Route Sixty-Six at the Gate of California

Route Sixty-Six entered California through the Cajon Pass and came down off the mountains onto Foothill Boulevard. This was the moment the long haul across the desert ended and something called California began. For the Dust Bowl families, that arrival was not romantic. It was desperate and specific.

They had been driving, in the worst cases, for days. Loaded Ford sedans with mattresses tied to the roof. Children in the back seat. Everything they owned, which was not much, because the farms were gone and the banks had taken the rest. They came through the Mojave at night when it was cooler. They came down the pass and the valley opened up below them, green, irrigated, warm, the orange groves and the motor courts and the gas stations of San Bernardino.

What they found was not always welcome. County sheriffs sometimes erected roadblocks on the Foothill Boulevard approaches to turn migrants back. The state of California passed a law in nineteen thirty-seven making it a misdemeanor to transport indigent non-residents into the state. The law was eventually struck down in nineteen forty-one, but in the years it operated, it was enforced at the eastern edge of this valley, at the very stretch of road you are on now. Agricultural employers wanted the labor but not the permanent residents, the distinction that shaped California's relationship to migrant workers for the next century.

The motels and auto courts along Foothill Boulevard carried all of this: the Depression migration, the postwar motor tourism, the slow commercial death when the interstates bypassed the old highway. Some of them still stand, in various states of nostalgia and ruin. The road is largely intact. It is one of the longest surviving Route Sixty-Six alignments in California.