Route 66 Turns 100: How the Mother Road Began

On College Street in Springfield, Missouri, the city marks the spot where the Colonial Hotel once stood. On April 30, 1926, Cyrus Avery of Tulsa and Missouri highway engineer B.H. Piepmeier sent a telegram from Springfield to Washington about the new highway from Chicago to Los Angeles.

The message that matters is one short line, as the Federal Highway Administration prints it: "We prefer sixty six to sixty two."

That is why Springfield calls itself the birthplace of Route 66. But the date the country celebrates is today. On November 11, 1926, the road became part of the new national system of numbered U.S. highways. It did not open that day, and nobody cut a ribbon. What was approved 100 years ago was a number in a national system. Signs and promotion followed, and with them the idea that a person could follow one road across eight states.

What happened on November 11, 1926

The vote took place far from Missouri, at the annual meeting of the American Association of State Highway Officials in Pinehurst, North Carolina. The group approved the U.S. numbered highway system that day. The government did not even announce it to the public until January 2, 1927, after maps could be prepared.

The road itself was not new. The National Park Service describes Route 66 as a stitching together of existing local, state, and national roads. It ran from Chicago to Los Angeles through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Later alignments carried it to Santa Monica and the Pacific.

How long was it? That depends on who is measuring and which alignment. The Park Service rounds it to about 2,400 miles. The Route 66 Centennial Commission uses about 2,448 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica.

The fight over a number

Route 66 was almost Route 60. Under the numbering plan, the most important east-west roads got numbers ending in zero, and the Chicago to Los Angeles road was first slated for 60. Kentucky objected. It had no major east-west route ending in zero, and its officials wanted one.

The compromise gave 60 to a road from Newport News, Virginia, to Springfield, Missouri, and offered Avery's road 62. Then John M. Page, Oklahoma's chief highway engineer, noticed that 66 had not been assigned to anything. Avery and Piepmeier took it. The telegram followed.

Avery is remembered in Tulsa as the road's chief promoter, and Springfield businessman John T. Woodruff worked alongside him. Neither man built Route 66. They argued it into existence and then sold it.

A road that was mostly unpaved

In 1926, by one estimate from the Texas Historical Commission, only about 800 miles of the roughly 2,500-mile route were paved. Illinois was already paved. Most of the rest was not.

In 1928 the road's promoters used a footrace to draw attention to it. On March 4, a race organized by sports promoter C.C. Pyle left Los Angeles, followed Route 66 to Chicago, and finished in New York on May 26. It was nicknamed the "Bunion Derby." The Oklahoma Historical Society counts 199 starters and 55 finishers over 84 days and 3,423.3 miles. The winner was Andy Payne.

By 1938, the Park Service says, paving crews had finished the job, and the highway had pavement from Chicago to Los Angeles.

How it became the Mother Road

The nickname came from a novel. In 1939, John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" followed a family driving west out of the Dust Bowl. Chapter 12 begins, "HIGHWAY 66 IS THE main migrant road." A few lines later Steinbeck wrote, "66 is the mother road, the road of flight."

After World War II the road meant something else: vacations. In 1946, Bobby Troup wrote "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," and the Nat King Cole Trio recorded it that same year.

Bypassed, one town at a time

The road that made the trip possible was undone by a newer one. On June 29, 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which paid for the Interstate system. Over the next three decades, Interstates 55, 44, 40, 15, and 10 replaced Route 66 piece by piece.

The last section to go was at Williams, Arizona, where Interstate 40 bypassed the town in 1984. In June 1985, the highway officials' association, by then called AASHTO, approved removing U.S. 66 from the system. The surviving committee record is dated June 26 and reads, in part, "Elimination of U.S. Route 66 -- APPROVED."

What's left

More than you might think. In 1999 Congress created the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program within the National Park Service, and the Park Service says more than 170 projects along the old road have received its grants since 2001. Route 66 is not a national park or a National Historic Trail. It is a string of towns that kept their part of it.

At Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, the Park Service notes, you can see the only stretch of Route 66 inside a national park, marked by a line of old telephone poles across the desert.