All along its 2448 miles, US Route 66 communities are celebrating its 100th anniversary with a summer of festivals — from Chicago to California. For example — Springfield held a kick-off celebration from April 30-May 3. Watch part of the parade here.
Springfield is considered the Birthplace of Route 66 because in April of 1926, federal planners and other officials, while gathered in a Springfield hotel, received word that the Bureau of Public Roads in D.C. decided to use their suggestion of Highway 66 as the official designation. Route 66 was the first federally managed highway system in the United States and until the interstate highway system was commissioned in 1956, was vital to trucking, tourism, oil and agriculture.
While Callaway and Boone Counties are not on the Mother Road, we have materials that will help you experience it within your home. To journey via books, find “Birthplace of Route 66: Springfield, Missouri.” Of special interest is the driving guide in this book: one that recognizes the Original Route 66 (1926,) the Historic Route 66 (1928,) Bypass Route 66 (1935) and the City Route 66 (1960’s.) Using this guide and the indexed images also included, today’s tourist can retrace and imagine the route that was. This book also includes short articles about some of the iconic landmarks, such as the Rest Haven Motor Court and the Alberta Hotel.
You can also cook up a meal with “The Route 66 Cookbook: The Best Recipes From Every Stop Along the Way” by Linda Ly. While researching her book, Ly said “I realized Route 66 truly encapsulates the quirky eats and regional specialties that are deeply influenced by Indigenous foodways and our country’s history of settlement.” Each state gets a chapter and each recipe is identified by the restaurant Ly and her family visited. You could plot your own food tourism journey in this 2025 book, confident that the food will be delicious and the restaurant still open.
Much of our material comes as travel guides, such as Jim Hinckley “Ghost Towns of Route 66.” Hinkley is a prolific researcher and photographer of Highway 66 and we have several of his books, both physical and available via Hoopla. Did you realize that high definition photos just pop on a computer screen? You can enlarge them to explore details not visible in a static book. It is easier to find your way around a physical copy of a book, of course, such as “Route 66 in the Missouri Ozarks” by Joe Sonderman. As a Greene County native, I found many familiar landmarks of my childhood in the book, many of which are no longer standing.
Hoopla contains the 2023 video “Route 66 : The Untold Story of Women on the Mother Road.” This three-part history film introduces women who were vital to businesses along Route 66, overcoming segregation and gender discrimination. Route 66 Women, the organization that produced it, has continued to capture information, including oral history, and has produced lesson plans for the classroom.
Via Kanopy, you can watch “Life is a Highway: Chicago to Joplin Missouri.” This 2022-release documentary follows Mona Haydar and her husband Sebastian Robins as they share Muslim history and personal stories from people they meet along Highway 66’s midwest length. Haydar is a poet, activist, rapper and content creator.
As a reminder, the movies, tv shows, documentaries and more found in Kanopy and in Hoopla are not indexed in DBRL’s catalog. While in-region card holders have access to thousands of films, patrons must search through these streaming service’s catalogs, linked on our website or via your app.
Route 66 has featured in fiction as well; most well known is John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.” The Joad family travels through
southeastern states to California, encountering hardship as they seek to escape the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. Of more interest to Missourians would be Richard Paul Evans’ “The Forgotten Road” which follows Charles James, a man walking Highway 66 as a sort of redemption quest. Some research went into the locations; for example, the dam at Wilmington is dangerous, as we learn in chapter 10 and which I confirmed via the internet. When Charles James gets into Missouri, he has experiences in St. Louis, Times Beach, Meramec Cavern and the zinc mines of Joplin. He mentions lots of tourist attractions, but never complains about sore feet. Most of his conversations are short and link back to a relationship to a higher power.
To further dive into what we offer, check out this list; it doesn’t include all of the ebooks or the music CDs but it’s a good mix of the physical ones.
Did you and your family vacation or work on US Route 66? Do you have any of your own stories to tell? Be sure to tell them to youngsters, buy a journal to write them up, or join Substack and get them saved and shared within that writing app. Don’t let your history fade away! And if you are on the Mother Road and writing up your adventures, I’d like to hear about it and follow along.
