The 1956 Highway Act and the Mojave Towns It Passed By
by C. V. Wooster · October 5, 2026 · 4 min read
On June 29, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act. Most people remember it as the law that built the interstates. It authorized a national network of limited-access highways, about 41,000 miles at first, and it changed how the money worked. The federal government would pay 90 percent of the cost of the new system. A new Highway Trust Fund, filled by federal fuel taxes, would carry that share.
That is the national story, and it is told well in many places. This post is about what that law looked like from the ground in the Mojave Desert, where Route 66 had been the only real road for a generation, and where a new interstate line could turn a busy stop into a quiet one.
Why a new road instead of a wider old one
Route 66 through the California desert was not built as one engineered highway. It grew out of the National Old Trails Road, and it followed the railroad and the water. Its curves and grades suited a 1920s car. Its towns sat where the trains had needed to stop.
The interstate standard was different. It called for divided lanes, gentle curves, controlled access, and no cross traffic. A road like that does not wind into every town. It runs straight where the land allows, and it meets local roads only at interchanges. Where an old two-lane highway could not be rebuilt to that standard, the state built a new road on a new line, often a few hundred yards away, sometimes miles away.
That choice is why so many Route 66 places in the West feel stranded today. The old road is still there. It simply stopped being the way people went.
Interstate 40 in the desert
In California, Interstate 40 runs east from Barstow across the Mojave to Needles and the Colorado River. The National Park Service lists I-40 among the interstates that replaced U.S. 66. Across much of the desert east of Barstow, the interstate stays close to the old corridor. Past Ludlow, it bends north, away from the old highway and the railroad line that runs through Amboy and Essex.
For a traveler, that bend saved time. For the towns on the old line, it meant the traffic was gone almost overnight once the new road opened. Amboy is the best-known example. Its café and motel sign still draw photographers, but the town lost its purpose as a stop when the interstate traffic moved north.
Closer to Barstow, the interstate and the old road run side by side, sometimes within sight of each other. That closeness created a different kind of problem. The towns were not bypassed by miles. They were cut through. A freeway with controlled access is a wall as much as it is a road. If your land sat between the new lanes and the old highway, the question became simple and urgent: how do I get out to the road?
The driveway question
Mrs. Orcutt's Driveway is about that question at the scale of one household. Margaret "Bonnie" Orcutt kept a home on 100 acres east of Newberry. Her dirt driveway met old Route 66. When survey markers for Interstate 40 crossed that track, she wrote letters. The book follows what she asked for, who she wrote to, and what came of it.
We will not give the ending away here. What matters for this post is that her situation was not unusual in kind. Across the country, interstate planning meant thousands of decisions about access: which roads would get an interchange, which would be closed, which farms and homes would be split, and which would keep a way out. Most of those decisions were made by engineers working from maps, and most of the people affected never wrote a letter. Some did.
Ninety percent federal money, local consequences
The financing in the 1956 law shaped those decisions in ways people still argue about. When Washington pays 90 percent of a road, the state has strong reasons to build it to the federal standard and on the federal schedule. Local requests that add cost, such as an extra interchange or a frontage road, have to compete with the standard itself.
That does not mean local voices did not count. It means they had to be heard at the right desk, at the right time, in the right form. A letter to a county office might not reach the state highway engineer. A letter to a governor or the White House might be forwarded back down the chain. One of the quiet lessons of the interstate years is that persistence mattered, and so did knowing where the decision was actually being made.
When the old road lost its number
The new interstates did not erase Route 66 all at once. Pieces of the road lost the U.S. 66 shield over many years as bypasses opened. The Park Service dates the official decommissioning to 1985, after I-40 bypassed the last section at Williams, Arizona, in October 1984. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials voted on June 27, 1985, to remove the route from the system.
By then the desert towns had already felt the change for a decade or more. Some held on by serving the interstate at an exit. Others shrank to a few buildings. A few were all but abandoned. In Newberry Springs, the old road became the National Trails Highway, and the town kept going on both sides of the freeway.
Visiting with care
If you drive this stretch for the Route 66 centennial, take the old road where it is open and the interstate where it is not. Check road status before you go, because parts of the old highway in the eastern Mojave have closed for long periods for bridge and flood repairs. Carry water. Stay on public roads.
And please remember that Bonnie's house is private property, not a tourist stop. The story is in the book. The land belongs to whoever lives there now.
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