Goodbye, Mother Road: Route 66 Is Erased From the Map

It was an ordinary summer day, and crews were out unbolting highway signs. On June 27, 1985, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials voted to eliminate the last remaining stretch of U.S. Route 66 — from Scotland, Missouri, to Sanders, Arizona — and just like that, after 59 years, the most famous road in America officially ceased to exist.

Route 66 had been born on November 11, 1926, as one of the first numbered highways in the federal system: 2,448 miles of pavement and dirt running from Chicago to Santa Monica, California, across eight states. Cyrus Avery, the Oklahoma highway commissioner who championed it, dreamed of a single continuous road linking the small towns of the Midwest and Southwest to the big cities at either end.

The road became a lifeline during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when more than 200,000 people fleeing drought and poverty drove it west to California. John Steinbeck, watching them pass, gave the highway its immortal nickname in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: the Mother Road.

After the war came the golden age. Returning troops, cheap cars, and paid vacations turned Route 66 into the great American family road trip — neon motels, chrome diners, mom-and-pop motor courts, Burma-Shave signs, and the giant fiberglass cowboys of the roadside. During World War II the highway had carried troops, equipment, and supplies to West Coast bases — and after 1945 it carried the victorious soldiers home. Bobby Troup's hit song urged everyone to "get your kicks" on it. The highway ran through towns, not past them, and the towns lived on the river of cars.

But in the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Interstate Highway System — faster, wider, safer superhighways that bypassed the small towns instead of threading through them. The arithmetic was cruel: the traffic didn't slow down, it vanished overnight. Route 66 was dismantled piece by piece — decertified in Illinois and Missouri in 1974, in California and western Arizona in 1979 — until only the segment voted out on June 27, 1985, remained.

The road refused to die, though. A barber in Seligman, Arizona, named Angel Delgadillo, organized the towns along the old route and turned the abandoned Mother Road into a pilgrimage — a slow, two-lane drive through roadside America that travelers now make from all over the world.

Route 66 turns 100 in 2026. The interstate gets you there; Route 66 was the there.

Photo: Dietmar Rabich — CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.