[photo credit; The Gamble House]
The talk, “Before Route 66: Early Road Travel and the Birth of Highway Signage,” ties Pasadena’s Route 66 centennial commemorations to a lesser-known chapter of local road history: the 1914–1915 effort to sign-post the National Old Trails Road, the transcontinental route the museum describes as the precursor to Route 66. Presenter Morgan Yates, the Auto Club’s corporate archivist and historian, will examine how motorists found their way before standardized signs existed.
Doors open at 4 p.m. for a pre-lecture reception, and the lecture begins at 5 p.m., according to the Pasadena Museum of History. The event runs until 6 p.m. at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church’s Ross Chapel, 301 N. Orange Grove Blvd. Tickets are $20 for general admission and $15 for museum members.
The lecture is part of the museum’s exhibition “Where History Meets the Road: Celebrating Route 66 & Colorado Boulevard,” which runs through Jan. 24, 2027, tied to both the Route 66 centennial and the 150th anniversary of Colorado Boulevard. The exhibition also features a 70-foot illustrated canvas scroll, a Claremont Graduate University project depicting the historic route from Santa Monica to Needles.
The history begins in 1912, when the National Old Trails Road was proposed as a transcontinental highway running roughly 3,096 miles from Baltimore — some early maps place the eastern terminus in New York City — to Los Angeles. The Auto Club’s founder and president, Fred L. Baker, promoted the route during a January 1914 visit to New York to meet American Automobile Association officials. To help drivers reach two 1915 world’s fairs — the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego — the Federal Highway Administration’s history records that the road’s association and the Auto Club, founded in 1900, “had begun an extensive campaign in 1914 to post signs on the National Old Trails Road to help motorists find their way to the expositions.”
By historical accounts, the Auto Club launched the project on Aug. 20, 1914, placing its first sign at the club’s Los Angeles property and its second at the southeast corner of Colorado Avenue and Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena, before the final marker went up in Kansas City on Sept. 3, 1915. Writing in Motor magazine in March 1915, road authority A.L. Westgard reported that more than $2 million had reportedly been spent improving the road in 1914 and rated it “first place” among the era’s transcontinental routes for surface condition, scenery, historic interest and hotel accommodations. One traveler, R.A. Woodall of the Blue Book Publishing Company, recounted encountering the club’s marked crew near Raton, New Mexico, and being told that “all that was necessary to do was to follow the Club’s signs and we couldn’t lose our way.” The Auto Club reported a 500 percent increase in routing inquiries the following spring.
The lecture joins exhibition programming that includes a July 9 author talk, walking tours on July 11 and Aug. 22, an Aug. 20 talk on Pasadena’s hotel and motel history, and an Aug. 27 presentation, “Aprons Away: Women’s Work on Route 66.” The Gamble House, a co-presenter, is at 4 Westmoreland Place. Tickets are available through the Pasadena Museum of History website.
