Widely acknowledged as the "Father of Route 66," Cyrus Avery was born on August 31, 1871, in Stephensville, Pennsylvania. After graduating from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, he moved to Indian Territory and managed the Oklahoma City office of the New York Life Insurance Company from 1898 to 1904, then spent three years in Vinita, Oklahoma, working in real estate. After moving to Tulsa in 1907, he continued in residential development while broadening his interests into public affairs, serving on the Tulsa County Commission from 1913 to 1916 and on the Tulsa Water Board in the 1920s when it initiated the Spavinaw Lake Project to bring water to the growing city. Recognizing the automobile's potential to reshape commerce and tourism, he joined transcontinental road associations to promote road and interstate highway construction and maintenance. As vice president of the Ozark Trail Association, he arranged for its national convention to be held in Tulsa in 1916. The association promoted the Ozark Trail Highway, designated in the early 1920s, which included a section through Oklahoma and Tulsa. Avery served as state highway commissioner from 1922 to 1926, and in 1926 the Ozark Trail became one of the highways used to form U.S. Highway 66. He then served as vice president of the renamed U.S. Highway 66 Association in 1927. Alongside his public service, he was also an entrepreneur and salesman. The original alignment of Route 66 ran west along East 11th Street, turned one mile north on Mingo Road to Admiral Place, then continued west into downtown Tulsa and crossed the 11th Street bridge before leaving Tulsa along South Quanah Road, also known as Southwest Boulevard. This route passed directly in front of his farmstead at the edge of Admiral Place, where he opened some of the highway's earliest service businesses, including a filling station, a tourist camp, and the Old English Inn. The Mingo Road traffic circle now surrounds the historic site of those properties, which have long since been demolished. Avery later served as Works Progress Administration administrator for the Tulsa area in 1935-1936, retired from sales in 1958, died in California in 1963, and was buried in Tulsa at Rose Hill Park Cemetery on East Admiral Place and South Yale Avenue.
