By today’s standards, Arizona’s share of the National Old Trails Road wasn’t much of a road.
It was the first transcontinental route for newfangled motorcars, envisioned in 1912, as the first wave of automobile popularity engulfed America. The idea was to link New York to Los Angeles with a road that passed through Arizona.
Arizona’s roads back then were often little more than rutted wagon tracks subject to winter snows and monsoon-season washouts. Getting stuck in mud or sand was common, as were tire blowouts. Sometimes a local rancher’s horses had to come to the rescue and pull a car out of trouble.
Arizona planners decided that the transcontinental highway should more or less follow the established route of the Santa Fe Railroad. But they had a problem. The railroad’s route from the New Mexico state line to Holbrook skirted the southern edge of the Navajo Nation, and no one had bothered to build much of a road there.
Not until the early 1920s did motoring this stretch become more feasible, though the entire route through Arizona was still an uneven patchwork of dirt, cinder, and paved road segments.
A few relics of that era remain, like narrow century-old bridges in Sanders and Allentown. But travelers still experience the Old Trails Road’s main legacy today. The alignment it created through the upland Southwest was formalized in 1926 with a new name: Route 66.
This Earth Note was written by Peter Friederici and produced by KNAU and the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University.
