Route 66 Mural Art Trail

Big Picture

A series of 12 outdoor murals will link some Southern Illinois towns along Route 66.

Details

Tapping into history, kitsch and modern points of pride, the public artwork is being called the Route 66 Mural Art Trail.

Organizers hope the murals — coming four years before the centenary celebration of Route 66 — will draw visitors to Illinois’ last 100 miles of the route.

Quotable

“Traveling along Route 66 is a huge draw for international travelers,” said Stephanie Tate, marketing and communications director for Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau.

Visitors will come to the U.S. for a month to make the roughly 2,400-mile road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, she said. She hopes to draw more domestic fans to Southern Illinois’ portion of Route 66, which morphed over the years, adding and subtracting local and state roads.

Funding

In May, the tourism bureau received a state grant for $919,000 to pay for the murals and a series of other projects.

You Know this Road

“While not the first long-distance highway, or the most traveled, Route 66 gained fame beyond almost any other road,” says the National Museum of American History. “Dubbed the ‘Mother Road’ by John Steinbeck in ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ Route 66 carried hundreds of thousands of Depression-era migrants from the Midwest who went to California hoping for jobs and a better life.”

During World War II, the route was used for military transportation. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported construction of new high-speed interstates, and in 1985, Route 66 was officially decommissioned. But support for the highway remained, and Congress passed an act in 1999 to create the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. Nostalgia has never waned.