Route 66 and the quest to connect America

In the late 1800s, a farmer noticed a hat sitting in the middle of a muddy road. He poked it with a long pole, and a man’s head emerged from underneath. “My God, man, are you okay?” the farmer asked. The man shook his head and replied, “Yeah, I’m fine, but I don’t know about my horse.” This story, possibly apocryphal, captures the reality of American roads before the age of pavement: they were so deep in mud that men and horses could disappear into them. Out of that mud, a ragtag coalition of bicyclists, county commissioners, and a stubborn Oklahoma highway booster named Cyrus Avery built the most famous road in American history—Route 66.

The mud that built a movement

In the late 1800s, American roads were essentially unmanaged dirt tracks. Farmers couldn’t get goods to market, doctors couldn’t reach patients, and travel was seasonal at best. But the group that finally pushed for change was unexpected: wealthy bicyclists. Bicycles were expensive in the 1880s, and their owners had political clout. They formed the League of American Wheelmen, which lobbied Congress for road feasibility studies. By 1893, a Good Roads Convention at the Chicago World’s Fair spawned Good Roads magazine, which quickly gained a million subscribers. The movement grew to include rural mail carriers, doctors, and farmers, and politicians began running on “good roads” platforms the way they might r