A little history revisited... Here is the story:
United States Highway 66 followed in the wake of the nation's first trans-Mississippi migration.
In 1853, Congress commissioned Captain Amiel Weeks Whipple of the Army Topographical Corps to conduct a survey for a proposed transcontinental railroad.
Congress ultimately opted against the railroad and instead subsidized a network of wagon roads to improve military and civilian communications throughout the western frontier.
In 1857, Congress commissioned Lieutenant Edward Fitzgerald Beale to chart a wagon road following the 35th parallel from Fort Defiance close to the New Mexico/Arizona border to the Colorado River. Beale's Road established a vital military transportation and communication link between Fort Smith near the Arkansas River and the westernmost reaches of the Southwest. In underwriting the $200,000 expense to establish what Lt. Beale felt certain would become "the great emigrant road to California," the Federal Government provided the impetus for the creation of the transcontinental railroad and the establishment of Route 66. Beale's Road was in fact the frontier antecedent of Route 66.
Interest in the route resurfaced under the National Old Trails Road Movement, when motorists began to discuss the need for an ocean-to-ocean thoroughfare in the first decades of the 20th century. Promoters hoped to capitalize on the national appeal of the Panama-Pacific Expositions scheduled to open in San Diego and San Francisco in 1915, as justification for Federal subsidies of a continuously paved transcontinental highway.
As conceived in 1912, the National Old Trails Road was to originate on the east coast with branches to Baltimore and Washington, DC, and terminate on the west coast in San Diego.
During its lifetime, the road's promotional arm, the National Old Trails Road Association, promoted improvement of the proposed ocean-to-ocean corridor as it retraced the nation's historic trails.
The association also championed good roads in America by advocating direct Federal involvement in road construction in lieu of Federal aid to State agencies.
This concept became a part of Federal highway policy in 1916 that continues today. The first leg of the ocean-to-ocean highway that the National Old Trails Association proposed in 1912 originated in Washington, DC and traced the Cumberland Road, a well-established historic avenue, to St. Louis. From Missouri, the highway followed the Santa Fe Trail to Albuquerque and Santa Fe before taking a more southerly course through Arizona to Flagstaff, gateway to the Grand Canyon. Flagstaff's pioneer lumberman, Matthew J. Riordan, detailed the final leg of the route that most closely approximates the 1927 orientation of U.S. Highway 66.
Christened the "Grand Canyon Route," the road was eventually constructed from Williams to Ashfork and Seligman in Yavapai County to Topock, Arizona on the Colorado River, where automobiles could be loaded on railway flatcars and transported across an expansion bridge that the Santa Fe Railroad built to Needles, California.
From this desert community, the road proceeded 164 miles across the Mojave to Barstow and the desert communities of Bakersfield and San Bernardino terminating in San Diego. The official origin of Route 66 was the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921. A road assessment of a decade earlier estimated the total mileage of rural roads in America at approximately 2.5 million miles, 10.5% of them surfaced.
Of those 257,291 miles, only 32,180 had pavement of bituminous material, brick, or concrete.
The intent of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921, successor to the earlier highway appropriations legislation of 1916, was to create a coherent highway network by requiring that Federal aid be concentrated on projects that would expedite completion of an adequate and connected system of interstate highways.
A minimum of 60% of Federal funds were be spent on what was designated the primary or interstate network.
The dubbed Highway 66 or also popularly known as Route 66 or the Mother Road -- definitely became to hold a special place in American consciousness.
It now evokes images of simpler times, mom and pop businesses, and the icons of a mobile nation on the road. We all now like to discover this shared heritage through the historic places that recall those images and experiences that are reminders of our past and evidence of the influence of the automobiles in our life.
Like many small communities along this historical road, Strafford, Missouri celebrated it's past along this very road of memories.
Their 66 Association Headquarters is in a long ago gas station's bones as seen in the below pictures.
I always feel humbled to walk & ride the ground that many leaders conceived and the citizens traveled with their automobiles to explore this vast great nation before me.
This is the stuff that motivates me and makes me smile everyday.
Loving this wonderful nation and those souls.
Nana