working campus.

The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.

The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.

Thirteen blocks of Amarillo's streetcar suburb that Route 66 turned into a roadside strip, from the 1922 Nat to Texaco, Phillips and Dutch Mill stations, now shops and bars.

Shamrock's 1936 Conoco station and cafe at the corner of Route 66 and US-83, sketched in the dirt with a nail, named by a schoolboy and saved by the town.

Four sealed time capsules raised in Amarillo in 1968 for helium's centennial, in the city that for years produced almost all the world's commercial helium from the Cliffside field.

A restored 1920s Magnolia filling station on Vega's Main Street, a barbershop after the pumps stopped in 1953, saved with a National Park Service grant.

A 1929 cottage-style Phillips 66 station on First Street in McLean, the town I-40 went around last and whose Route 66 business district stayed much as it was.

The sign in Adrian that puts Chicago and Los Angeles 1,139 miles away in each direction, and across the road the 1928 cafe that took the midpoint for its name.

Ten Cadillacs from 1949 to 1963 planted nose down in a pasture west of Amarillo by the Ant Farm collective in 1974, on private land where visitors are let in to paint them.