Iconic Stops

Known colloquially as “America’s Main Street” and the “Mother Road,” and stretching 2,400 miles across eight states from Illinois to California, U.S. Highway 66—aka Route 66—has a storied history your group tour will want to explore. The highway dips down from the shores of Lake Michigan in Illinois, traverses the American West, and concludes at the Pacific Coast in Los Angeles, California. As your tourgoers “get their kicks” on Route 66, they will delight in kooky roadside attractions, historic buildings, iconic monuments, vintage restaurants, and diverse cultural stops reflecting the amazing life of the well-traveled road.

Route 66 was established along the 35th parallel in 1926—nearly 100 years ago—when the federal highway system was created by the Bureau of Public Roads. The bureau “made” the road by stitching together various existing local, state, and national thoroughfares. Many of these roads were originally animal trails, first followed by Indigenous peoples and later taken up by white settlers in wagons and stagecoaches. Before Route 66’s construction, these pathways were used by farmers to haul their produce to town, as David Dunaway writes in his books, “A Route 66 Companion” and “Researching Route 66: A Bibliographical Guide.” The route was also planned close to railway lines, Dunaway explains, as tracks were often placed on high, flat, stable ground to avoid flooding, and planners wished for Route 66 to follow suit.

The U.S. Highway 66 Association promoted the road as “the shortest, best, and most scenic route from Chicago, through St. Louis, to Los Angeles,” and it became popular for motorists seeking to explore the country on family vacations. Winding through cities and small towns, Route 66 provided merchants and mom-and-pop businesses with new opportunities to attract motorists and build revenue. But, there were plenty of stops and restarts along the way. During the Dust Bowl, families traveled east to west in search of new lives and jobs in California; a journey famously documented by novelist John Steinbeck, who dubbed Route 66 the “Mother Road” in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Between 1933 and 1938, the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Project Administration put men to work improving the often-rugged road. In 1938, Route 66 became the first U.S. highway to be paved from end to end. During World War II, as thousands of jobseekers headed west to work in defense plants in California, Oregon, and Washington, military trucks transported munitions, supplies, and troops from California to the Midwest and onward to eastern sections of the country as part of the war effort. The truck traffic damaged the road, but postwar repairs, increased traffic as war-time rationing and travel restrictions were lifted, and the dramatic rise in automobile ownership set the stage for Route 66’s heyday.

With the Mother Road’s Centennial approaching, consider taking your group on a journey through time. Popular destinations on or near Route 66 included the Grand Canyon, Disneyland, and Southern California’s beaches. But there is plenty to delight in and experience along the way, as your group will still discover. With Steinbeck’s bleak Depression-era image of the road long past, a positive, adventurous view of Route 66 has since taken shape. Bobby Troup’s lively song “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” provided the soundtrack for Route 66 as an expression of American freedom and the country’s best road trip.

The route today is a mecca of midcenturyera—now-vintage—attractions that encapsulate the true Americana spirit: wacky roadside attractions, brightly colored neon signs, souvenir shops and general stores packed with paraphernalia, family-owned motor lodges, trailer courts, greasy spoon diners, and gas stations treat visitors to a nostalgic journey across the country. As competition was fierce for tourist dollars during the road’s earlier days, business owners continually tried to one-up each other with bigger, better, and more bizarre roadside novelties and signage.

Wigwam Villages—a now-defunct motel chain of cement, wigwam-shaped motel rooms—popped up in San Bernardino, California, and in the desert near Holbrook, Arizona. A few more notable sites along the route in California, before “The End of the Trail” terminus in Santa Monica, include a gigantic fiberglass “Chicken Boy” in Los Angeles, once used to advertise a restaurant; Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch in Oro Grande, consisting of hundreds of scrap-metal trees with bottles on the welded branches; and the Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, with its filigree of “ancient Mayan art motifs” on the exterior.

Along with the Petrified Forest and the corner made famous by the Eagles in Winslow, Arizona, the Grand Canyon State boasts the historic Twin Arrows and Jack Rabbit trading posts—the former with its iconic giant yellow-and-red arrows marking the spot and the latter with the mysterious sign proclaiming, “Here It Is.” Route 66 in New Mexico is lined with historic sites from the era, including churches and missions, service stations and curio shops, and the famous “dead end” sign near the Continental Divide of the Americas.

Oklahoma’s Route 66 icons range from a round barn in Arcadia and the 9-foot-wide ribbon road in Miami to the world’s tallest gas pump in Sapulpa, the world’s largest concrete totem pole in Foyil, and a large fiberglass blue whale resting in a pond constructed to “make waves” in Catoosa. An art deco-style service station in Shamrock, Texas, is not to be outdone by Slug Bug Ranch, a series of hood-down, half-buried Volkswagen Beetles in Amarillo. The Route 66 sites in Kansas include the “Tag Flag,” a U.S. flag made from license plates at the Texaco in Galena.

Missouri’s corridor of the iconic route has a giant red rocking chair in Fanning, the 66 Drive-In Theatre in Carthage, and a variety of motels with classic retro neon signage. Eastward in Illinois are starting and ending point signs for Route 66 in Chicago, the “World’s Largest Catsup Bottle” in Collinsville, and a 30-foot fiberglass statue of a man wearing a space helmet named the Gemini Giant in Wilmington.

While these attractions can still be enjoyed today, they’re no longer located along the thriving, well-traveled Route 66 of the 1950s and ’60s. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported the construction of a new system of high-speed, limited-access, four-lane divided highways. By 1984, five interstate highways (I-55, I-44, I-40, I-15, and I-10) gradually took over the routes once served by U.S. 66. The highway was decommissioned in 1985, and the majority of businesses along the road faded away. Still, campaigns to preserve and commemorate Route 66 took hold. Groups organized to promote travel and preservation. Portions of Route 66 received designation as State and/or National Scenic Byways. In 1990, Congress passed the Route 66 Study Act, which recognized that the famous roadway had “become a symbol of the American people’s heritage of travel and their legacy of seeking a better life.”

Subsequently, the National Park Service (NPS) conducted the “Route 66 Special Resource Study” to evaluate the road’s significance and identify options for its preservation and interpretation. The NPS study led to Public Law 106-45, which facilitated the creation of the NPS Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, now providing financial and technical assistance to individuals; nonprofit organizations; and local, state, tribal, and federal agencies to preserve the “most significant and representative historic sites along the route,” according to the NPS. In 2008, Route 66 appeared on the World Monuments Fund Watch list of “100 of the Most Endangered Sites,” and the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the road a National Treasure. More tourism initiatives, preservation efforts, travel groups, and nonprofits have come into existence to celebrate and promote the cultural and historical aspects of “America’s Main Street.”

Many Route 66 enthusiasts believe the roadway has a uniquely American spirit that lives on in the businesses, stories, novelties, attractions, restaurants, signage, lodgings, and other iconic places that made midcentury, cross-country travel such a remarkable experience. Connecting east and west, your group’s Route 66 adventure will reveal historic changes and unforgettable sites that transformed lives in the past and continue to change perceptions in the present.

By C.L. Lefevre

Main Image: Route 66, California; Credit: Visit California/David Collier