Route 66 is the most famous road in America. Generations of travelers have romanticized this highway as a symbol of unlimited mobility and freedom of the road. Its iconic status is enhanced by the unprecedented volume of music, books, films, and other art forms that depict it as the essence of America’s highway culture.

It was born in 1926 as part of the new numbered highway network and quickly grew to be the preferred road west for a nation on the move. US Highway 66 was not as old or as long as some other transcontinental routes like the Yellowstone or the Lincoln Highway, but it quickly gained fame as the shortest, year-round route between the Midwest and the coast as it passed through the fabled landscape of the American Southwest. The construction of this thin, ribbon of the road helped to transform the American West from an isolated frontier to an economically vital region of the country and made it accessible to anyone with a car.

In its lifetime, this celebrated road witnessed a continuum of highway and transportation evolution from Ford Model Ts plodding through rutted dirt to the rise of the monolithic American Interstate Highway System. Route 66 was the most well-known road in a national network of public highways, which succeeded in uniting a huge, dispersed nation into a cohesive whole. During its heyday, Route 66 mirrored the mood of the nation.

During the Great Depression, it became the Road of Flight for farm families escaping the Dust Bowl. In his classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck christened it the Mother Road, and it has carried that moniker ever since. Even this monumental exodus was but a single surge in the mass movement of humans in the nation’s history. Another was the post-World War II movement of ex-GIs and their families to join the booming California job market.

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