The eight states traversed by America’s defining highway are preparing for the 100th anniversary of Route 66 in 2026.
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.People walk past the"End of the Trail" for Route 66 sign at Santa Monica pier in Santa Monica, California, on May 21, 2017. For decades, Route 66 captured the imagination of travelers the world over, offering a glimpse of a bygone era of American history, when people hit the road in search of adventure and a better life.
A motorist watches owner Daniel Ricketts, left, and muralist Jerome Lamke with St. Louis Sign& Mural, hand-paint a Route 66 mural on a building on Monday, July 25, 2022, in Edwardsville, Illinois. The mural is one of 11 murals highlighting Route 66 in southern Illinois towns. In Arizona, the state developed the Route 66 Digital Passport, an app that allows travelers to tick off some of the best attractions for posting on social media. The app helped welcome a new generation of road-trippers to Arizona during the pandemic, when people sought outdoors and open-road experiences, said Josh Coddington, director of communications for the state’s Office of Tourism.
In Oklahoma, the state Department of Transportation allows cities and counties to buy giant adhesive stickers to install on sections of the road, an Instagrammable and directional visual aid. To make part of Route 66 more accessible to bicyclists, Oklahoma recently received a $1 million federal grant to improve 1.3 miles of the highway near several roadside attractions, including the often photographed Arcadia Round Barn.
By 1939 with the publication of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” Route 66 had achieved iconic status. In the book, Steinbeck describes Route 66 as the “Mother Road” for how it served as refuge for so many people displaced by the Great Depression and the devastation in the Great Plains of the Dust Bowl years. Route 66 was “the path of a people in flight,” Steinbeck wrote, “refugees from dust and shrinking land.
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