On April 30, 1926, two state highway men met in Springfield, Missouri to settle an argument over a number. One was Cyrus Avery of Oklahoma, a fifty-four-year-old Tulsa businessman who sat on his state’s highway commission. The other was B. H.
Peep Meers, the chief engineer of the Missouri Highway Department. For months, they had fought to keep the number 60 on the road from Chicago to Los Angeles, and they were losing. That day they gave up on 60 and sent a telegram to Washington that read, “We prefer 66 to 62. ” The vote that would make the road official was still months away.
The road itself barely existed. But in that telegram, the future Route 66 found its name. The fight over the number makes more sense once you know who Avery was. He was born in Stevensville, Pennsylvania, in 1871, and came to Tulsa in 1907, the same year Oklahoma became a state.
He ran an oil and gas company and a large farm outside town. Like a good number of businessmen in those years, he had decided that bad roads were costing him money. As a Tulsa County commissioner in the 1910s, he was responsible for the Eleventh Street Bridge, a concrete arch over the Arkansas River that dates to 1916. For ten years, he also served as president of the Albert Pike Highway Association, one of the private booster clubs that promoted long-distance routes before the government numbered anything.
By the middle of the 1920s, he sat on the Oklahoma State Highway Commission, where he helped bring in a gasoline tax to pay for road work. The country at that point had a tangle of named trails, each one promoted by its own private association. A single stretch of road could carry several trail names at once, and nobody agreed on which name meant what. On February 20, 1925, the Secretary of Agriculture approved a joint board on interstate highways, and its members were named on March 2.
It had three men from the Federal Bureau of Public Roads, about twenty state highway officials, and the bureau’s chief, Thomas MacDonald, chaired it. Avery was on the board, and so were Peep Meers and Frank Sheets, the chief highway engineer of Illinois. Their job was to pick the most important through roads out of what already existed and give them numbers instead of names. Those three men worked out a route from Chicago to Los Angeles, and it did not run straight west.
It left Chicago on a long diagonal to the southwest, through St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri, then through Tulsa and Oklahoma City, and only after that did it turn west across the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, and Arizona to California. In 1926, the eastern end was the corner of Jackson Boulevard and Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago; the western end was the corner of Seventh Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. Avery’s own town sat right on the line, and nobody has ever pretended that was an accident.
The numbers came from a federal engineer named E. W. James, who laid a grid over the country. Roads running east and west got even numbers; roads running north and south got odd ones.
The most important east-west routes got numbers ending in zero. A committee of five board members met in St. Louis on September 25, 1925, to settle the details. The Chicago-to-Los Angeles road was first given the number 60.
Then the governor of Kentucky, William J. Fields, objected that his state had been left without a single route ending in zero, and he argued that 60 belonged on a road running east and west through Kentucky toward the Atlantic. Kentucky won that argument. The diagonal road was offered 62 as a consolation, and both Missouri and Oklahoma turned it down.
That is how Avery and Peep Meers ended up in Springfield that April. According to the Federal Highway Administration’s account, it was Oklahoma’s chief engineer, John Page, who noticed that the number 66 had not been assigned to anything. Avery and Peep Meers took it, the telegram went out, and Washington agreed. When the American Association of State Highway Officials adopted the whole system that November, it covered 96,626 miles of road, and Route 66 was only about two and a half percent of it.
Route 66 became official on November 11, 1926, when state highway officials meeting in Pinehurst, North Carolina, adopted a numbered highway system that included a 2,448-mile road from Chicago to the Pacific coast across eight states. That vote created a line on a map and very little else, because fewer than 800 of those miles had any pavement. The rest would not be paved until 1938, and the work was split among eight states that each had to find the money for their own miles. The strange part is that nobody was ever in charge of building it.
The road now had a number, a line on the map, and a very determined promoter. What it did not have was money or a construction crew, because a federal highway number in 1926 was only a label. Washington did not build these roads and did not own them. Since the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, which put up $75 million over five years, the federal government had helped pay for road work on one condition: each state had to run a highway department and match the federal money dollar for dollar.
A second law in 1921 narrowed that aid to a limited system of main roads inside each state. Everything else was up to the state capitals, and in practice much of the early grading was done county by county. In practice, that made Route 66 eight separate road programs that happened to share a shield. Each state paved its piece when its own legislature and its own tax collections allowed.
Illinois was far ahead. Its road from Chicago to St. Louis had been almost entirely paved by 1924, two years before the number existed. Kansas had only about thirteen miles of the route to worry about.
The trouble started farther west, where distances were longer, towns were smaller, and the tax base was thin. It helps to know what building a road meant at the time. The first job was the grade, the shaped bed of earth the road sits on. Crews cut down the high spots and filled the low ones, so the road climbed and dropped gently instead of following every dip in the ground.
Then came drainage, because water is what destroys a road. Ditches ran along both sides, and wherever a creek or a wash crossed the line, builders set a culvert, a pipe or small concrete box that lets water pass underneath. The surface was given a crown, a slight hump down the middle, so rain ran off the edges instead of soaking in. Only after all of that did anyone think about a surface.
In most of the West, the first surface was gravel. Concrete or asphalt was the last step and by far the most expensive one, which is why so many miles sat for years as a decent gravel road waiting for money. Oklahoma showed what a tight budget could do to pavement. Between the towns of Miami and Afton in the northeast corner of the state, the road that became Route 66 had been paved between 1919 and 1921, before the highway had a number, and it was paved only nine feet wide.
That is narrower than a single lane on a modern highway. When two cars met, each driver had to drop his outside wheels onto the gravel shoulder to get by. The explanation usually given is that the money on hand would pave either half the distance at full width or the whole distance at half width, and the builders chose to reach the next town. The paperwork that proves the story has never surfaced, but the road itself is real, and it carried Route 66 traffic from 1926 until a straighter line replaced it in 1937.
A half-width strip was one way to get a road out of a thin budget. New Mexico tried something stranger, in the same weeks the number became official, and it had a deadline attached. In November 1926, the governor of New Mexico, a Democrat named Arthur T. Hannett, lost his bid for a second term.
Route 66, as it had just been laid out through his state, made a huge detour. From Santa Rosa, it climbed northwest to Santa Fe, came down the steep switchbacks of La Bajada Hill toward Albuquerque, and then swung south to Los Lunas before finally heading west. Hannett ordered the state highway crews to build a direct road from Santa Rosa west to Moriarty, on the way to Albuquerque, a distance of sixty-nine miles, and to finish it before his term ran out at the end of December. The motive most accounts give is revenge on the Santa Fe politicians he blamed for his defeat.
The crews graded through December with tractors and road graders in snow and bitter cold, and they gave up their Christmas day off to keep going. An account passed down from an engineer on the job named Bale says that somebody poured sand into the fuel tanks of the machines to stop them. The new governor, Richard C. Dillon, took office on January 1, 1927, and sent an engineer out to shut the project down.
That engineer reached the site on January 3 and found a graded and graveled road that had opened to traffic a few hours earlier. Dillon, to his credit, kept the laborers on the state payroll instead of punishing them for finishing. Sixty-nine miles had been built in thirty-one days, a little more than two miles of new road every day in a New Mexico winter. There is one careful distinction to make.
Hannett’s cutoff was a state road when it opened, and Route 66 kept looping through Santa Fe for another ten years. The cutoff only became the official highway after it was paved in 1937, with approval coming that September, and depending on whose mileage you use, it took something like ninety to one hundred miles off the trip across New Mexico. By early 1927, pieces of road were going down, but most of the country had never heard of Route 66, and most of its western half was still dirt. Avery’s answer was a second kind of construction, the kind done with advertising.
On February 4, 1927, in Tulsa, he and other boosters from along the line formed the U. S. Highway 66 Association, with John T. Woodruff of Springfield, Missouri, as its first president.
The association had two goals. It wanted the highway paved from end to end, and it wanted people driving on it. So it bought magazine ads, put up billboards, printed brochures, and started calling the road the Main Street of America. The biggest stunt came the next year.
A sports promoter named C. C. Pyle organized a foot race from Los Angeles to New York, with more than two-thirds of it following Route 66 as far as Chicago. At three in the afternoon on March 4, 1928, 109 runners left the Legion Ascot Speedway in Los Angeles.
They ran every day for eighty-four days and covered about 3,400 miles. When the race ended at Madison Square Garden on May 26, only fifty-five of them were still in it. The winner was Andy Payne, a twenty-year-old Cherokee farm boy from Foyil, Oklahoma, a small town that sits on Route 66. His total running time was a little over 573 hours, an average of about six miles an hour, a steady jog held for the equivalent of almost twenty-four full days.
He won $25,000, and he used it to clear the debt on his family’s farm and build his parents a new house. He later spent almost thirty-eight years as clerk of the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The race was meant as publicity, but for anyone reading about it now, it also works as an accidental survey, because those men crossed the Mojave Desert, the Arizona mountains, and the Texas Panhandle on foot, mostly on dirt and gravel. A real survey from the following year gives the numbers.
A road report published by Texico in 1929 described Route 66 as fully concrete in Kansas, sixty-six percent paved in Missouri, and twenty-five percent improved in Oklahoma. West of there, the picture changed completely. According to the Park Service history, the stretches in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the California desert had only about sixty-four miles of surfaced highway among them, out of a western run of roughly 1,200 miles. That works out to about five percent, three years after the road was commissioned.
Then the economy collapsed, and the way the road was paid for stopped working. State tax collections fell, and a state that could not raise its half could not claim the federal half. Traffic kept climbing anyway. On the Illinois end, between Chicago and St.
Louis, about 1,500 trucks a day were using Route 66 in 1931, and trucks are much harder on a road than cars. The worst single stretch of the whole highway in those years was in the Texas Panhandle. Between the small towns of Alanreed and Groom, the road crossed sixteen to eighteen miles, depending on who measured it, of a soil Texans call black gumbo. Gumbo is a fine, dense clay that packs hard when dry and turns into something close to glue when wet.
Cars sank in it and stayed there until local farmers pulled them out with teams of horses. The stretch took its name from a tiny settlement in the middle of it, and drivers all along the route knew it as the Jericho Gap. In October 1932, the newspaper in nearby Shamrock complained that the gap was impassable in rainy weather and that tourists were avoiding the Panhandle because of it. One account from that year called it the only unpaved stretch between Amarillo and Oklahoma City.
The settlement of Jericho itself had about a hundred residents at its peak in the 1930s, and a fair part of its living came from travelers who were stuck there. Texas knew exactly where the problem was, and so did every other state on the line. They had the surveys and the plans, and they did not have the matching money. The answer came out of Washington in June 1933, and it came with terms the states had never been offered before.
On June 16, 1933, President Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act. It set aside more than $3 billion for public works, and $400 million of that went to the states as grants for road building. The states did not have to match any of it. For the first time, the money could also be spent on streets carrying a federal aid highway into and through a town, which mattered a great deal on a road that ran down so many main streets.
The point of the spending was jobs as much as pavement. The Park Service history says that from 1933 to 1938, thousands of unemployed young men from virtually every state were put to work on road gangs paving the last stretches of Route 66. The histories do not give firmer accounts or names. What they do show is where the money landed.
One of the clearest examples is a bridge in western Oklahoma, west of Oklahoma City. The highway had to cross the South Canadian River. In the first years, Route 66 dipped north through the town of Bridgeport and crossed on a suspension bridge called the Key Bridge, which had been built in 1921 and charged a toll until 1930. In 1932, the state started a new crossing of its own, finished in 1933.
The bridge is 3,944 feet long, about three-quarters of a mile, and it is made of thirty-eight identical steel spans, each one one hundred feet long. Those spans are pony trusses. A truss is a frame of steel triangles that carries the weight of the deck. On a big truss bridge, the frames rise high on both sides and are tied together over the roadway, so you drive through a kind of steel tunnel.
A pony truss is a shorter version, low enough that the two sides stand on their own with nothing connecting them overhead. Thirty-eight small trusses in a row is a design that reads like a budget decision: one modest span drawn once and then repeated across a very wide river. It has been described as the longest and most expensive bridge in Oklahoma at the time it was finished. Route 66 moved onto it in 1934, and the new alignment bypassed Bridgeport along with the towns of Geary and Calumet.
That detail is easy to pass over, and it turned out to be the pattern for the next fifty years. Nearly every improvement that made the highway straighter or faster also took it away from some town that had been living on the traffic. The Jericho Gap was fixed the same way. On July 19, 1934, Texas opened bids to pave the road from Rockledge, a few miles west of Alanreed, to the Carson County line.
According to the local paper, the job had been held up partly by a landowner near Jericho who would not sell the right-of-way the state wanted north of the railroad. The answer in the end was to leave the old road in the gumbo and build the pavement about half a mile to the north on higher ground. That paved segment was opened on October 9, 1936. Some accounts put the last of the work in that area as late as 1938, so the exact year deserves caution.
Either way, the settlement of Jericho was left off the highway, and it faded quickly. The same year brought a different kind of fix at St. Louis, where the road had to cross the Mississippi. In 1936, Route 66 was moved north of the city onto the Chain of Rocks Bridge, and the highway departments had not built that bridge at all.
It was a private toll bridge begun in 1927, with crews working from the Missouri and Illinois banks at the same time. The piers were finished in August 1928, and the owners planned to open on New Year’s Day of 1929, but the bridge did not open until that July, about six months behind schedule. It had been estimated at $1. 4 million, and it came in at just over $2.
5 million. It is roughly a mile long and stands more than sixty feet above the water. During the Second World War, the toll was thirty-five cents a car, plus five cents for each extra passenger. It also has a bend in the middle of the river, the thing nearly everyone remembers about it, and the reason for it is worth knowing.
The builders had planned a straight crossing. Riverboat men objected that a straight line would put the piers close to the city’s water intake towers and make the channel dangerous to run. The bedrock along part of that line turned out to be too weak to carry the piers anyway. So the bridge turns partway across.
Most descriptions put the angle at twenty-two degrees, while the Park Service calls it thirty. The compromise is still visible from the deck. It says a lot about how Route 66 came together that its Mississippi crossing was a bridge somebody else had built for somebody else’s reasons. By 1937, the long corrections were finishing.
Oklahoma opened its straighter line between Miami and Afton and retired the nine-foot pavement. New Mexico paved Hannett’s winter cutoff, and the highway finally left Santa Fe. California’s whole section had been paved by about 1935, and around the same time, the western end was extended from downtown Los Angeles out to Santa Monica. That left the mountains of western Arizona, which held the steepest part of the whole highway, and the builders never really solved it.
Between Kingman and the mining town of Oatman, the highway crossed the Black Mountains at Sitgreaves Pass, about 3,550 feet above sea level, on a narrow road full of hairpin curves and steep grades. Arizona had paved very little by 1928, apart from a concrete stretch near Flagstaff that dated to 1921. It had the road paved from the Colorado River at Topock up to Oatman by 1930, and in the same year it paved a stretch running east to Winslow, so that by 1931 a driver had pavement all the way from Flagstaff to Winslow. Relief money did part of the rest.
The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 paid for an underpass that carried the highway beneath the railroad at Winslow, finished in 1936. By 1935, accounts describe only two unpaved gaps left in that part of the state, one of about twenty miles and one of about six miles near the town of Valentine. The pass itself stayed frightening even with pavement on it. As late as 1949, a filling station on the grade was selling tows up to the pass for $3.
50. In 1952, the state gave up on the pass and rerouted the highway to the south through Yucca. Then, in 1938, the last unpaved mile was covered, and Route 66 is generally described as the first of the numbered U. S.
highways to be paved from end to end. It had taken twelve years from the vote in Pinehurst. Exactly where the last pavement went down, the records do not agree. Texas accounts say the state finished its 179 miles in 1938 and point to Oldham County, west of Amarillo, which happens to hold the town of Adrian, the place that advertises itself as the halfway point of the whole road.
An Arizona account says the final pavement was laid near Valentine and dates it to 1937. The record cannot settle it. There is another gap in the record that matters more. None of the histories give an accounting of the men who were hurt or killed building this road.
With eight states, private contractors, and relief crews all working over twelve years, it is very unlikely the number is zero. It simply was never added up in one place. The same is true of the names of the relief workers who did the last of the paving. The road was barely finished before it was carrying more than anyone had planned for.
During the drought years of the 1930s, an estimated 210,000 people left the southern plains for California, and a large share of them went west on Route 66. John Steinbeck followed that migration in The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 and called the highway the Mother Road. When the film came out the next year, the long bridge over the South Canadian River was in it. Then the war arrived.
The Park Service history notes that American factories turned out 3. 7 million cars in 1941 and 610 in 1943, because the plants were building for the military. Between 1941 and 1943, trucks hauled at least half of the country’s defense material, and truck traffic between Chicago and St. Louis reached about 7,500 a day, five times the count of ten years earlier.
Much of that load ran over pavement designed in the 1920s for light cars, and the old road took a beating. Illinois, which had been first to pave, was now first to need repairs, and the Defense Highway Act of 1941 gave the state about $400,000 toward fixing its section. After 1945, the traffic changed again. Car production jumped from about 65,000 in 1945 to 3.
9 million in 1948. Families started driving west on vacation, and a songwriter named Bobby Troup gave the road its tune in 1946. Those were the years of the motel and the neon, and they are the years most people picture. From an engineer’s point of view, they were also the years the road was failing.
The pavement was narrow and built to the standards of an earlier time, and it ran straight through the middle of the towns on the line. The replacements came in pieces, the same way the road had. Oklahoma opened the Turner Turnpike between Tulsa and Oklahoma City in 1953, a toll road running right alongside the old highway. In Illinois, a new freeway opened in 1957 between the town of Gardner and the Chicago suburbs, and for a while it carried the Route 66 signs before it became part of Interstate 55.
In 1956, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act that funded the interstate system. By 1960, according to the Park Service, each of the Route 66 states had already spent between $14 and $20 million on its interstate sections. Five interstates eventually took over the route: Interstate 55 out of Chicago, Interstate 44 across Missouri and into Oklahoma, Interstate 40 across the long western middle, and Interstates 15 and 10 into Los Angeles. The last town to be bypassed was Williams, Arizona.
On October 13, 1984, about 500 people gathered at the new Interstate 40 exit there to mark the occasion. The following year, on June 27, 1985, the Highway Officials Association formally removed Route 66 from the U. S. highway system.
Cyrus Avery did not live to see that. He died in Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of ninety-one, with his roads still carrying traffic. A good deal of what those crews built is still on the ground. Congress ordered a study of the old highway in 1990, and in 1999 it created the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program inside the National Park Service.
The Chain of Rocks Bridge was closed to cars in 1968 and reopened in 1999 for walkers and cyclists, so you can stand right at the bend. A stretch of the nine-foot pavement south of Miami, Oklahoma, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The thirty-eight-span bridge over the South Canadian has been rebuilt in recent years with its pony trusses kept in place. The old road over Sitgreaves Pass is now a backcountry byway managed by the Bureau of Land Management, hairpins included.
What stays with anyone who looks back over all of it is how little of Route 66 was ever planned as one project. It started as a telegram about a number that nobody else wanted. After that, it was eight separate state budgets, a governor racing his own last day in office, a private toll bridge with a bend in it, and relief crews whose names were never written down. The paving was only finished because Washington, for a few Depression years, stopped asking the states to pay half.
The men in Pinehurst voted for a line on a map, and it took the rest of the country twelve years to put a road under it.
