Route 66 in Amarillo
Amarillo, Potter County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Commonly called the "Main Street of America" and also the "Mother Road," Route 66 became the first paved transcontinental highway in the U.S. spanning from Chicago to Los Angeles; the route in Texas crossed 7 panhandle counties over 177 miles. Route 66 was popular with automobile tourists. The road was important in the development of Sixth Street and the San Jacinto area in Amarillo, which was the only large urban city on the Texas route. In 1994 the area was listed in the National Register of historic places, and has become the focus of local preservation efforts. (1996)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Route 66, the "Mother Road," became the first paved transcontinental highway in America, running from Chicago to Los Angeles and crossing 177 miles of the Texas Panhandle. Amarillo was the only large city on the Texas stretch, and the highway shaped the growth of its Sixth Street and San Jacinto district. That area, listed in the National Register in 1994, is now a focus of local preservation.
Why it matters
Route 66 embodies the age of the automobile and the mobility, roadside culture, and westward dreams it carried across mid-century America.
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Nearby & related markers
Amarillo Natatorium ("The Nat")
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Amarillo's Natatorium opened in July 1922 as an open-air pool on the High Plains, then was enclosed for year-round use the next year. By 1926 owners had floored over the pool with 10,000 square feet of maple and reinvented "The Nat" as a dance hall, where traveling bands rolling through on Route 66 stopped to play. Though it closed as a public dance hall in the 1960s, it remained one of Amarillo's great social gathering places for decades.
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, The Amarillo Story
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The arrival of a railroad across the Panhandle gave rise to Amarillo, made county seat of Potter County in 1887, and for a decade the town enjoyed a trade monopoly over the South Plains, ranking as the nation's largest rural cattle-shipping point in the 1890s. When a rival routing threatened to bypass it in 1898, citizens persuaded the Santa Fe to make Amarillo the terminus of its new line; the railroad then moved its headquarters there and, by 1908, folded the town into its transcontinental main line. Branch lines followed, cementing Amarillo as the commercial hub of the High Plains.
Santa Fe Building
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When the Santa Fe Railroad raised this 14-story tower in Amarillo between 1928 and 1930, it planted a piece of big-city ambition on the Texas Panhandle plains. Designed by railroad architect E.A. Harrison and dressed in Gothic Revival detailing, it housed the line's division headquarters and stood as Amarillo's tallest building for four decades. It remains one of the few surviving early skyscrapers of its kind in the state.
Potter County, Establishing of
Amarillo, TX
The land that became Potter County lay in country ranged by Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa peoples and crossed by old Spanish and trail routes, including the Great Spanish Road of 1786 and the Fort Smith–Santa Fe Trail followed by 1849 gold seekers. Created by the legislature in 1876 while still empty, it saw Indigenous peoples forced out and buffalo replaced by longhorns, the great LX and barbed-wire Frying Pan ranches established, and finally organized by cowboy voters in 1887. Named for Republic of Texas official Robert Potter, it later gave up the vast Panhandle-Hugoton gas field and holds the Alibates flint quarries worked by prehistoric peoples as early as 10,000 B.C.