Tarot Reader in Owasso, Oklahoma

Up 169 with everyone else

Owasso is about 14 miles from downtown Tulsa, close to twenty minutes at an ordinary hour, and most of the drive is US-169. The town has outgrown that road. Owasso counted 28,915 people in 2010 and 38,240 in 2020, a 36 percent jump, and added nearly 5 percent more in 2023 alone. Traffic on 169 through Owasso went from about 60,000 vehicles a day in 2019 to about 75,000 by early 2026, the year ODOT added a third lane each way between 66th and 86th Street North. At rush hour the backup has run three or four miles, so for a weeknight party I leave early. The other way in is US-75 north to 76th Street, then east into downtown.

What makes the drive north

A one-on-one reading happens at a coworking space in Tulsa, so a client from Owasso heads south for a private reading. Anything with a guest list comes north instead. What I carry is small, a cloth, a deck, a lamp, and a sign, and it sets up the same in the corner of a community center room as beside a pool pavilion on 86th. Owasso spills over from Tulsa County into Rogers County, and the price ignores the county line. Events start at $300 and cover two hours; after that it is $125 an hour.

A town named for a turnaround

Before it was Owasso it was Elm Creek, settled in 1881 in the Cherokee Nation's Cooweescoowee District. In 1899 a short line called the Kansas, Oklahoma Central and Southwestern finished its track down from near Caney, Kansas, and stopped about three miles northwest of Elm Creek, where the rails ended in a turnaround Y beside the depot. The name came from that Y. Owasso is usually traced to an Osage word for "the end of the trail" or "turn around." The first train came in on November 1, 1899, the post office took the new name on January 24, 1900, and the Santa Fe absorbed the little railroad that July.

Downtown has had a second name since a community vote in 2016: the Redbud District. Its middle is Redbud Festival Park, at 109 N. Main, a two-acre park whose lawn sits between a 6,700-square-foot pavilion and a 2,700-square-foot stage. Around the city stand 42 statues of Timmy and Cindy, a boy and a girl, from a public art project begun in 2004. The Owasso Historical Museum keeps the older story in the Komma Building, the city's oldest commercial structure and a grocery from 1928 to 1957. On its brick wall is an End of the Trail mural that more than 250 people each added a brushstroke to in 1996.