Route 66 Centennial: Celebrating 100 Years of the Mother Road

Now, Route 66 was commissioned in 1926, and this was originally intended to connect rural communities with urban centers.

And the U.S. Highway System was an effort by the federal government to connect these small rural towns, not just major cities.

And before the U.S. Highway System was created, trips that were made along these tiny little dirt roads, dirt paths between all these rural communities took much, much longer to be able to travel and get to anywhere.

And this was really an effort to speed up and connect more of the communities of the United States together in a way that had not been possible in the past.

And this was originally a mix for, certainly for Route 66, was originally a mix of dirt and gravel roads, along with a few disjointed local roads that connected from Chicago, Illinois, all the way out to Santa Monica, California, over roughly 2,500 miles.

And it was the first real effort to link all of these different roads together, adding in some segments that were missing, and really give a single path that you could do to really cross a huge swath of the United States.

And while it started in 1926 for the beginning of the commissioning of it, it wasn't fully paved until 1938, so there was a long period of time where parts of Route 66 were still dirt and gravel paths.

Now, John Steinbeck immortalized Route 66 as the Mother Road in The Grapes of Wrath, adding to the cultural zeitgeist surrounding Route 66 and the migration during the Dust Bowl from the middle of the country out west towards California.

And in World War II, Route 66 was a major military highway, bringing supplies across the country.

This made it much easier to bring supplies over to the West Coast of the United States, and therefore was a critical part of the war machinery.

Now, as we wrapped up the war and there was a huge growth in prosperity that was happening in the United States, and road trips became a huge part of that experience, Route 66 was a very highly sought-after route.

It went through all sorts of small little towns.

There was all sorts of diners that were being put up, drive-in theaters, neon lights on the motels.

Weird attractions sprouted up along its entire path, and these attracted motorists to want to travel along, stop by, spend a little bit of money.

And it became an economic source for a lot of these smaller communities to take advantage of all these motorists who were driving along its length.

And in fact, the original Pixar film Cars captured a bit of the character of that original spirit, if you will, of Route 66 and looked at it almost with a bit of rose-colored glasses.

It looked back and said like, "Hey, it used to be this great thing," but it had fallen onto harder times.

And that really was what happened to Route 66.

In the 1960s, after the start of the federal Interstate System, national highways were often ignored by motorists in favor of the interstates, which were even faster.

They, instead of following along the path of the terrain, they just cut through it.

So they were faster, but they bypassed a lot of these smaller communities.

And those faster routes with fewer curves saved a little bit of time for the motorists, and I think this was really captured in that Pixar film of, "Hey, it saved 10 minutes," and that's why that small little town was affected, Radiator Springs.

But this left, of course, the numerous businesses that were along these original alignments with no revenue, and many of them went under.

And in fact, some of these towns that were bypassed actually became ghost towns because of that revenue loss.

There was no longer a mechanism for them to sustain any livelihood, and sadly, many of them have gone away.