Tarot Reader in Sapulpa, Oklahoma

Fifteen miles down the Mother Road

Sapulpa sits about fifteen miles southwest of downtown Tulsa. Interstate 44 is the quick way, roughly twenty minutes at an ordinary hour, and the Creek Turnpike, Tulsa's southern and eastern bypass, branches off it on the northeast edge of town. The slow way is the old road. Route 66 is State Highway 66 now, and by the time it reaches downtown Sapulpa it is Dewey Avenue. The town calls itself the Crossroads of America, because 66 crossed it east to west and Alternate US-75 crossed it north to south.

Where the table goes

A sitting for one person happens at a coworking space in Tulsa, so a Sapulpa client drives up the interstate for a private reading. Anything with guests runs the other direction. The deck, the cloth, a lamp, and a small sign come down to you: a 1911 house on Main Street, a barn beside a pond, a picnic shelter in a city park. Crossing into Creek County adds nothing to the bill. A party starts at $300 and covers the first two hours; every hour past that adds $125.

The Crystal City

Sapulpa was a railroad town first. The Frisco line reached it from Red Fork in 1886, and by 1900 it was a division point where the trains were serviced. Oil from the Glenn Pool field, struck in 1905, nearly doubled the population between 1907 and 1910. Then came glass. Clean sand and plentiful natural gas brought four glass plants by the 1920s, and Sapulpa took the name the Crystal City of the Southwest. Bartlett-Collins employed five hundred people at mid-century and closed in 2008. Liberty Glass, which began as Premium Glass in 1912, was shipping a million milk bottles a year by 1950.

Here is the part most people miss: glass is still made there. The old Liberty plant passed through a long chain of owners to Ardagh, which announced in January 2021 that it was making wine bottles in Sapulpa. Clay went the other way. Frankoma Pottery moved here from Norman in 1938, switched to brick-red clay from Sugar Loaf Hill, rebuilt after fires in 1938 and 1983, and left for Glenpool in 2022. Frankoma Road kept the name.

Dewey Avenue, rebuilt

Downtown spent most of 2025 dug up. The ReDewey project, paid for with a bond passed in 2020, cut trenches four to five feet deep for new water and sewer lines along Route 66, and the street reopened on January 16, 2026, in time for the highway's hundredth year. The Christmas Chute sat out 2025 because of it. Its organizers said the new streetscape would build the Chute into the street itself, so this November it returns to a street rebuilt with it in mind.