On April 30, 1926, Oklahoma highway commissioner Cyrus Avery sent a telegram from Springfield, Missouri, about the proposed highway from Chicago to Los Angeles. His side had wanted the number 60. Kentucky officials had pushed for that number on a route that crossed their state. Avery told the federal Bureau of Public Roads that he would accept 66 if the other states along the Chicago to Los Angeles route agreed. Route 66 was officially designated on Nov. 11, 1926, when the new numbered highway system was adopted. Bureau of Land Management history A century later, 66 is the number people still paint on the pavement, even where it has been off the official road map for decades. Federal Highway Administration history
Avery's telegram settled a question for road officials. It left the people along the route with more immediate ones. Could they earn a living from cars passing through town? Where could a family get a room for the night? And what happened to a business built around a highway when a faster road opened a mile or two away?
A number on a collection of roads
The country already had long-distance routes, but many were assembled and promoted under names by private associations. Their markings could overlap. The new numbering plan gave motorists a shared set of signs to follow across state lines. Route 66 joined existing roads and streets. In Oklahoma, for example, it incorporated a stretch of State Highway 7 that ran past the Threatt family's farm. A designation could make an old road part of a national trip without changing its surface. National Park Service on the roads that preceded Route 66
Even in 1929, motorists heading west from the New Mexico line toward Holbrook, Arizona, still had a long stretch of earth road. A contemporary survey reproduced in the federal highway history lists sections of gravel, concrete, oil-treated road and plain earth between there and California. Near Cajon Pass, highway crews were working to replace dozens of sharp curves. A traveler could follow the same number from state to state and encounter a different kind of road in the space of an afternoon.
The route had already acquired a showman. In 1928, promoter Charles C. Pyle sent runners from Los Angeles to New York in a race that used Route 66 for part of the trip. Newspapers called it the Bunion Derby. The State Historical Society of Missouri counts 199 starters and 55 finishers. Andy Payne, a young Cherokee runner from Oklahoma, won $25,000. The society's surviving footage shows the race in Missouri, two years after the designation, while boosters were still persuading Americans to make the trip themselves. Oklahoma Supreme Court account of Payne's race
West for work
In the 1930s, the road carried families going west in search of work. The Dust Bowl and the Depression pushed people out of the Plains, and Route 66 was one of the ways to California. John Steinbeck gave that journey a fictional family in The Grapes of Wrath. The Joads were characters, but the decisions behind their trip were familiar to the people whose lives federal photographers documented: what could go in the car, how far their money might take them, and whether there would be work when they arrived. Federal Highway Administration account of the migration and the novel
Dorothea Lange photographed one family stopped with tire trouble in California in February 1936. The Library of Congress record describes them as Mexican migrants looking for work picking peas. It does not place them on Route 66. The photograph documents the work and travel that brought families to California in the same period, and the cost of a setback that a map could never show. A broken tire could put the next day's wages farther away than the next town.
By the postwar years, more of the people arriving in those towns were on vacation. They still needed many of the same things: fuel, food, a repair and somewhere to stop for the night. The businesses that met those needs became part of what motorists remembered about the trip. Passing cars could bring a family to a counter or motel office for one evening. To the people behind the counter, there would be another car in the morning, as long as the traffic kept coming.
Where a driver could stop
In 1936, a New York postal worker named Victor Hugo Green began publishing the travel guide now known as the Green Book. Its listings helped Black travelers find businesses that would serve them during segregation. The 1940 edition lists hotels and tourist homes alongside garages, restaurants and other services. The range of entries gives a sense of how many ordinary errands called for advance planning. Finding a place that rented rooms was only one part of getting through the day. National Park Service on Route 66 and the Green Book
A few miles east of Luther, Oklahoma, the Threatt family ran a filling station beside the road. The building, made of local sandstone around 1915, was there before the highway got its number. The National Park Service's account of the station describes it as an early business that served Black motorists on the route. Its history belongs beside the directory's even though a station could welcome travelers without appearing in any particular edition. A motorist could know a stop through family or friends, through a guide, or through having made the trip before. The information had value because a sign advertising gasoline or rooms did not tell every passing driver whether they could get either.
The station was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. It stands at the junction of old Route 66 and Pottawatomi Road, where a traveler can still see the building from the road. The people who protected it saved a piece of what made travel possible, in a place that could easily have been remembered only as a dot between larger cities.
A motel you could spot from the car
A business had a few seconds to catch a driver's attention. In Holbrook, Arizona, stucco-clad cabins shaped like tipis stood beside the road at the Wigwam Motel. In Tucumcari, New Mexico, the Blue Swallow advertised itself in neon. Carol M. Highsmith's 2006 photograph shows the motel's sign rising above the low buildings around it. The shape and height mattered when customers were still moving. Each business had to announce itself early enough for a driver to see it, decide and pull in. Library of Congress Blue Swallow photograph · Library of Congress Wigwam Motel photograph
Those buildings also depended on the arrangement the numbered road had inherited: it often ran through town. A motorist could make a stop on the same street a resident used to go to work. The interstate offered a different arrangement. It carried traffic past the stoplights and storefronts, with entrances and exits spaced out along the route. Drivers could make better time. For a business that had counted on being seen from the road, a few miles could be enough to put it outside the trip.
What the bypass left behind
The last stretch of Route 66 to be bypassed by the interstates ran through Williams, Arizona. Interstate 40 opened there in 1984. The following June, highway officials approved removing U.S. 66 from the national network. The pavement in Williams remained, as did the buildings and the people who depended on them. The number had lost its official job. Towns and states gave it another one as they began marking and promoting stretches of Historic Route 66. Federal Highway Administration on the bypass and the 1985 decision
Congress established the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program in 1999. The National Park Service now documents the old road in pieces, through places such as filling stations, bridges and motels. The work at Threatt Filling Station shows what that can mean. The Park Service awarded grants in 2018 and 2021 to help the owners preserve a building whose story could not be told by keeping an old highway sign alone.
In 2018, Highsmith photographed the welcome sign along old Route 66 in Williams. The last town to be bypassed was inviting motorists off the faster road. There was no need to drive through town anymore. The people who did had made a decision to turn in. Library of Congress Williams photograph
