The Birthplace of Route Sixty-Six

On the last day of April, nineteen twenty-six, a telegram sent from Springfield, by local tradition, changed American geography. Springfield tells it that Cyrus Avery of Oklahoma, who had been lobbying for a continuous highway running diagonally from Chicago to Los Angeles, and John Woodruff of Springfield, Missouri, sent word proposing that the new highway be numbered sixty-six. Other accounts credit an Oklahoma highway engineer named John Page with spotting the unassigned number.

Either way, the number stuck. Route Sixty-Six was officially commissioned on November eleventh, nineteen twenty-six, but Springfield was already positioning itself as its natural headquarters city. The road passed through town on its way from Chicago toward Oklahoma and Texas and the Pacific coast.

Businesses, motels, and diners oriented themselves to the highway. Springfield thrived on the through-traffic in a way that smaller towns along the route could not. The story deepened during the Dust Bowl years.

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, published in nineteen thirty-nine, put Route Sixty-Six at the center of American exodus mythology. He called it the mother road, the road of flight, and the phrase attached itself permanently to the highway's identity. Springfield was part of that story, a provisioning stop, a rest stop, a place where families moving west paused.

The highway's original alignments have been rerouted and in places buried under Interstate Forty-four, but Springfield preserves the Route Sixty-Six heritage vigorously. There is a Route Sixty-Six Motor Tour, historic signage, and a museum that tells the highway's story in the city that helped name it. Cyrus Avery is often called the Father of Route Sixty-Six.

But the telegram went out from Springfield, and Springfield has been the Birthplace ever since.