Texas Historical Commission now considers Washburn a Route 66 town

The Texas Historical Commission recently completed a survey of Route 66 in the Lone Star State, including an interactive Google Map that shows even obscure alignments, hundreds of photos of historic sites and an apparent ruling that Washburn once was a town on the Mother Road.

Results of the survey of Texas’ 178 miles of Route 66, funded in part by the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, recently was finished and uploaded online here. There’s a lot to interest people, particularly those who are historians.

The many dozens of historic photos are fascinating, including culverts, bridges, auto repair garages, gas stations, diners, tourist camps, auto courts, motels, road markers, paving and traffic signs.

The maps of the varying alignments may be seen here, grouped by county and city. The interactive Google Map of all the Texas Route 66 alignments may be seen in the commission’s main page here.

Noteworthy features of the maps:

  • They show in detail how to use the infamous dirt-road Jericho Gap between McLean and Alanreed.
  • They show at least two alignments in Vega.
  • They show at least two alignments in Adrian.
  • It shows the old alignment to the ghost town of Boise, west of Adrian.
  • It shows multiple alignments in Amarillo, including an obscure one that runs right by the current location of the Big Texan Steak Ranch.

Most interestingly, the commission now considers the town of Washburn, located east-southeast of Amarillo, to be a Route 66 town from 1926 to 1928 and has mapped it as such.

I thought this was a curious addition, since there’s dispute whether Washburn ever was on the Mother Road. There’s also controversy about nearby Claude also being on Route 66, but the evidence for that is even slimmer.

This sentence in the main survey report clarifies a few things about Washburn:

Some segments of the earliest alignment (1926-1932) were difficult to confirm with certainty due to the
lack of accurate maps from the period and lack of physical evidence on the ground as seen through
historical and current aerial images. Conferring with noted Route 66 expert, Nick Gerlich, and with
NPS staff did not resolve these issues completely, and therefore staff made educated estimates of
alignments. The alignments in question are the path through Alanreed, just east of Groom coming from
Boydston/Jericho, the road into Washburn from the north/east via Conway, and the path coming into
Amarillo from the southeast.

More from the survey:

Documents used for determining the alignment into Washburn from the north/east:
• 1920s Wiggley’s map (from Mike Ward’s files)
• 1940 Texas Highway Department General Highway Maps for Armstrong and Carson counties
(from TSLA)
• 1953 aerial photo (from www.historicaerials.com)
• 1957 USGS quadrangle map
The 1920s Wiggley’s map shows Route 66 coming to Washburn from Groom, but is not drawn to scale
and is not at a large enough scale for detail. The THD map does not name or number most of its roads,
so is inconclusive as to what was Route 66.

So officials couldn’t verify Washburn as a Route 66 town with utmost certainty. Using caution, they decided to include it anyway. Perhaps information eventually will emerge one way or another to settle this.

(Hat tip to Dora Meroney; image of Washburn, Texas, via Texas Historical Commission survey)

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