Parks, Arizona
Near Williams, Arizona
Parks is a tiny village between Williams and Flagstaff on the original Route Sixty-Six alignment, but it predates the famous highway by decades. By local account, a rail depot in a converted boxcar appeared here in the late eighteen hundreds, and the settlement was once known as Maine. In nineteen twenty-one the National Old Trails Highway was completed through the area.
The town was renamed Parks after its post office, and in nineteen twenty-six the highway was re-designated as U.S. Route Sixty-Six.
The Sinagua people had farmed these ponderosa forests long before any of that, doing so until they left around the early fourteen hundreds, a departure scholars attribute to drought, depleted resources, and other pressures.
