Route 66 sign

How to read it

Route 66 was one of the U.S. numbered highways of 1926, and the National Park Service calls it the nation's first all-weather highway linking Chicago to Los Angeles, more than 200 miles shorter than the routes before it. It was marked with the U.S. route shield, which the MUTCD now specifies as black numerals on a white shield on a black square. In 1985 the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials retired the number at the states' request, the road having been replaced by Interstates. Parts survive as frontage roads and state highways, the Oklahoma Historical Society's encyclopedia notes, and the NPS dates the route's historic period from 1926 to 1985. This page describes the national standard; it isn’t legal advice, and each state applies it on its own roads.

Also searched as: historic route 66 sign, route 66 shield, US 66 sign.

Why 66 and not 60

The Chicago–Los Angeles road was first numbered 60. Kentucky and other eastern states objected that 60 belonged on a coast-to-coast route through them, and the dispute became, in FHWA historian Richard Weingroff's words, the most protracted and bitter of the whole numbering plan. The compromise gave 60 to a route from Virginia Beach to Springfield, Missouri, and 66 to Chicago–Los Angeles; on the ballots sent to the states, 60 was turned into 66 with a pen mark on the zero. Cyrus Avery of Oklahoma, remembered as the Father of Route 66, wrote that he would have to junk the U.S. 60 shields.

The first shield

The shield itself came from the Joint Board on Interstate Highways in 1925. E. W. James later recalled that Frank Rogers of Michigan doodled a shield at a Board meeting and that he improved on it; the Board adopted the design on Avery's motion. Rogers wanted each state able to put its name in the upper part of the shield. The Board first voted 10 to 9 to leave the name off, then reversed itself and adopted the shield with the name of the state, “U.S.” and the number. The sample in its report used the number 56 and the state name MAINE.

Mother Road

John Steinbeck called it the Mother Road in The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Congress created the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, run by the National Park Service, in 1999, and in 2026 the NPS is commemorating the road's centennial.