The Mother Road
Route 66 is the most famous of American highways. It connected Chicago, Illinois, to Los Angeles, California. It took old roads with names like the Osage Indian Trail and the Wire Road and connected them with new stretches that went 1,648 miles through the United States. The old roads had been made of dirt, bricks, wooden planks, or gravel. These old roads and the new portions of Route 66 were paved mostly with concrete, a durable surface that bears heavy traffic well.
This concrete artery is called the Mother Road because that is what the author John Steinbeck called it in his popular novel The Grapes of Wrath about an Oklahoma family who lost their home because of the drought of the 1930s. Because the book was popular and a successful movie was made of it, the name Mother Road stuck in the minds of many Americans.
Route 66 united much of the nation with a highway, and it gave a strong boost to many businesses along the highway. Restaurants, motels of every description, gas stations, auto parts stores, and amusements, some of them bizarre, were built up along the length of the highway.
Route 66 is different from today's major highways. Route 66 goes through the hearts of towns. It stops at stoplights, traffic goes slowly in places where people cross the road, and the traveler gets a feel for the place.
Major highways, the interstates, are high speed arteries that send cars and trucks on their way as fast as possible. Interstate travelers don't see much of the towns they pass through, and they have very little contact with the people of those towns.
Information provided by Walter Eskridge, Curator of Education
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