By Stuart Rosebrook

In 2026 the Centennial of Route 66 is an international event being celebrated in communities from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California. Beyond the hoopla around the nation’s most famous American road, we mustn’t overlook the significance of why the national U.S. Highway system, including 66, was a revolutionary moment in American transportation history. More importantly, how did the vision of one Prescott leader, Grace Sparkes, change Arizona history and its original territorial capital forever.

In 1926 the U. S. was in the midst of The Roaring Twenties, a tumultuous decade of economic and social change. While the automobile revolution was in full swing and the first American airline companies began offering regional and transcontinental passenger air service, train travel trumped all other forms of transportation. In 1926 federal records reveal that over 17.3 billion passengers traveled on urban trains and trollies, while passengers on intercity trains logged over 37 billion passenger miles. Nonetheless, train travel was waning in America, and automobiles were slowly becoming the favored transportation choice for Americans. The only problem was the lack of roads.

An automobile traveler who ventured outside of urban areas in 1926 would have discovered a national highway system more suited for wagons than cars. According to federal records, only 140,735 miles were paved in the U.S. in 1926, compared to 2.8 to 2.9 million miles a century later. Arizona had less than 2,000 miles of paved roads, compared to 77,252 miles in 2026.