U.S. Highway 66, popularly known as "Route 66," is significant as the
nation's first all-weather highway linking Chicago to Los Angeles. When contrasted with
transcontinental corridors such as the Lincoln Highway and U.S. Highway 40, Route 66 does
not stand out as America's oldest or longest road. Nevertheless, what sets this segment of
national highway apart from its contemporaries is that it remains the shortest, year-round
route between the Midwest and the Pacific Coast. U.S. Highway 66 reduced the distance
between Chicago and Los Angeles by more than 200 miles, which made Route 66 popular among
thousands of motorists who drove west in subsequent decades.
Like other highways of its day, Route 66 reflects the origin and evolution of road
transportation in the United States. The often romanticized highway represents an
outstanding example of the transition from dirt track to superhighway. Not only does Route
66 underscore the importance of the automobile as a technological achievement, but,
perhaps equally important to the American psyche, it symbolized unprecedented freedom and
mobility for every citizen who could afford to own and operate a car. Escalating numbers
of motor vehicles and the rise of the trucking industry increased the need for improved
highways. In response the federal government pledged to link small town U.S.A. with all of
the metropolitan capitals.
The period of outstanding historical significance for Route 66 is 1933 to 1970. The
national system of public highways brought geographic cohesion and economic prosperity to
the disparate regions of the country. As a component of the federal network Route 66
linked the isolated and predominantly rural West to the densely populated urban Midwest
and Northeast. Chicago had long served as a transshipment point for goods that were
transported to the West. The creation of Route 66 ensured the continuation of this vital
socioeconomic link. The appearance of U.S. Highway 66 came at a time of unparalleled
social, economic, and political disruption and global conflict. and it enabled the most
comprehensive movement of people in the history of the United States. One result was the
irreversible transformation of the American far west from a rural frontier to a
pacesetting, metropolitan region.
Perhaps more than any other American high-way, Route 66 symbolized the new optimism
that pervaded the nation s postwar economic recovery. For thousands of returning American
servicemen and their families, Route 66 represented more than just another highway.
"It became," according to one contemporary admirer, "an icon of
free-spirited independence linking the United States across the Rocky Mountain divide to
the Pacific Ocean." In recent years Route 66 imaginatively documented in prose, song,
film, and television has come to represent the essence of the American highway culture to
countless motorists who traversed its course during the more than fifty years of its
lifetime.
Reprinted from:
Special Resource Study Route 66
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service (See Credits)
NPS D-4 July 1995.
