by The hundredth birthday of U.S. Route 66 falls on a Wednesday. November 11, 2026 is also Veterans Day. Tulsa will open the morning with its Veterans Day parade, then hand the rest of the day to the road. The city plans a street party on the block between the OKPOP Museum and Cain’s Ballroom, with the King Cabbage brass band and the Inspyral Circus troupe. The evening ends inside Cain’s with a sold-out concert, Wilderado and Ken Pomeroy holding the stage at seven. Springfield, Illinois, will run a full statewide conference at the Motorheads complex on Toronto Road. Sessions on preservation and economic development run through the afternoon, with an awards luncheon at midday, and Starship featuring Mickey Thomas plays the Motordome at night. The National Museum of Transportation in St. Louis will mark the date with arithmetic: adult admission for the day priced at $10.66, children at $3.66, doors open nine to four.
The guest of honor does not exist. Route 66 has not existed for forty-one years. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials struck U.S. 66 from the federal highway system on June 27, 1985, at a meeting in Duluth, Minnesota, and the formal record of the vote is about as sentimental as a title transfer. The agenda item was styled “Elimination of U.S. Route 66.” The disposition was a single word: “APPROVED.” The last living stretch by then ran from Scotland, Missouri, to Sanders, Arizona. Everything east and west of it had been decommissioned in pieces as the interstates arrived, I-55 and I-44 and I-40 covering the old alignment state by state. The centennial this fall is a party for a ghost, and nobody involved seems to find that strange.
Route 66’s number was the residue of a fight. Cyrus Avery of Tulsa wanted the Chicago to Los Angeles route to carry the number 60, a round number that announced a major transcontinental road, and Kentucky had its own plans for 60. The dispute ran through 1925 and into the spring of 1926. Avery and a federal road official named Piepmeier were meeting in Springfield, Missouri, on April 30 of that year, and they noticed that 66 was still unassigned. They wired the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads: “We prefer sixty six to sixty two.” The American Association of State Highway Officials adopted the full U.S. numbered highway system seven months later, on November 11, 1926. The Chicago to Los Angeles road, 2,448 miles across eight states, became U.S. 66. Promoters soon called it the Main Street of America.
The road earned the mythology honestly. When the drought years came, U.S. 66 was the direct diagonal out of the southern plains. More than half a million people left Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri in the 1930s, most of them aiming at California. The 1940 Census counted 286,746 people from the southern plains who had made that move in the last five years of the decade alone. They loaded what they owned onto cars that broke down in the heat, and the road carried them west past Amarillo and Gallup and Barstow. A lane of flight is what the number meant before it meant anything else. Steinbeck saw it, and in 1939 he gave the road its permanent name in chapter twelve of The Grapes of Wrath: “66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”
The song came from a happier car. Bobby Troup, a songwriter fresh out of the Marines, packed a 1941 Buick in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in February 1946 and drove west with his wife Cynthia to try his luck in Hollywood. He had thought about writing a song for U.S. 40, the road they started on, and Cynthia talked him out of it. He worked on the new lyric during the drive and finished it with a map in Los Angeles, then found Nat King Cole backstage at the Trocadero and played him half a song. Cole told him to finish it and bring it back. The King Cole Trio recorded “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” at Radio Recorders on March 15, 1946, Capitol released it in April, and it climbed to number three on the R&B chart and number eleven on the pop chart. The Troups bought a ranch house with the royalties and called it the house that Route 66 built. Chuck Berry cut the song in 1961, and the Rolling Stones put it on their first album in 1964.
Television took its turn in 1960. CBS premiered a series called Route 66 on October 7 of that year and ran it for four seasons and 116 episodes. The premise was two young men in a Corvette working odd jobs across a black-and-white America, and almost none of the filming happened anywhere near the actual road. The network declined to pay royalties on the Troup song, so it commissioned Nelson Riddle to write an instrumental theme instead. Riddle’s theme reached the Billboard Top 30 on its own and picked up two Grammy nominations, which means the road collected a second anthem because the first one cost money. Pixar’s Cars came a generation later, in 2006, after John Lasseter’s family road trip and after Route 66 historian Michael Wallis led a crew of animators down the old alignment in rented white Cadillacs. Radiator Springs, the bypassed town at the center of the film, was assembled from Seligman and Tucumcari and Galena, places the interstate had bypassed.
Congress made the affection official in 2020. The Route 66 Centennial Commission Act became Public Law 116-256 on December 23 of that year. The statute finds that the road has become a symbol of the heritage of travel and instructs a fifteen-member commission to recommend fitting and proper ways to honor the Mother Road of the United States. Then the fine print tells you how the republic feels. Every expenditure of the commission must come from donated funds; no appropriation accompanies the honor. The commission terminates on December 31, 2026, fifty days after the birthday it exists to celebrate. The road got a federal commission that may not spend a federal dollar and is scheduled to dissolve before the confetti is swept up.
One road came first. The country had already built a highway across the continent thirteen years before Avery’s telegram, and that road crossed Nebraska. Carl Fisher, the man behind the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, organized the Lincoln Highway Association on July 1, 1913, alongside Henry Joy of Packard and Frank Seiberling of Goodyear. Their purpose was a continuous improved highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, open to lawful traffic without tolls. The association announced its chosen route on September 14, 1913, a line of 3,389 miles from Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco through twelve states, and the dedication followed on October 31, 1913. It was the first road in America laid out so that an automobile could cross the nation on one named route. They named it for a president who never saw an automobile highway. Less than half of the first line was improved road, 1,598 miles of it. The rest was mud and sand.
The Lincoln Highway still crosses Nebraska. It runs some 450 miles border to border, signed now as U.S. 30 and as the Lincoln Highway Scenic and Historic Byway, raised to National Scenic Byway status in 2021. It leaves Omaha to the west and crosses the Missouri near where the first bridge stood. From there the towns take the Platte one after another: Fremont, Columbus, Grand Island, Kearney, Lexington, Cozad, Gothenburg, North Platte, Ogallala, Sidney, Kimball, and out toward Wyoming at Pine Bluffs. The Federal Highway Administration’s byway page notes that small towns developed along the route every six to twelve miles, which is what happens when a road is built to serve farms instead of to flee them. Nor was the highway the first traffic on that ground. The Platte corridor had already carried the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express, and the Union Pacific, each layer laid beside the last. The Lincoln Highway was the fourth transcontinental route through the valley, and Interstate 80 would become the fifth.
Kearney built its name on the geography. The town had called itself the Midway City since at least 1890, claiming to sit exactly 1,733 miles from Boston and 1,733 miles from San Francisco. When the Lincoln Highway came through, a local farmer put up a sign boasting “1733 miles to Frisco, 1733 miles to Boston.” History Nebraska, which dug into the claim, found that the mileage was real and attached to an old railroad route, and attached to nothing else. The great circle distances do not match. The Lincoln Highway never went to Boston at all; its own 1915 guidebook measured Kearney at 1,752 miles from San Francisco and 1,632 from New York. None of this stopped Kearney. The 1733 Ranch five miles west of town built what was said to be the world’s largest barn, and a shoe store was still advertising 17.33 percent off a century later. Cozad has the quieter marker. A sign there identifies the true midpoint of the original highway, 1,694.5 miles from either end, and nobody wrote a song about that either.
The numbering plan cut the named road into pieces. The Lincoln Highway became Route 1 here, Route 30 there, 30N and 30S and 530 and 40 and 50. Henry Joy was bitter enough about it to draft a note to President Coolidge listing the fragments, though he never sent it. The Nebraska stretch became U.S. 30, a number with no swing to it, and the name slid into the care of historical societies and eventually into the byway program. Each road lost something in the trade. Route 66 lost its legal existence in 1985 and kept its name, song, television show, Pixar film, and act of Congress. The Lincoln Highway lost its name in 1926 and kept its pavement, towns, grain elevators, and traffic. Route 66 survives on every playlist and on no current federal map. The Lincoln Highway can still be driven end to end, mostly under a number nobody hums.
A road becomes a myth by being the road people left on. Flight gives a road a plot: a departure, a desert crossing, a valley at the end that may or may not deliver. The Joads took 66 because 66 was the way out, and the way out is the American story that songs are built from. Arrival gives a road plumbing. The Lincoln Highway carried people who were going somewhere specific, and it carried the people who stopped. The stopping became Fremont and Kearney and North Platte, towns with brick streets, a dance hall named after a mileage, and a barn named after a boast. People fled west on the Lincoln Highway too, every day of its life, and the corridor had carried the fleeing and the seeking for decades before the automobile. My family’s ground is the North Loup country, well north of the old highway, and the condition holds there too. Nebraska is the place the country crosses. The difference is which story got told back to the country. The country wanted the story about leaving, because leaving rhymes with the way the country prefers to remember itself. Nobody writes a chorus about the state you cross in the dark on the way to somewhere else.
Nebraska built a monument to being crossed. The Archway at Kearney is a 310-foot museum building spanning Interstate 80 at exit 275. Its arch section was assembled at ground level, jacked up beside the lanes, and rolled across the interstate in 1999; the museum opened on June 9, 2000. The exhibits walk the whole stack of the corridor: wagons, rails, the mud road, the brick. The tour ends on a floor directly above the interstate, in the middle of the thing the museum is about, and radar guns at the windows let visitors clock the trucks going by. They are doing seventy-five and eighty. Some of those drivers are on the old Lincoln Highway corridor at that moment, crossing the same river valley the emigrants crossed, and most of them could not tell you its name.
Next month’s parties will be warm and sincere. Tulsa has earned its big day, since the number started in a telegram about Tulsa’s preferred road. The road with the song has not legally existed since a one-word vote in Duluth in 1985, and eight states will throw it a hundredth birthday party anyway. The road with the towns crossed its own centennial in 2013 with far less fanfare, and it goes on carrying grain trucks and school buses the way it has for 113 years. Brick laid near Elkhorn in 1920 still takes traffic. The elevators still come up one after another along the Platte, six to twelve miles apart, right on schedule. Nebraska never got the chorus. It got the road.
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