The telegram went to Washington on Friday, April 30th, 1926, from the telegraph office in Springfield, Missouri. Cyrus Avery, the Tulsa oilman who sat on Oklahoma’s State Highway Commission and on the federal board drawing up the new numbered highways, had wanted this road to be Route 60. Kentucky’s highway officials wanted that same number for a road through their state, and they were fighting for it. What resolved the fight was simple arithmetic.
Oklahoma’s chief highway engineer, John M. Page, was in Springfield that day, and he noticed something nobody else had caught—66 hadn’t been assigned to any road yet. Avery and Missouri’s chief highway engineer wired the proposal to Washington that day, and the number stuck. The most famous highway number in America came from an engineer checking which numbers were still free.
On November 11th, 1926, America’s highway officials put Route 66 on the map: 2,448 miles across eight states, and about 1,600 of those miles weren’t paved at all. Out in the Texas Panhandle, east of a farm town called Groom, the pavement just stopped in the open prairie. Past that edge, the highway was two ruts in black dirt running on toward the horizon. Turning that line from Chicago to Los Angeles into one hard road took twelve years, eight state highway departments, and most of the Great Depression.
And when the very last stretch of dirt was finally covered, it was sitting almost in the middle of the entire road. The paving records the states kept on their own stretches tell the story county by county. Two stories run through those records. One is a strip of Texas mud so bad that the farm families living beside it made money pulling stranded cars out of it.
The other belongs to a New Mexico highway engineer named E. B. Bale, who was given thirty-one winter days to cut a road through a forest. Along the way, a federal number painted over dirt became the first highway in the country paved from end to end, and the last of that dirt sat almost exactly at the road’s halfway point.
Los Angeles, March 4th, 1928. At the Ascot Speedway, 199 runners lined up for a foot race to New York. The course followed Route 66 as far as Chicago. Among them was Andy Payne, a twenty-year-old Cherokee from near Foyil, Oklahoma, a farm town that sat right on the new highway.
Payne had entered for the first prize of $25,000, and he wanted that money to help pay off the debt on his father’s farm. A young man was about to run from the Pacific toward his own family’s land on the same road that ran past it. What he ran on was not what the map promised. That spring, almost none of Route 66 in Arizona was paved, apart from a stretch around Flagstaff where the highway through town had been paved in concrete back in 1921.
The runners went east across the Mojave and up into the Arizona high country on gravel and graded dirt—the same surface every car and truck on the highway was using. The newspapers called the race the Bunyan Derby, and that name tells you something about what the road was doing to feet. Of the 199 who started, only 55 would finish. Payne kept going.
Over the whole race he averaged roughly six miles an hour, day after day, and he came up through New Mexico and across the Texas Panhandle. When the race reached Oklahoma, he led the field into Chelsea, not far from home. The crowds that turned out included Governor Henry Johnston and Will Rogers. On May 26th, 1928, the survivors ran into Madison Square Garden in New York.
By then the race had crossed thirteen states. Payne won. His time was 573 hours, 4 minutes, and 34 seconds, spread over 84 days, and the $25,000 went home to Oklahoma. A farm kid ran more than 3,400 miles to save a farm.
The first part of that run was on a federal highway that was, in long stretches, a dirt road with a number on it. The road he ran on had a problem no prize money could fix, and it came down to who paid. Route 66 was for the most part a federal number assigned to roads the states already had, most of them in poor condition. The number brought federal aid for improving the road, but only on a matching basis—the state had to put up its own share for every mile.
And those first improvements, the grading, the regrading, and the surfacing, were costing state highway agencies around $22,000 a mile. Run that across the map. Out west, the highway crossed hundreds of miles of ranch country, desert, and mountain in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—states with far fewer people to pay the bill. Until 1933, improving these roads fell almost entirely on the individual states.
The better-prepared states moved quickly, while others, Texas among them, struggled just to keep their stretches passable. Route 66 existed the day the official signed off on it. The hard part was paying to grade and pave 1,600 miles of dirt when every state had to find its own share of the money. The next winter, on February 4th, 1927, a group of boosters met in Tulsa and formed the US Highway 66 Association.
Its first president was John T. Woodruff of Springfield, with Avery serving as vice president. They gave the road a slogan—“The Main Street of America”—and started paying for billboards, magazine ads, and brochures. The whole point of that noise was to push the states into paving the road.
A number is just paint. What did building Route 66 actually mean on the ground? It meant four jobs, over and over, county after county. First you graded the roadbed, shaping the dirt into a crown so water would run off.
On a dirt highway that job never really ended, because after every hard rain a county crew had to drag the road smooth again. Then you ditched it along the sides and set culverts under every low spot. You bridged the creeks and rivers. Last of all, you put a hard surface on top: gravel at first in the poorer places, then asphalt over a concrete base, or plain concrete poured in long slabs.
Those slabs went down one pour at a time, and on old stretches of the highway in Texas you can still see the grooves where one pour met the next. Some of the road was already there when the number landed on it. In northeastern Oklahoma, the state had graded, drained, and paved the road from Miami to Afton in 1922—a concrete base with a rock asphalt top, 15½ miles of it. Around Tulsa that same year, three contractors—Tibbetts Pleasant, Dan A.
Burton, and the Standard Paving Company—poured concrete on more than 11 miles. Those names come straight out of the state’s construction chronology. The best way to describe what Route 66 really was in its first years is a chain with eight links, each link being forged by a different blacksmith, paying for his own iron, working at his own speed. The chain was only as good as its unfinished links, and some of those links were still long stretches of dirt.
Three years in, somebody finally counted. A Texaco road report from 1929 found that Kansas had its whole stretch in concrete. Illinois was boasting that all of its Route 66 was paved. Missouri was two-thirds of the way there—the real figure in that report was 66 percent.
Oklahoma was about a quarter improved. But the report didn’t stop there. It got to the west: from the Texas line to California, the highway ran about 1,200 miles, and along all of that there were only about 64 miles of pavement. Put in simpler terms, if you drove Route 66 out west in 1929, you got roughly one paved mile for every 19 miles of dirt and gravel.
Some of the worst of that dirt was in the farm country of the Texas Panhandle, where the trouble was the ground itself. Texas had its own reason to be slow. Route 66 only crossed the Panhandle, far from the big cities. In 1926, the largest cities in Texas were San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas, and none of them was anywhere near this highway.
As recently as the 2000s, the whole Panhandle, Amarillo included, had around a third of the people of Austin. Texas was being asked to pay for a highway across a thinly settled corner of the state, a long way from most of the people paying for it. Between the towns of Alanreed and Groom, the highway crossed a belt of black soil people there called gumbo. Dry, it made a decent road.
Wet, it turned into a sticky, heavy, waxy goo that stuck to everything it touched and built up on the wheels until a car stopped under the weight of its own tires. That stretch ran about 18 miles, and it took its name from a little settlement along it called Jericho. Travelers called it the Jericho Gap. The farmers who worked that land knew the gumbo.
They wrapped chains around their wheels and got through. Travelers passing through didn’t have chains, and when they bogged down, families along the gap came out with teams of horses and mules and pulled them free for a price. Pulling cars out of the gap turned into steady side income for families along that road. A story has been told about the gap for generations—call it exactly what it is, a rumor nobody ever proved.
People said some of those farmers would go out at night with water tanks on wheels and wet down the ruts, so there’d be plenty of customers stuck in the morning. Nobody was ever caught doing it. But people like to point out that plenty of farms along the gap seemed to own one of those water tanks. Jericho itself was never big.
Its post office had been open since 1902. At its height in the 1930s, about 100 people lived there, with three stores, a grain elevator, a tourist court, a garage, and a filling station—all of it living off a road that trapped people. While the gap held on, the pavement kept closing in around it. On January 5th, 1931, Missouri finished paving its stretch, the third state to do it after Illinois and Kansas.
By that year, nearly half of the whole highway had a hard surface. In Beckham County, the last Oklahoma county before the Texas line, crews had been pouring concrete between Sayre, Elk City, and Erick since the middle of the ’20s, and they’d carried the highway over the North Fork of the Red River on a timber trestle more than half a mile long. Oklahoma was paving right up to the Texas line. In October of 1932, a newspaper account described the gap as 16 miles long and the only unpaved stretch left on the highway between Amarillo and Oklahoma City—well over 200 miles of new pavement on both sides, and one black hole between them that could hold a car like glue.
The association was selling this road as the Main Street of America, and 16 miles of that Main Street could stop a car cold after one good rain. On July 19th, 1934, the state opened bids to pave the Jericho Gap. And what the highway engineers finally did about the gumbo was the smartest move anyone made on this whole road. They didn’t pave the gumbo.
They moved the highway. When the paved road finally came through, it didn’t follow the old ruts past Jericho at all. The highway department shifted the line about a mile to the north, onto higher ground and a straighter path, and put the pavement down there. That fall, in 1936, the new paved road opened, and the Jericho Gap was left behind in the fields.
After years of fighting that black soil, the fix was to go around it. Now you could drive from Amarillo to Oklahoma City without ever leaving pavement. The gap was gone, but it wasn’t the last dirt left in the Panhandle. That piece was farther west.
Jericho paid for the bypass. With the traffic gone a mile north, the little town started to empty out, and by 1939 its population had fallen to about 50 people—half of what it had been. The families who’d made money pulling cars out of the mud lost that income along with the traffic. Moving a road was one way to beat a problem.
Back in northeastern Oklahoma, years earlier, the state had beaten a different problem—a shortage of money—with a trick drivers can still use today. Remember that early stretch between Miami and Afton? When Oklahoma paved it in the early ’20s, the new surface was only 9 feet wide—one lane for a road carrying traffic in both directions. The pavement ran in long straight pieces joined by six sharp 90-degree turns, asphalt on top with concrete along the edges.
People call it the ribbon road or the sidewalk highway, and there’s a historical marker for it now. The story people in Miami tell about it is simple. The money on hand was only enough to pave that road at full width for about half the distance to Afton, so they paved a narrow road the whole way instead. Drivers made it work.
Traffic was light, so you drove right up the center of the pavement. When another car came at you, both drivers eased over until their outside wheels were down in the dirt, passed each other with the inside wheels still on the concrete edge, and pulled back onto the middle once they’d cleared. It’s a road built by people who couldn’t afford what they wanted, who decided a narrow hard road beat a wide muddy one—and they were right. Route 66 ran over that narrow strip for over a decade, until 1937, when the highway was moved off it onto a newer line.
The old road was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, and it’s now the earliest surviving one-lane section of Route 66. Illinois tried something different on one stretch. South of Springfield, between the towns of Chatham and Auburn, part of the highway was laid in brick sometime between 1926 and 1930. But paving only solves the ground under the road.
The highway also had to cross rivers, and the biggest of them came early, at St. Louis. North of the city, the Mississippi runs over a line of rock ledges called the Chain of Rocks, a stretch so rough it was dangerous to take a boat through. In 1929, a toll bridge built with private money opened across the river right there—just over a mile of steel, only 24 feet wide.
And halfway across, above the river, the bridge turns. It bends 22 degrees out there. From above it looks like somebody bumped the drawing board, but the bend was deliberate. A water intake blocked a straight crossing, and parts of the bedrock under the river couldn’t hold up piers where a straight bridge would have put them.
So the engineers bent the bridge to fit the river bottom, and its longest single span reaches 700 feet. In the late 1930s, a bypass route of Route 66 was laid across that bridge to carry traffic around the north and west side of St. Louis. Cars used it until February 25th, 1970, when it closed.
In 1998 it opened again—this time for people on foot and on bicycles, bend and all. The next state over got a rainbow. Past Missouri, the highway cuts across the southeast corner of Kansas, the shortest piece of the whole road—only about 13 miles through Galena, Riverton, and Baxter Springs. Between Riverton and Baxter Springs, the road crossed Brush Creek on a bridge that was already there, built in 1923 before the number existed.
It’s a single concrete arch of the kind engineers called a Marsh Arch, with curved concrete ribs rising above the roadway on both sides—and that curve is why everybody calls it the Rainbow Bridge. Route 66 traffic used it until 1960. There were once other bridges of that type along this highway. The one over Brush Creek is the only one still standing.
Down in Oklahoma, the South Canadian River got something even stranger. West of Oklahoma City, near the town of Bridgeport where Canadian and Caddo counties meet, the highway ran into the South Canadian River and its wide bed of sand. In 1933 a new bridge went across it, built in a way that sounds almost stubborn when you hear it. Instead of a few giant spans, the builders crossed the river with 38 separate steel trusses set end to end, each one 100 feet long.
They’re pony trusses—the low kind with no bracing overhead. From the driver’s seat you see open sky above you the whole way across. Put together, the bridge ran 3,945 feet—about three-quarters of a mile of steel over sand. It still counted as the longest known simple-span pony truss bridge in America.
People along the highway just called it the Pony Bridge, though its official name is the William H. Murray Bridge. After a four-year rebuild, it reopened to traffic in May of 2024, still carrying cars over the South Canadian. But the hardest climb on the entire route was a mountain pass in western Arizona where some drivers had to take the grade backward.
West of Kingman, the original highway climbed into the Black Mountains toward the old gold mining town of Oatman. The summit of that climb is Sitgreaves Pass, 3,550 feet up—more than half a mile above sea level—reached by a narrow road of hairpin curves with long drops off the side. The trouble was the cars. A lot of early automobiles had no fuel pump.
The gas just ran downhill from the tank into the engine. On a grade that steep pointed uphill, the fuel couldn’t reach the carburetor, and the engine would starve and quit halfway up the mountain. So drivers did the one thing that kept the tank above the engine: they turned around and backed up the pass in reverse gear. The stories that come off that mountain say you’d see cars crawling up Sitgreaves Pass rear end first.
On the climb up from Kingman there was a stop called Cool Springs, a cafe and a filling station on the side of the mountain. In the ’30s, a man named James Walker moved his family out from Huntington, Indiana to run it. Places like that lived on the cars that were about to try the pass. Not everybody had the nerve for it.
Some travelers paid a local to drive their car over the top for them. Others hired a team of horses to haul their car to the summit. Later, tow trucks worked that grade and made a business of pulling stranded motorists over the pass. Arizona’s share of the paving count shows how slowly all of this went.
In 1928, almost none of Route 66 there was paved. Paving started between Topock on the Colorado River and Kingman the following year. The road from Flagstaff to Winslow was finished in 1931, and the stretch from Crookton to Ash Fork came the year after. Ash Fork had already made a small piece of road history—in 1921, a short section outside that town became the first road ever paved using volcanic cinders.
By 1935, almost all of the highway between Topock and Peach Springs was paved, which meant the hairpins over Sitgreaves Pass were paved too. The car still had to climb it, but now they climbed on pavement. That mountain line stayed the main road until the early 1950s, when a gentler route through Yucca finally replaced it. Meanwhile, the far end of the highway actually got longer.
In June of 1935, the western end of Route 66 was carried past downtown Los Angeles out to Santa Monica. The road now finished right at the ocean. But long before that, every state along the highway had run into a bigger problem than any mountain. The money was drying up.
The crash came late in 1929, and over the next few years the Depression drained the states of the tax money they’d been using to match the federal road funds. For a highway being paved one state share at a time, that was close to a death sentence. Most of the eastern states had finished before the money went, and most of the unfinished miles were out west. That timing decided which families would end up driving the worst of the road.
And the strange part is that the road was getting busier the whole time. Trucking had grown so fast that by 1930 it rivaled the railroad for shipping freight, and Route 66—running across flat prairie and warm desert—was exactly the kind of road truckers wanted. Between Chicago and St. Louis, about 1,500 trucks a day were using the highway in 1931, one in four of them a big tractor pulling a semi-trailer.
That was the squeeze the western states were stuck in. The highway engineers knew what they wanted this road to become: a modern all-weather highway with fewer curves, wider lanes, and a surface maintenance crews could keep open in any season. So you had more weight on the road every year, a clear idea of what it should be, and less money to pave it. Then the weather turned on the people living along it.
Through the early 1930s, drought and wind stripped the topsoil off the southern plains. Dust storms rolled across Kansas, Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, and eastern New Mexico—some of them dark enough that people called them black blizzards. Farms that were already struggling went under, and the families who left went west on Route 66. By one estimate, about 210,000 people migrated along this highway to California to get away from the Dust Bowl.
Look at the road those families were driving on. The eastern half through Illinois and Missouri and most of Oklahoma was paved by then. But the western half through the Panhandle, New Mexico, and Arizona still had long stretches of gravel and graded dirt—the Arizona mountain grades, the Jericho Gap. A lot of those overloaded cars and trucks crossed the unfinished part of the road with everything the family owned tied on top.
And most of them didn’t stay. The National Park Service’s study of the road found that barely 8 percent of the Dust Bowl migrants who set out for California remained there—fewer than 16,000 of the people from the Dust Bowl proper stayed on. The rest moved on or went back the way they’d come. In 1939, John Steinbeck put families like that into The Grapes of Wrath and gave this highway the name it still carries.
He called it the Mother Road, the road of flight. But the number about who stayed is the one that stops you cold. We tend to remember this highway the way Steinbeck wrote it, as a one-way road out. By the Park Service’s numbers, more than nine in ten of those families didn’t stay in California, and a lot of their miles were on dirt that nobody had yet found the money to pave.
That same traffic kept roadside businesses going along the whole route—filling stations, cafes, tourist courts—even in the worst years. Meanwhile, the people who never left were trying to get by in the ruined economies of Kansas, Oklahoma, West Texas, and New Mexico. And the road itself was one of the places they could still find paid work. This is where Route 66 stood in the spring of 1933.
The busy eastern end was paved while the western end still had long stretches of dirt. The states that owned those miles were broke, and the people living beside them needed work badly. The answer came out of Washington that June, with a rule the states had never been offered before. On June 16th, 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act became law.
Inside it, as part of more than $3 billion for public works, was $400 million in grants to the states for building roads. Unlike the federal road money that came before it, this money came with no matching requirement. A state with an empty treasury could take it and pave. The act did something else that mattered to a road like this: federal road money could now be spent inside cities and towns, which it never could before, on the streets that carried a federal highway through them.
And Route 66 was the main road through hundreds of towns. The act had a second rule, and it was about the men. Workers on those projects were limited to 30 hours a week at what the law called just and reasonable wages. With the week kept that short, the same mile of road took more men to finish.
And in 1933, plenty of men needed that work. From 1933 to 1938, thousands of unemployed men—a lot of them young, from nearly every state in the country—worked as laborers on road gangs along this highway. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration made road improvement and maintenance part of their jobs, and the Texas Preservation Survey gives that relief work credit for closing the gaps that were left. There’s a line in the National Park Service’s study of Route 66 that surprises more than anything else in these records: the highway affected more Americans on federal work relief than people who used it during the famous exodus to California.
The famous photographs mostly show the smaller crowd. The bigger crowd was down in the ditch beside the road holding a shovel. A lot of what those crews built was the stuff nobody photographs. In Texas, much of the relief work across the state went into culverts—the small structures that carry water under a road.
Work Projects Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and National Youth Administration crews built them with masonry wing walls and headwalls, stone set by hand, work that needed skilled masons and plain laborers side by side. It was slow, heavy, careful work—so labor-hungry, in fact, that once the Depression ended, the Texas Highway Department mostly stopped building culverts that way and switched to cheaper concrete pipe and box designs. A stone culvert under an old Texas highway is very often a piece of Depression relief work set by men working their 30-hour weeks. Money and men could finish a road.
But out in New Mexico, the line those relief crews would end up paving had been cut years earlier by one engineer’s crews in a single winter month. New Mexico, November 1926. Governor Arthur T. Hannett had just lost his race for re-election, and he had until New Year’s Day before he left office.
Route 66 in New Mexico took a long, winding loop north to Santa Fe, the capital. Hannett wanted a straight road instead, running west from Santa Rosa through Moriarty to Albuquerque and cutting Santa Fe out of the route entirely. He gave the job to E. B.
Bale, the state highway engineer—and Bale had a deadline problem. He had about a month before a new administration took over, and not one mile of the new line existed yet. Bale split his men into two crews. He took one himself and worked east from Moriarty.
The other, under Sam Fulton, worked west from Santa Rosa. The idea was that the two would meet somewhere out on the high plains between them. The machines were whatever the state could scrape together—a makeshift collection of tractors and graders and surplus caterpillar tractors left over from the First World War, old machines that had already been used hard before they ever reached New Mexico. And they had a forest in the way.
Near Moriarty, Bale’s crew had nearly 30 miles of piñon to get through. There was no time to cut the trees one at a time, so they chained them to the tractors and pulled them out mile after mile, grading the roadbed right behind them. They moved like men on a deadline because they were. The crews cut through ranch fences without waiting for condemnation papers.
Not everyone along the line wanted that road either. Some people poured sugar into the gas tanks of the machines and threw sand into the engines to slow the work down. It was December on the high plains of New Mexico, bitterly cold, and the crews kept grading. On New Year’s Day, 1927, the incoming administration sent its own engineer out to a spot called Palma, about halfway between the two crews, with orders to shut the work down.
But the weather took a side. A heavy snowstorm blew in, and the engineer couldn’t reach the crews until January 3rd. By then, the two crews had met. They’d surveyed, cut, scraped, and graded 69 miles of new highway.
It had taken them 31 days. Sixty-nine miles through a piñon forest in a New Mexico December, with worn-out war surplus tractors and sugar in the gas tanks. Nothing else in the paving records of this highway moves that fast—and it wasn’t even paved, just graded dirt. And for the next ten years, that dirt shortcut wasn’t officially Route 66 at all.
The road was there, but the highway on the map still made its long loop north through Santa Fe. What finally changed that is where the paving race comes down to its last miles. September 26th, 1937. Eleven years after the number went on the map, Bale’s old shortcut became the official line of Route 66.
From Santa Rosa, the highway now ran straight west through Moriarty to Albuquerque, and Santa Fe dropped off the route. The old New Mexico stretch had wound across 506 miles. The new line did the same job in 399—a 107-mile cut out of the highway in a single state. And this time it came with pavement.
As the new line was made official, it was paved, and before 1937 was out, Route 66 in New Mexico was paved from one state line to the other. No highway in New Mexico had ever been paved all the way across before. West of Albuquerque, the new line crossed the Rio Puerco on a steel truss bridge that had gone up in 1933—a Parker through truss, the kind where the road runs inside the steel framework and the truss rises in a hump over the center of the span. It had been waiting on that line for four years.
Meanwhile, Arizona was closing out its own last gaps. By 1938, every mile of Route 66 in Arizona was paved, one of the first highways in that state paved from end to end. So in the first half of 1938, the count that had started with about 800 paved miles back in 1926 came down to one last piece of unpaved highway. You’ll often hear that the Jericho Gap was the last dirt on Route 66.
By then, the new paved road had been running past the gap for almost two years. That last piece was back in the Texas Panhandle, all right—but out at its western edge, in Oldham County. The last unpaved section of the whole highway ran between the little town of Adrian and Glenrio, right on the New Mexico line. Texas had been one of the last states to finish its stretch, and this was the last piece of it.
By mid-1938, the paving crews had covered that stretch too, and the finish was marked with a celebration right there in Oldham County. The records don’t say who was on that last crew. None of the records found name them. Then there’s Adrian itself.
A sign in that town today says it’s 1,139 miles to Chicago. The same sign says it’s the same distance to Los Angeles. Adrian is the midpoint of Route 66. So after a dozen years of paving, the very last dirt on the whole highway lay just west of its halfway point.
The eastern states had finished years before; the west had come in last; the final gap closed almost exactly at the road’s halfway mark. Nobody designed it to end there. That’s just how the paving happened to finish. That year, the Chicago-to-Los Angeles highway was reported as continuously paved.
A family could now leave Chicago and roll to the ocean at Santa Monica without their tires touching dirt. Ten years earlier, Andy Payne had run across the west on dirt. A runner could go every mile from the Pacific to Chicago on pavement. The US Highway 66 Association, the group that had been printing brochures since the winter of 1927, finally had the road its slogan promised.
But a road finished in 1938 was finished for the traffic of 1938, and that traffic didn’t stay the same size. Between Chicago and St. Louis, trucks on the highway reached about 7,500 a day by the early ’40s—five times the truck traffic of 1931. The army had been marking roads like this one as important to national defense since 1922, on what was called the Pershing Map.
In 1939, with war spreading in Europe, the War Department ordered the Public Roads Administration to survey the nation’s key highways. The surveys found that many federally funded roads were already in poor condition, and many of their bridges couldn’t safely carry military trucks. The road that had just been finished was already being measured against loads nobody had planned for in 1926. And the west was exactly where the army wanted to train: isolated, with a mild climate.
Military bases went up near Route 66 in Missouri, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In Arizona alone, the military investment ran to over $230 million. Meanwhile, the car factories went to war work—American plants built 3. 7 million cars in 1941, and in 1943, they built 610.
That’s the part of the story where Route 66 starts getting widened, rebuilt, rerouted, and eventually replaced by the Interstate—a whole story of its own. But the pavement those crews laid down between 1926 and 1938 didn’t all disappear. A surprising amount of that pavement survives, and most of the route can still be driven. Start in downtown Chicago and head southwest across the Illinois prairie, through Joliet, Pontiac, and Bloomington to Springfield, the state capital.
By 1929, Illinois had about 7,500 miles of paved road, and its whole piece of Route 66 was part of that. Just south of Springfield, between Chatham and Auburn, look for the brick. Then the road runs on through Litchfield and Edwardsville toward the Mississippi. At St.
Louis, you can leave the car, walk out onto the Chain of Rocks Bridge, and stand right at the bend. Across Missouri, the old road winds through the Ozarks, through Rolla and Lebanon to Springfield, Missouri, and on west through Carthage and Joplin. Then comes the short run across the corner of Kansas, all of it in Cherokee County, through Galena and Riverton, over the Rainbow Bridge on Brush Creek, and into Baxter Springs. The Rainbow Bridge went on the National Register in March of 1983 and was restored about a decade later.
In Oklahoma, the first thing to find is the Ribbon Road south of Miami—that 9-foot strip of old pavement between the fields toward Afton. It’s worn now, and the Oklahoma Route 66 Association has been running a campaign to save it before it breaks up for good. Drive it slowly, and if somebody comes the other way, you’ll find out the old passing rule still works. The state’s chronology even lists a gravel stretch past Afton, just over 2 miles graded, drained, and surfaced in 1921.
Past Vinita comes Foyil, where a bronze statue of Payne stands beside the highway he ran. Then Tulsa, Avery’s town. He’d come to Oklahoma Territory as a young man in 1901 and sat on the Tulsa County Commission in the 1910s, years before anyone asked him to help number a national highway. Avery lived until 1963, and he died in California, the state at the far end of his road.
After Tulsa, it’s Sapulpa, Stroud, Chandler, and Oklahoma City, where the state’s chronology starts with its oldest project on this route—from 1919, a bit over half a mile of pavement on 23rd Street near the state capital, laid by the Western Paving Company and M. A. Swatek, seven years before there was any Route 66. West of the city you reach El Reno, then the Pony Bridge at Bridgeport, all 38 trusses still carrying cars across the sand after more than 90 years.
After that, Weatherford, Clinton, Elk City, Sayre, and Erick—the Beckham County concrete—and the Texas line. Texas is where the road still shows its seams. Texas finished last, but its piece of the highway had been carrying everything from the start: farm trucks, cross-country freight, Dust Bowl families, and later the military. In 1931, the Auto Club guide measured Route 66 in Texas at a little under 195 miles.
When the Texas Historical Commission surveyed the old route, it found that about 91 percent of the original Route 66 in Texas can still be driven, mostly as frontage roads, business routes through towns, and county farm roads. The drivable mileage keeps shrinking, though—the Park Service counted at least 185 drivable miles in Texas in 1994, and by 2002 it was about 178. At Shamrock, you’re in the Panhandle. Just west of McLean, there’s a stretch of abandoned old pavement that the survey singled out as one of the few pieces in Texas with its historic character still intact.
Past Alanreed, out in the fields on private land, is what’s left of the Jericho Gap—when the state surveyed it, that land belonged to Delbert True. Near it are the remains of Jericho’s Tourist Court, which went up around 1910, long before anyone had heard of Route 66. Then Groom, and just east of Conway, another stretch the survey marked as intact. Out of all the old road in Texas, the survey recommended only three locations for the National Register, and that stretch leading into Conway was one of them.
Through Amarillo, the road runs as a city street now, but on West 6th, under the old Rock Island Railroad underpass just east of Bowie Street, there’s a section of the original roadbed. You can still see the pour marks from the concrete crews—a seam where one pour ended and the next began. West of town toward Vega, the very first alignment is still there if you know how to look for it: a faint cut in the ground just north of the Interstate frontage road. Then Adrian and its midpoint sign, out in Oldham County, alongside the railroad tracks.
The survey also found old unpaved segments of the road that nobody has fully explored, and all along the Texas route it documented old bridges and culverts still sitting in place beside the road. After Adrian comes Glenrio. It’s nearly empty now, a ghost town, but the survey found the old road through it remarkably intact. Glenrio even has the only stretch of old Route 66 in Texas laid out as two lanes with a median down the middle.
If you stand in Glenrio and look east toward Adrian, you’re looking at the last stretch of Route 66 anyone ever had to pave. Nothing there looks important, and it’s where the whole twelve-year job ended. In New Mexico, it’s Tucumcari and Santa Rosa, then a fork in the road’s own history. Turn north on the old loop toward Santa Fe and you’re driving the road of 1926.
Keep straight west through Moriarty and you’re on Bale’s line—the one those crews graded through the piñon in a single December. Moriarty is where Bale’s own crew began working east into the trees. Santa Rosa is where Fulton’s crew started west. Very few of the people driving that stretch today know it was built as a race against a deadline.
Past Albuquerque comes the Rio Puerco bridge, then Grants and Gallup and the Arizona line. In Arizona, it’s Holbrook, Winslow, and Flagstaff, then Ash Fork, then Williams. Williams was the very last town on the whole route to be bypassed by the Interstate, on October 13th, 1984. Less than a year later, on June 26th, 1985, Route 66 was officially decertified, and the familiar highway signs came down.
The association that had spent all those years pushing for pavement had already changed its name in 1970 to the Main Street of America Association, and it disbanded in November of 1979. West of Williams, it’s Seligman, Peach Springs, and Kingman, then the old road up past Cool Springs to Sitgreaves Pass. Cool Springs burned to the ground in 1966 and was rebuilt and restored in 2004, so the old stop stands on that climb again. A little farther along are the remains of Ed’s Camp, the trading post Ed Edgerton built after he came out to those mountains as a miner in 1917.
Those hairpins are still open, and this time you can take them facing forward and wind down the other side into Oatman and out to Topock on the Colorado River. Across the river it’s California: Needles, then the long desert run through Amboy, which went nearly silent once the traffic left, and on to Barstow, down through San Bernardino and across Los Angeles to Santa Monica, where the road runs out of land at the Pacific. That spot east of Groom, where hard road gave way to Panhandle gumbo, was only one edge of many, and none of them stayed put. County crews and state contractors pushed those edges forward through the ’20s, and relief gangs pushed them through the ’30s.
Out in New Mexico, two crews racing a governor’s last month cut a line that would later shorten the road by over a hundred miles. For twelve years those edges moved state by state, one pour at a time, until the last of them closed out in Oldham County, just west of the exact middle of the road. That’s how America built it: eight states and dozens of counties each paying for their own piece, a mile at a time, until the pieces touched.
A hundred years after the line went on the map, that’s what Route 66 really is—the place where all those edges finally met.
