U.S. Highway 66 had its origin in the wake of the nation's first trans-Mississippi migration. In 1853 Congress commissioned Captain Amiel Weeks Whipple of the Army Topographical Corps to conduct a survey for a proposed transcontinental railroad. Congress opted against the railroad and instead subsidized a network of wagon roads intended to improve military and civilian communications throughout the western frontier. In 1857 Congress commissioned Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale to chart a wagon road following the 35th parallel from Fort Defiance (near the New Mexico/Arizona border) to the Colorado River. Beal's Road, as the route came to be identified, established a vital military transportation and communication link between Fort Smith near the Arkansas River and the westernmost reaches of the Southwest. In underwriting the $200,000 expense to establish what Lt. Beale felt certain would become "the great emigrant road to California," the federal government provided the impetus for the creation of the transcontinental railroad.

 

Beal's Road was the frontier antecedent of Route 66. Interest in the route resurfaced under the National old Trails Road Movement when motorists began to discuss the need for an ocean-to-ocean thoroughfare in the first decades of this century. Promoters hoped to capitalize on the national appeal of the Panama-Pacific Expositions, scheduled to open in San Diego and San Francisco in 1915, as justification for federal subsidies of a continuously paved transcontinental highway. The National Old Trails Road, as conceived in 1912, originated on the East Coast with branches to Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and terminated on the West Coast at San Diego. The road's promotional arm, the National Old Trails Road Association, supported two ideas during its lifetime (1) it promoted improvement of the proposed ocean-to-ocean corridor as it retraced the nation's historic trails, and (2) the association championed good roads in America by advocating direct federal involvement in road construction in lieu of federal aid to state agencies. This concept was eventually incorporated into federal highway policy in 1916 and continues today.

 

The first leg of the ocean-to-ocean highway proposed by the National Old Trails Association in 1912 originated in Washington, D.C., and traced the Cumberland Road, a well-established historic avenue, to St. Louis. From Missouri, the highway followed the Santa Fe Trail to Albuquerque and Santa Fe before taking a more southerly course through Arizona to Flagstaff, gateway to the Grand Canyon. Flagstaff's pioneer lumberman Matthew J. Riordan detailed the final leg of the route, which most closely approximates the 1927 orientation of U.S. Highway 66. Christened the "Grand Canyon Route," the road was eventually constructed from Williams to Ashfork and Seligman in Yavapai County to Topock on the Colorado River, where automobiles could be loaded on railway flatcars and transported across an expansion bridge built by the Santa Fe Railroad to Needles, California. From this desert community, the road proceeded 164 miles across the Mojave to Barstow and the desert communities of Bakersfield and San Bernadino to San Diego.

 

The official origin of Route 66 was the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921. A road assessment taken a decade earlier estimated the total mileage of rural roads in America at approximately 2.5 million miles, 10.5% of which were listed as surfaced. Of those 257,291 miles only 32,180 were paved with bituminous material, brick, or concrete. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921, successor to the earlier highway appropriations legislation of 1916, was designed to create a coherent highway network by requiring that federal aid be concentrated upon such projects as will expedite the completion of an adequate and connected system of highways, interstate in character. To that end, a minimum of 60% of federal funds would be spent on what was designated the primary or interstate network.

 

It can be argued that the miracle of the 20th century was not the automobile, but the construction of the vast network of highways that gave motorists someplace to go. In the case of Route 66, the two technological achievements were together from the outset. The Lincoln Highway, established to facilitate travel across the 3,000-mile stretch of mountains and prairies between New York and San Francisco, predated Route 66 by more than a decade. Nevertheless, from 1912 until the end of the First World War, cross-country travel along the Lincoln Highway was largely limited to the wealthy few who could afford an automobile and dared to challenge the uneven, ill-defined course of the road.

 

Route 66 was the result of America's infatuation with rapid mobility, mass transportation, and technological change. Historian Richard Davies wrote, the automobile constituted a personalized urban mass transit system, allowing the owner to travel whenever or wherever he desired." Moreover, it provided a personal means of escape from the congestion of metropolitan America. One significant effect of the increased use of the automobile, according to Davies, was to reduce cross-country travel from an adventure of the affluent and stout hearted to a relatively inexpensive and common occurrence.

 

The 1920s were the first boom years for the automobile. In 1910, two years before the authorization of the Lincoln Highway, there were 180,000 registered automobiles in the United States a ratio of about one for every 5,000 citizens. During the subsequent decade more than 17 million cars, trucks, and buses were added to America's motor fleet. (This figure increased 6.5 times to 112 million in 1970s. Not surprisingly, Americans demanded improved highways to meet the growing number of vehicles on America's roadways. It was the federal government's early response to these demands that first breathed life into Route 66.

 

Although entrepreneurs Cyrus Avery of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and John Woodruff of Springfield, Missouri, deserve most of the credit for promoting the idea of an interregional link between Chicago and Los Angeles, their lobbying efforts were not realized until their dreams merged with the national program of highway and road development. While legislation for public highways first appeared in 1916, with revisions in 1921, it was not until Congress enacted an even more comprehensive version of the act in 1925 that the government executed its plan for national highway construction. Officially, the numerical designation 66 was assigned to the Chicago-to-Los Angeles route in the summer of 1926. With that designation came its acknowledgement as one of the nation's principal east-west arteries. For the most part, U.S. 66 was just an assignment of a number to an already existing network of state-managed roads, most of which were in poor condition.

 

From the outset, public road planners intended U.S. 66 to connect the main streets of rural and urban communities along its course for the most practical of reasons: most small towns had no prior access to a major national thoroughfare. Before 1926, for example, Cyrus Avery's hometown of Tulsa, and most of what was once called "Indian Territory" before Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907, claimed few improved roads. In those days it took six hours to drive the 103 miles of uneven dirt roads to Oklahoma City. The same was true of New Mexico and Arizona, which were both admitted to the union in 1912, scarcely fourteen years before construction of Route 66. Use of the new road in these remote desert states was sporadic. In 1925 New Mexico's Office of the State Engineer reported an average daily use of only 207 cars between Albuquerque and Gallup. Although Arizona reported a slightly higher daily count of 338 cars, road conditions left much to be desired. The section between Ashfork and Seligman was described in the summer of 1925 as "Unimproved except in the way of removing boulders from the road that might menace a low- clearance car . . . it is a twenty-mile (per hour) road." Despite these obvious short-comings, the extension of U.S. Highway 66 into these desolate western territories helped facilitate their transition from territory to statehood by offering greater access to prospective residents and travelers.

 

Text portions courtesy of the National Park Service

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