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Vol.2, No. 13, October 2009 |
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Lincoln Highway Road Marker, Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C. Click for larger image |
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Via Appia Antika outside of Rome. Click for larger image. |
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Cyrus Stevens Avery, The Godfather of Route 66 |
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Route 66 mural on the back wall of the Route 66 Hall of Fame, Pontiac, Illinois. Click for larger image. |
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Map of Route 66. Click for larger image |
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FORWARD
This is the first of several installments of narratives recounting my road trip along Historic Route from Illinois to California. I will attempt to share with the reader my experiences, some facts and history about this legendary road and, of course many photos. It was a trip I had dreamed of since my first venture across the country on route 66 in 1963 and began seriously planning over a year ago. I read books about the route. Some focused on the state by state history and others were packed with photos, old and new. I researched the road on the Internet using sources such as the Federal Highway Administration and State Route 66 Associations. I even took a virtual tour along the route using Google Earth so I could locate various waypoints for possible photo opportunities. After all my research was completed I developed a plan for my wife, Kathy, and I to follow for our thirteen day adventure.
We planned to drive about 250 miles each day so we could take advantage of the daylight hours and allow for the numerous photo stops we would make along the way. We also planned for two overnight stays with friends in St. Louis, Missouri and Albuquerque, New Mexico. We were usually on the road by 7:30 in the morning so I could take advantage of the morning light from the east for my photography. The early morning and late afternoon light offers the best lighting for vivid landscape photos. To this issue I also decided to travel westbound along route 66 to avoid the strong morning backlight that would not be favorable to acquiring the photography I wanted and would also put the sun in our eyes. I felt westbound was more in tune with the historic nature of the road as that’s the way it was conceived and constructed. It is also the route Bobby Troupe wrote of in his famous “Get Your Kicks on Route 66: lyrics.
Kathy and I flew to Chicago where we rented a Ford Explorer SUV and drove south the Joliet, Illinois for the first night’s stay. Our hotel was near the junction of Historic Route 66 (Interstate 55) and the Lincoln Highway, US 30 (Interstate 80). I wanted to be near the junction of these two legendary American highways that meant so much to the development of this great country. The next morning (October 9, 2009) we began our exploration of Route 66.
Our Ford Explorer was equipped with a GPS navigation unit, which I strongly advise for anyone making the trip. I also brought along my portable XM satellite radio so we would not have to fiddle with the AM or FM bands trying to keep a radio in station in tune. As a reference I used Jerry McClanahan’s EZ66 Route 66 Guide for Travelers, the absolute bible for anyone wanting to make a comprehensive trip along Route 66. This book is available at any Route 66 museum, tourist stop or available on Amazon.com. This was another reason for driving westward as that is how McClanahan’s book is oriented.
The weather on the first day was not very nice. It was a misty day with periods of rain. Once we arrived in St. Louis the weather cleared and stayed that way through Missouri. Oklahoma and part of Texas brought us the mist and fog again. By the time we left Amarillo, Texas we had magnificent weather with clear, blue skies for the remainder of the trip. The official end of my Route 66 tour was Ludlow, California as I had explored and written about the California section of Route 66 some months ago. You can find a photo narrative of this portion of Route 66 by clicking on this link. |
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THE BEGININGS
There are a few famous and historic roads in this world. One might consider roads such as the Roman Appian Way, The Lincoln Highway, The Burma Road and the first German Autobahn in this category. However, no other road in the world attracts more attention and passion than the Mother Road, Historic U.S. Route 66.
The miracle was not the automobile. The miracle of the early twentieth century was the construction of a vast network of highways that gave the automobile someplace to go. With the routing and paving of those highways, Americans in one part of the country could see what people were doing in others: what they ate, wore, lived in, and looked like. After the highways came remote places were no longer so remote: cities became readily accessible to small towns and people on one side of the country could stay in touch with relatives on the other. |
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The Lincoln Highway was a planned route beginning in New York’s Times Square and ending in Lincoln Park in San Francisco. The road stretching some 3,142 miles crossed the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Conceived in 1912 and formally dedicated October 31, 1913, the Lincoln Highway was America's first national memorial to President Abraham Lincoln, predating the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. by 9 years. As the first automobile road across America, the Lincoln Highway brought great prosperity to the hundreds of cities, towns and villages along the way. Affectionately, the Lincoln Highway became known as "The Main Street Across America." On September 1, 1928 at 1:00 p.m. groups of Boy Scouts placed approximately 2,400 concrete markers at sites along the route to officially mark and dedicate it to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Less commonly known is that 4,000 metal signs for urban areas were also erected then. The markers were placed on the outer edge of the right of way at major and minor crossroads, and at reassuring intervals along uninterrupted segments. Each concrete post carried the Lincoln Highway insignia and directional arrow, and a bronze medallion with Lincoln's bust and stating "This Highway Dedicated to Abraham Lincoln". The Lincoln Highway carries the designations of US 1, 40, US 50 and for the bulk of its breadth US 30. Unlike any of the above mentioned roads Route 66 was not a planned transportation corridor, but the dream of an Oklahoma businessman and entrepreneur, Cyrus Stevens Avery. Avery’s public life in his teens and twenties was dedicated to highways. In his business life, he had a real estate business, a tourist court, a car dealership, and an oil business. (Source: Ruth Sigler Avery, Tulsa, Oklahoma). |
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U.S. Highway 66 was a product of the grassroots movement for better roads and was one of the main arteries of the 1926 National Highway System. It was the "great diagonal highway" that sliced through the Middle West, rolled across the Great Plains, straddled the deserts of the Southwest, and stopped at the very edge of the Pacific Ocean. Route 66 was also something else: it was a real highway that grew to be a symbol for the American people's heritage of travel and their national legacy of bettering themselves by moving west.
Unlike other national highways Route 66 did not follow a single trade route established by generations of travel. It traversed sections of several old trails at its eastern and western ends, but it cut out on its own through the young state of Oklahoma and covered a lot of empty space before it finally reached California.
Route 66 began in Chicago, under the trees in Grant Park, on the shore of Lake Michigan. It moved grandly south through the city, into Al Capone's town of Cicero, and out onto the rich prairie land of northern Illinois. It went through the coal-mining town where John Mitchell organized the United Mine Workers and the state capitol where Abraham Lincoln practiced law. Then it moved south across the Mississippi River into Saint Louis and followed the ridges into the Missouri Ozarks. It passed caves, small towns, dairy farms, and lead mines and moved into the Old West of the cattle drives, taking off a corner of Kansas on the way. In Oklahoma, the highway connected Vinita to Tulsa and Oklahoma City and then ran flat and straight across a land where the few trees grew leaning toward the north, blown that way by the state's prevailing southern wind.
From Oklahoma, U.S. 66 carried cars and trucks across the dusty Texas Panhandle, through Shamrock and Amarillo to the barren plains of eastern New Mexico, where white settlers had not arrived until almost the turn of the century. The highway then climbed up and across the Sandia Mountains and dropped down into the enchanted world of mesas, buttes, and a pueblo people who regarded Coronado and de Soto as recent visitors. On the high deserts of Arizona the road climbed past a few lonesome towns-named for the railroad men who had been there first-on its way to Flagstaff, a piney village in the San Francisco Mountains. From Flagstaff, the road descended through more Indian lands, down through Kingman, and then up again over the Black Mountains to Needles and the low-lying Mojave Desert. It snaked westward across the desert, following the railroad section stops Essex, Cadiz, and Amboy to Barstow and then south to Victorville. From Victorville, the highway wound upward to the Cajon Pass and then down to San Bernardino. It continued west through Fontana, Cucamonga, Pasadena, and Los Angeles to Santa Monica and a small green park overlooking the ocean where a brass plaque dedicated Route 66 as the Will Rogers Highway. |
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The highway undoubtedly traversed some of the most romantic and remote country in the United States. That fact alone, however, was not enough to locate the road in the American imagination. More important was the way Route 66 came to be part of the uprootings and major changes in American life that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. The Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the war years of the 1940s, and the normalcy of the 1950s all manifested themselves in various forms on Route 66 and left their imprint. Over those years there were also a few farsighted individuals who understood the impact of Route 66 on the American experience. The first of those men was Cyrus Stevens Avery, who knew the desperate need of rural America for good roads and envisioned the potential effect of a major highway through the Southwest. A prominent citizen of Tulsa, Avery became a leader in the effort to develop the national highway system. From that vantage he became godfather to U.S. Highway 66: he was influential in designating the route, getting the road paved, and organizing a booster organization for it. |
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During the 1920s, when travel by automobile was as much an adventure for many Americans as flagpole sitting or a solo cross-Atlantic flight, Route 66 had a promoter. The megaphone man was C. C. Pyle, a pioneer publicist and sports impresario, who staged a coast-to-coast footrace that followed Highway 66 from Los Angeles to Chicago, on the way to New York City. For the better part of a year, that race was reported and ballyhooed in newspapers, radio broadcasts, and movie theater newsreels around the world.
A decade later, when Route 66 was the main road taken by destitute farmers and shop owners in their flight from the rain-starved Middle West, a Californian named John Steinbeck chronicled that migration in a novel that became an American classic, The Grapes of Wrath. |
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From the beginning the presence of the highway–and those who traveled it–was immensely important to the towns and people it linked together. Into the rural Middle West and sparsely populated Southwest, Route 66 brought travelers and automobiles and a kind of prosperity that the land never could have provided. And in return for that, the people paid attention to the road. They worked to get it paved, they publicized it to the rest of the country, they fought for its continued existence, and, when the time came, they lamented its demise.
In the 1890s the secretary of agriculture opened an Office of Public Road Inquiry to study the situation and answer the growing demands for better roads in the United States. Within a few years the name was changed to the Bureau of Public Roads, still under the auspices of the Agriculture Department. Public oratory after the turn of the century focused on the need for road building to bring farmers closer to their city markets, to enable farm children to receive better educations, and to bring mail directly to rural doorsteps. Despite the rhetoric, however, there was little misunderstanding about what was really at stake. Farmers and the Populist movement supported road improvements largely because that would break the monopolistic control of the railroads over the farmers. That was a real, if lesser, issue. The greater issue was that Americans were having a good time driving their own automobiles, and they wanted better roads on which to drive.
Coincidentally, a 1915 Joint Congressional Committee reported that the continuation of financial road building aid from the federal government to the states was, after all, constitutional. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill calling for a national system of highways and providing the groundwork for public financing. This law, the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, had a number of significant provisions, including the following:
Any rural road was eligible for federal aid if it was intended to carry the mail. (There was no mention of urban streets.)
· States must match federal road-building dollars equally.
· Appropriations were to be made on the basis of the region, the population, and the miles of post roads.
· States had to have an organized highway department to be eligible for federal aid.
· States had the right to decide primary routes.
· The federal government would inspect any completed project.
The 1916 law was followed by a 1921 Federal Aid Law that required the states to designate a connected system of main rural roads that would be eligible for federal monies, with the caveat that these main roads amount to not more than 7 percent of all the rural roads in the state. These two acts effectively laid the bureaucratic groundwork for the first system of federal highways.
In Oklahoma, especially, roads were a problem. A state since only 1907, Oklahoma had not developed the network of pioneer trails, wagon roads, and railroads that crisscrossed the rest of the country. Then when the territory was finally opened for homesteading (it happened quickly-the western half of the state was populated in a matter of days in 1889, and the eastern half was populated almost as quickly after oil was discovered in 1901), the roads that did develop were haphazard, inadequate, and poorly maintained, and the people of the state knew it.
A native of Pennsylvania, Avery moved to Indian Territory at the age of fourteen, after his father was bankrupted in the Panic of 1873. He grew up in the rolling country of southwest Missouri and northeast Oklahoma, helping his father farm, attending school, and teaching for three years to earn enough money to go to college. Avery worked his way through William Jewell College, in Liberty, Missouri. After he graduated, he married and returned to Oklahoma as an insurance representative, in Oklahoma City. In 1904, Avery moved back to the hill country where he had grown up, taking his wife, Essie, and their son, Leighton (the first of their three children) to Vinita, Oklahoma, a small community in the midst of the oil fields. There Avery opened his own insurance company. He also began speculating in farmland and the infant oil industry, organizing the Avery Oil and Gas Company, with Henry Sinclair as his partner.
In 1912, impressed by what was going on in Missouri, Avery had persuaded the Oklahoma governor and the local paper to focus attention on roads. A year later, as a result of that accomplishment, his friends got together and submitted his name as a candidate for Tulsa County Commissioner. Despite the fact that he warned he "wouldn't spend a dime to get the job!" Avery was elected and then named chairman of the three-man county commission. Once in office, he found that state laws left him powerless to really affect road construction, so he set out to secure local control over road building. Enlisting aid from the growing number of road boosters throughout the state, Avery encouraged the Oklahoma legislature to pass a law that gave commissioners the right to build the roads they needed in their counties.
When he was elected to a second two-year term as county commissioner, he became a road builder in earnest. He developed the first system for dragging roads in Oklahoma with what was known as the split-log drag, based on a system invented in Missouri. The drag was a horse-or mule-drawn device that, when pulled across a damp roadbed, dramatically improved the condition of the thoroughfare. Once they had the equipment, Avery's board of county commissioners developed a system for using the drags to keep the roads in reasonably good condition. Essentially, the county paid to have a number of the split-log drags made and then had them delivered to farmers along the main roads. Farmers were then allowed one dollar a mile for dragging the roads after each rain.
Nor did he stop with simply building the roads. Although Avery never lived on the acreage he owned outside Tulsa or, as an adult, on the property in the northeast part of the state that he and his father had settled, he maintained a lifelong interest in his farms and in improved farming and production methods, even to writing and publishing two books on grasses. A study of grasses, of course, leads to an understanding of erosion control. In 1913, early in his term as Tulsa county commissioner, Avery purchased a supply of unhulled sweet clover and sowed it along the county highways, an early move toward highway beautification and drainage control.
The good-roads activities complemented Avery's duties as a county commissioner and added further visibility to his other road promotion efforts. In 1923 he was appointed a State Highway Commissioner of Oklahoma and became first chairman of a new three-man State Highway Commission. In that position he laid out a state highway system, organized the maintenance of those roads, established a statewide system for marking, and eventually had markers placed along the highways. As highway commissioner, Avery supported a 1924 law that linked highway funds to a gasoline tax. He also continued to take an interest in and learn about the technology of road paving.
As a member of the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO), Avery participated in one of the most significant events in modern highway construction. At its tenth annual meeting, in November, 1924, the association petitioned the U.S. secretary of agriculture to do something about roads. Specifically, they asked the secretary to undertake "the selection and designation of a comprehensive system of through interstate routes, and to devise a comprehensive and uniform scheme for designating such routes in such a manner as to give them a conspicuous place among the highways of the country as roads of interstate and national significance." The organization also recommended that no more trail organizations be allowed to put signs on federal aid highways, thus assuring the success of a highway-numbering system.
As a member of the association's executive committee, Avery was appointed to the joint board and had power of approval over the final highway plan. He was also named a member of the executive committee for designating the roads in the Mississippi Valley area. On that committee his task was to connect major population centers with well-marked, paved, highways. With few exceptions, the job of designating which routes would become part of the national highway system was not difficult, and with even fewer exceptions, the designated roads had already been widely used by travelers and the committee's choice was accepted. One of the exceptions was the route that eventually became U.S. 66.
While he was overseeing the system in general and his region in particular, Avery-along with Frank Sheets, chief engineer for Illinois, and B. H. Piepmeier, chief engineer for Missouri created a road of his own, one that sliced through the Middle West and stopped at the Pacific Coast of southern California. This particular road did not follow a major historic route. Avery simply routed it through his hometown, Tulsa, because he thought Oklahoma needed a major U.S. highway. He conceived his road in the face of tradition: the Santa Fe Trail-still the path of most traffic to the Southwest-had gone to the north through Kansas City and the state of Kansas to Denver; the Butterfield Stage route had run far to the south. The 1849 California Road from Fort Smith, Arkansas, was the closest parallel for what eventually became U.S. 66, but it had an intermittent history, thanks to the Civil War and the establishment of Indian Territory. For decades, since the resettlement of the Five Civilized Tribes into Indian Territory, nearly all roads had gone around the place that later became Oklahoma.
The first description of Avery's road-then unnamed-was carried in the report of the Joint Board of lnterstate Highways on October 30, 1925. The report described the road as running from Chicago to Bloomington and Springfield, Illinois; Saint Louis, Rolla, Springfield, and Joplin, Missouri; Vinita, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, El Reno, and Sayre, Oklahoma; Amarillo, Texas; Tucumcari, Santa Fe, Los Lunas, and Gallup, New Mexico; Holbrook and Flagstaff, Arizona; and Barstow and Los Angeles, California. That description officially set the route but left plenty of room for more controversy later on, when it came time for paving and deciding which smaller towns would be on the main road between the cities.
Once the roads were set, they had to be numbered, a fairly uncomplicated procedure as far as outsiders were concerned. The numbering process, however, caused an uproar, and one of the biggest battles was fought over Cy Avery's road.
Avery, Sheets, and Piepmeier decided that the highway from Los Angeles to Chicago should carry the single number 60. Officials from Virginia and Kentucky thought that Avery's idea was a bad one and that any highway that had one end in Los Angeles should have the other end on the East Coast. This controversy was not over pavement: the Road Designation Committee had already planned that there would be a paved highway from Los Angeles to Newport News, Virginia, as well as to Chicago, and that the two roads would separate in Springfield, Missouri. The controversy was over highway numbers.
Avery's past successes, his national role, and his belief in the correctness of his position made him confident. He went so far as to put men to work marking the route through their states with signs that said U.S. 60. In Missouri, the State Highway Department printed six hundred thousand road maps that actually showed Highway 60 going through the state from Joplin to Saint Louis. This action aroused the ire of W. C. Markham, executive secretary of the American Association of State Highway Officials, as well as the officials in North Carolina and Kentucky. Markham wrote Avery, "The selection of the interstate system of highways, while it was more or less contentious, was nothing in comparison to the contention that is going on between the States in reference to this numbering system.”
By the end of March, several congressmen were beginning to take an interest in the road squabbles. Thomas H. MacDonald, chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, cautioned Avery that congressional involvement might lead to a legislative attempt to defeat the whole plan for a national highway system. MacDonald, who remained head of the U.S. federal road system for decades, was put out with Avery and wrote:
“Personally, I think that more time has been spent on this matter than it deserves. I do not feel that it makes one bit of difference to the States along the route from Chicago to Los Angeles whether it is Route No. 60 or 62 or any other number so long as the number is carried continuously, and that has been conceded . . . it seems to me that Route 60 with an outlet to Chicago and to the east coast is a greater advantage to Oklahoma than either one alone.”
Avery countered by suggesting that his road be called Route 60 and the route from Springfield, Missouri, to the East Coast be 60-South but could get no support for this from his friend Piepmeier. In late May, Piepmeier wrote Avery that "I am willing to accept 62, 66 or 60, from Chicago to Los Angeles, and nothing else. They can number the road from Springfield to Newport News anything they choose. That is my position and I hope you will agree with me and that we can get something settled at once." Avery acquiesced and carried Piepmeier's request to MacDonald.
On July 23, he received his answer: E. W. James, chief of the Public Roads Bureau's Division of Design, wrote that "Kentucky has just assented to an arrangement which will require the assignment of number 60 to the route from Springfield, Missouri, across Kentucky and Virginia to Newport News, with the understanding that the route from Chicago to Los Angeles will be given number 66." A confirming letter from Markham on the same date urged Avery to take their final offer so they could get on with marking the roads and making maps.
This time Avery agreed, and a letter ballot was duly sent to the Executive Committee of the American Association of State Highway Officials.
On August 11, Markham sent a memorandum to the state highway departments of eleven states, including the eight between Los Angeles and Chicago, plus Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. "Please be informed," wrote Markham, "that the Executive Committee has settled a controversy of long standing in reference to the use of Number 60 by assigning Number 60 to the route from Virginia Beach ... to Springfield, Mo.; and Number 66 to the route from Chicago ... to Los Angeles."
Where did the number 66 come from? Nowhere in particular, as it happened. At a meeting of the Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois officials in spring, 1926, Oklahoma's Chief Highway Engineer John M. Page discovered that number 66 had not yet been given to a national highway. Although 66 had not been the first choice, it was acceptable.
In the end Avery was pleased with the results of his twenty-four months of labor. He wrote to the chief of the Division of Design for the Bureau of Public Roads: "We assure you that U.S. 66 will be a road through Oklahoma that the U.S. Government will be proud of."
The highway system as designed and numbered by Cyrus Avery and his associates was accepted by the secretary of agriculture, and in November, 1926, it became the law of the land.
The next installment will cover the paving, realignments and growth of Route 66. For a gallery of captioned photos of my trip along Historic Route 66 please click here.
The source for much of this material is Quinta Scott and Susan Croce Kelly from their award winning book – Route 66, A Photographic Essay. |
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Kicks on Route 66," became a musical map for the next generation of highway travelers. And the magic continued. Even though Route 66 had begun to crumble under the weight of the wartime traffic and was too narrow for the postwar car designs, it was still the main road West in the 1950s and 1960s, when American workers found themselves blessed with the newly acquired right of paid vacations. The Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and other national parks of the Southwest; the Indians; Las Vegas; Hollywood; and, later, Disneyland were all stops on Route 66, and all attracted millions of vacationers down the highway. During those same years television was beginning to mesmerize America, and Sterling Siliphant turned the idea of travel on Route 66 into a highly popular TV series featuring two young men in a Corvette. |
