A Route 66 museum is a museum devoted primarily to the history of U.S. Route 66, a U.S. Highway which served the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois, in the United States from 1926 until it was bypassed by the Interstate highway system and ultimately decommissioned in June 1985.
In many towns and US states on the former highway, the initial efforts to establish museums to preserve the road’s history were led by individual state-level Route 66 associations or local groups.
As each museum is an independent entity, their content varies widely; some cover one state or region, while others cover the entire eight-state route, and many extend to related topics varying from the pre-highway transportation history of a state to the Dust Bowl exodus of the Great Depression, the mobilization of soldiers and equipment for World War II or nostalgia for the post-war highway and classic cars of that era.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “List of Route 66 museums“, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.