A Few Miles on US 6

As reflected in some of these posts, I like to travel old roads and think about their sights and histories.  US 6 is interesting road, present within fourteen states. It was once the longest transcontinental highway in the nation, running over 3600 miles. Its eastern point is Cape Cod. Its western point was Long Beach, but in the 1960s the highway was truncated at Bishop, CA.  If you look at a map, follow the path of US 395 south of Bishop to CA 14, and then trace CA 14 down to Long Beach, and that will give you the original final miles of highway 6.  After the road was truncated at Bishop, US 20 (from runs from Newport, OR to Boston, MA) became the longest highway in the country. But US 6 is still the longest continuous highway, since 20 is not marked through Yellowstone Park.

If you’ve studied the federal highway system that was laid out in the 1920s, you know that the zero-ending routes, 10 through 90, were east-west transcontinental highways, while the 1-ending routes, 1 through 101, were north-south roads. US 6 wasn’t originally planned as a transcontinental route and was limited to the northeast. But subsequent extensions expanded the route all the way to California.

Here are some websites that I found, concerning its route and history. http://www.heritagedocumentaries.org/Route6/index.html  http://usends.com/00-09/006/006.html  http://www.route6tour.com/  Highway 6 is also called The Grand Army of the Republic Highway. Highways can serve as memorials: the famous Lincoln Highway is an example, and the old Robert E. Lee Highway (which became US 80) in the south. You notice stretches of interstate that honor or memorialize; I live near a portion of I-70 that memorialize Senator Paul Simon. Route 6 honored Union veterans.

I like to find old signs on eBay and other places, and over the years several US 6 signs came up for sale. I also have an Iowa US 32 sign, a highway that was absorbed into Route 6 during the 1930s.

I’ll likely never do so, but I fancy an interesting road trip: to drive Highway 6 from Cape Cod to Long Beach. When George Stewart wrote a history of a cross-country highway, one of the reasons he chose US 40 over US 6 was that 40 was a fairly straightforward road from the east to the west coasts, while 6 tends to meander. When I taught Kerouac's On the Road a few years ago, I was pleased to see the highway mentioned near the novel's beginning, although the character Sal is persuaded to hitchhike on a busier road than 6.

I’ve actually traveled very little of US 6: a street in Cleveland, a little bit in Rhode Island, and a few-mile stretch around the Cook and Will County border in Illinois, where US 6 and IL 7 run concurrently. The latter was my first and primary acquaintance, because that was the way my wife Beth and I drove to visit her parents after we left Interstate 80. We were looking forward to our upcoming marriage, and after that we were happy newlyweds. Of course those feelings linger around those few miles of Route 6. Some of my memories are of Christmastime: gray, overcast days over the Illinois farmland, with snow in the air, as we drove 6 and 7.

There my memories stay, because my in-laws moved from the area over twenty years ago, and my father-in-law passed away in the 1990s. I might not recognize the drive now. At the time it was a fairly peaceful two lane through a particular kind of landscape: new suburban businesses alongside farmhouses, barns, and rural fields. I imagine that development continued unabated.