Route 66 Corridor National Historic Context Study

Cassity, Michael; Historical Research and Photography

U.S. Highway 66—often referred to simply as Route 66—has a special hold on the American imagination and its name commonly evokes images of the romance of simpler times, progress in the development of the nation’s economic and technological infrastructure, the visible despair of migrants on the road, the glory days of small businesses, and in myriad other ways the icons of a mobile nation, a nation on the road. Those images are easily recalled by the traveler on Highway 66 who sees the artifacts of that busy highway still standing, motels, gas stations, cafés, bridges, parks, and other structures and buildings. Often just ghosts of their former lives, these historic resources serve both as reminders of a past that has slipped away and as objects of investigation into the origins of current society, culture, economy, and political forces in the United States. This study is undertaken to provide a statement of historic context to facilitate the evaluation and listing of historic resources along Route 66 on the National Register of Historic Places. Since an essential part of the nomination of any property to the National Register is the evaluation of the property’s historic (or prehistoric) significance, the following narrative is designed to assist researchers as they nominate resources. Often the immediate and direct history of a resource can be documented—when it was constructed, by whom, and how the property changed over time in use and in structure, and when the property was perhaps taken out of commercial or other active use—but determining the significance, understanding the meaning, of that history, requires placing it into context with other historic resources locally and nationally. This, in turn, involves conducting research that goes beyond the immediate site to identify patterns of historical continuity and change. This is not an effort to identify and document every resource along Route 66, but instead is an effort to provide an understanding of the circumstances in which those many resources originated and evolved.