Bankhead Highway in Collin County

🏛️The era

The early twentieth century brought a revolution to America that ran on rubber tires. The automobile was transforming from a rich person's novelty into something ordinary families might own, and the country's roads, mostly rutted dirt tracks meant for wagons, were nowhere near ready for it.

Washington responded with the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, a landmark step toward a national commitment to good roads. Out of that push came the idea of long-distance, named auto trails stitched together from local roads, promoted by boosters who saw paved highways as engines of commerce and tourism.

One of the grandest of these was the Bankhead Highway, named for Senator John H. Bankhead of Alabama, a leading champion of the good-roads cause. Envisioned as a transcontinental route from Washington, D.C., all the way to San Diego, it was billed as the 'Broadway of America.' In Texas it was completed through the 1920s and designated State Highway 1, the very first in the state's numbering.

👥People & events

The Bankhead was not built from nothing. Across roughly 850 miles in Texas alone, it gathered up older paths and traces laid down across generations, including routes dating to the Spanish colonial period, the Republic of Texas, and early statehood, and bound them into a single engineered corridor for local and regional traffic.

Through Collin County, the highway followed the path known today as State Highway 66, running along the stretch between Greenville and Rockwall. In Royse City it did what these highways so often did: it became Main Street, and the town's commercial heart grew up along it.

A whole roadside economy sprang up to serve the new motorists. Auto repair garages and gas stations, diners and cafes, tourist camps and courts, motels and hotels, and highway markers all clustered along the route. For travelers crossing the state, towns like this one were where you fueled up, ate, slept, and fixed a flat.

That traffic fed real growth. Many communities along the Bankhead can trace their development to the highway, which supported commerce and expansion through the 1950s before the age of the interstate began to pull traffic onto newer, faster roads.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Bankhead Highway helped remake the American landscape in the image of the automobile. Before limited-access superhighways existed, routes like this one were the arteries of a mobile nation, and the strung-out commercial strips they created became a defining feature of the country's towns.

It stands as one of the most important transportation corridors in Texas history and a vivid illustration of a national story: how the early auto age turned quiet farm communities into roadside economies, and how a named auto trail could bind together a continent.

The highway's eventual decline is just as instructive. As automobile traffic grew explosively, the nation reached for wider, safer, faster roads, a movement that culminated in the Interstate Highway System launched in the 1950s. The very success of routes like the Bankhead created the demand that would one day bypass them.

🧭If you visit

The best way to experience this history is to think of the road itself as the artifact. As you move through Royse City, notice how the old commercial downtown lines up along the route; that arrangement, businesses facing the through-road, is the physical fingerprint of the highway era.

Keep an eye out for the survivors: an old garage, a vintage gas station, a mid-century motel or cafe, the kinds of roadside buildings that once catered to a steady stream of cross-country motorists. Each is a small monument to the years when this was a main artery rather than a quiet street.

For a road-tripper, this marker is a fitting place to pause, because you are standing on a piece of the very thing it commemorates. Let it reframe the drive ahead: the modern interstate may be faster, but routes like the Bankhead are where America first learned to travel by car.