History
In 1914 the road was designated "National Old Trails Highway"; in 1926 it was re-designated as U.S. Route 66. One section just outside Oatman, Arizona (through the Black Mountains) was fraught with hairpin turns and was the steepest along the entire route, so much so that some early travellers, too frightened at the prospect of driving such a potentially dangerous road, hired locals to navigate the winding grade. The section remained as Route 66 until 1953, and is still open to traffic today as the Oatman Highway.
On October 13, 1984, Williams, Arizona was the last point on U.S. Route 66 to be bypassed by an Interstate highway. US 66 was dropped from the US Highway system in 1985; parts of the highway were either absorbed into I-40, turned over to the state (SR 66), or turned over to Yavapai County.
Read more about this topic: U.S. Route 66 In Arizona
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)