THERE ARE THREE PIVOTAL DECISION POINTS that preserved Santa Fe as a small town and kept us from becoming the same as other Western state capitals like Phoenix or Denver or Salt Lake City. The first was the decision to not run the railroad all the way into town. The second when we had the choice of the university or the prison, and we chose the prison. The third was the decision to reroute Route 66, whose original 1926 alignment came all the way into Santa Fe.
My grandmother Evelyn was a girl in the 1920’s when she followed the original Route 66 to Santa Fe. Her people were from the Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma, where the Federal Government was doing its best to destroy the tribes. They’d banned the tribal governments and broken up the reservations into small allotments that, unless you got lucky and struck oil, weren’t fruitful enough to escape a permanent and purposeful poverty. So, like many folks, her family pulled up stakes and struck out for California. Not long after she first made the trek out to Bakersfield, the section of Route 66 that came to Santa Fe would be abandoned, left to deteriorate into dust in an act of political skullduggery.
If you want to know about the brief history of Route 66 through Santa Fe, the guy you should talk to is Willie Lambert. Willie landed here as a teenager on December 1st, 1972, settling along the old 66 down in Pecos and Rowe. He spent the next half-century working as a railroad man, a forest firefighter, a pit boss at the casino. For the last two decades he’s become a self-educated expert on all things 66, documenting the fading remnants of the old Santa Fe segment in a series of beautifully hand-drawn notebooks. He recently took us out on a tour of the local remains of America’s mother road. It won’t be there forever.
What was the original route of Route 66?
The original alignment came out of Santa Rosa, northwest up to Romeroville just south of Las Vegas, then through Pecos and Glorieta into Santa Fe, down La Bajada Hill into Bernalillo to Albuquerque.
Why did it change?
There was an election, and Governor Hannett lost. He was disappointed and blamed the politicians up in Santa Fe. He had to leave office on January 1st, but before that he laid a ruler down and drew a straight line for a new road from Santa Rosa to Moriarty, bypassing Santa Fe. Then he took the highway equipment and set up two crews. He put a crew in Santa Rosa going west, and he put a crew in Moriarty going east. They had 60 miles to do and 30 days to do it, so each crew had to do a mile a day.
Well, people up north on 66 realized that that was not gonna be good. A few folks came up there, sabotaging the machinery, and Governor Hannett eventually had people out guarding the equipment all night. On the 1st of January, the new governor sent out a crew to try to stop the construction, but they ran into a snowstorm and the job was completed on January 3rd.
When Governor Hannett dropped that ruler, he dropped it across private property and public property both.
They just bulldozed through people’s fences?
He made the road through private property without permission. It turned out that not a rancher complained because, I guess, why would they? They got a better path to town.
They called it Hannett’s Joke because Hannett’s workers were saying, is this a joke? We are gonna lose our jobs once we are done. I understand that the new Governor was so impressed with their work and their dedication that he kept them on.
With Hannett’s new shorter route, eventually in 1937, they switched Route 66 to go directly into Albuquerque.
Yeah. Which, even though there was a big thing about it, everybody knew it was a common sense thing to do.
What was the road like back when my grandmother came come out on the original Santa Fe segment in the 1920’s?
The road was all about finding the line of least resistance. Coming from Pecos to Santa Fe, you come through Apache Canyon, a very famous canyon. Everything has been passing through there for years, even though there was no more there than a trail. In ‘26, they said, okay, this is Route 66 now. They put a sign by it, but they were putting it by a dirt trail. The amount of pavement in New Mexico at that time was very, very limited. They would have been going 30 mph, tops, on dirt and gravel and a bit of asphalt or concrete.
You have to think, man, if it rained big time, they could be camped up on a hill two, three days before they could get through the mud. In the 30s, that’s when the machinery and technology came around and they started paying attention to the arroyos and putting in bridges like the one at the Santa Fe River at the bottom of La Bajada Hill. That’s all WPA bridges. By ’37, it would have been mostly paved.
Would there have been motels, or did people camp?
I think the majority, well, I would think most of the people coming out of the Dust Bowl would be camping. The people that are buying the Fred Harvey postcards and coming out and taking tours, they were staying in the motels.
What are some of your favorite places out on the old route?
Oh man. The Civil War Battlefield at Glorieta Pass, Art Sanchez’s roadside memorial to all war veterans, Pigeon Ranch, small towns, plazas and churches from the 1800’s, mountain vistas, old 66 pavement that is both drivable and not, Pecos National Historical Park, old bridges, the Bernal store, people along the way and the open road.
I think you saw, there’s old churches, 1800s, 1820s to 1850s churches. Bernal has a church, Tecolote has a church. There’s old trestle bridges, there’s old fragments. I love it all, but those old fragments of the road that I was showing you, sometimes you can only just see a little piece because it’s on private property… little pieces of it here and there.
Quite a few of those old buildings and gas stations, it’s hard to tell that that’s what they were. I’ve only discovered that by finding people somewhere that can answer a few questions – maybe I’ll see somebody outside and talk to them. In this 65, 70-mile run, we just have all this diversity.
I’ve been on the road here recently, quite a bit, and saw some really significant change. Lost some people, icons to me along the road that I’ve met over the years.
People who could remember back to when it was Route 66?
Oh yeah. There’s a lot of change, but between Santa Fe and Romeroville, this particular stretch, it’s slow to change. Very slow to change. But it’s all fading down. The pavement is covered through runoff mud. It’s getting buried, it’s crumbling naturally as the sun beats it all up. Yeah, it’s dissolving. I’ve seen more things dissolve in 20 years than being refurbished.
You want to see more done to make people aware of this history?
I would like to involve kids and encourage creativity and collection and community. This should be celebration of us because that’s what the fucking road is. It’s us! It’s Route 66 to America! It’s mom and pop in the diner. It’s entrepreneurship. It’s creativity. It’s us, man. What the hell?
All I’ve ever wanted to do is to share it. Because I love sharing it. I knew by sharing it other people are gonna share their histories.
We could do so much more.
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Photos Andy Johnson
