Route 66 turns 100 years old in 2026.

It passes through eight states and three different time zones.

Welcome to Prairie Fire.

Thanks for being here on the journey with us.

I'm your host, Sarah Edwards.

Route 66 was commissioned in 1926.

It starts in Chicago and winds its way about 300 miles south to St.

Louis where it crosses the Mississippi River.

It's played a significant role in Illinois history and it symbolizes the freedom, mobility, and sense of adventure on the open road.

Route 66, as we know it today, is a trail that people have used for thousands of years.

This area for many, many years was prairie.

It was wilderness, it was untamed.

It was really rugged terrain.

Native people, indigenous peoples used it as a route to get to the lakes, to Chicago, different trading posts.

And then as European settlers continued to move in, it became a cattle droving trail.

People would walk their cattle and their pigs and their hogs to market to be sold in Chicago kind of on this path.

Actually, Abraham Lincoln, when he was a lawyer on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, often took what we now know as Route 66, and it eventually became a railroad and it served as the Chicago and Alton Railroad for many, many years.

It became evident that we needed a uniform system for people to be able to travel on roads in their cars.

And so in 1926, the federal government commissioned Route 66 and it paralleled the railroad line of the Chicago and Alton Railroad.

The legislation that created Route 66 really helped develop a clear and cohesive path that people could follow.

Connecting obviously to hubs of culture and commerce in St.

Louis and Chicago was, I think, really pivotal for Illinois' success as a state.

We are in the middle of the country, but you can be connected via Route 66 between Lake Michigan, the Great Lakes, to the Mississippi River, all of which lots of people and goods traveled through.

So in 1900, there were about 8,000 automobiles registered in the United States.

By the 1920s, that had jumped to eight million.

By the 1940s, we're looking more like 28 million.

So as people continue to settle, have families, this country continues to grow.

Route 66 is a vital transportation corridor that allows people to move from place to place, allows supplies to move from place to place at a speed much faster than waiting for a train schedule or taking it by horse and buggy.

So whether that was bootleggers transporting alcohol during prohibition or the military transporting supplies during World War II, I mean, I think you can connect any major history really that happened in the 20th century had something happened along Route 66.

Primarily in Illinois, it connects Chicago to St.

Louis.

You go through Joliet, you go through Bloomington Normal, Pontiac, Springfield, all the way down to the St.

Louis area.

It looks very different from state to state.

I think one of the really cool things about traveling Route 66 is you can go through big, big cities like Chicago and then go through essentially ghost towns.

And then of course, more mid-size and moderate towns like Bloomington Normal in between, like Chenoa and Towanda, Lexington, McLean, Shirley and Funks Grove.

And each of these places is home to people who have lots of stories and a lot of fantastic stories.

Funks Grove maple syrup has been made consistently on that land since the 1800s.

It's one of the few undisturbed nature areas along Route 66.

I mean, it's truly gorgeous.

Sprague Super Service in Normal was built by a man in the 1930s who had this idea to build a building that looked different than all of the other service stations in town that would attract people to his.

Atlanta, Illinois is really the perfect place for this museum.

It's just a neat, quaint little Route 66 roadside mid-Illinois town.

My name is Joel Baker.

I'm with American Giants.

I'm a historian on Muffler Men and these giants that were made in the 1960s by International Fiberglass.

And it's really been fun to watch the population of giants grow in this town.

It's not just the museum and it's not just the hotdog guy.

Now we have other businesses in town like the Country Air just down the street that's got a uniroyal gal.

I just think it plays into that, just a very unique experience you're going to have on Route 66.

When people walk in this building, it's a little unexpected like, wow, maybe they've seen a Bob's Big Boy in their past or something on the roadside.

There's something about a larger than life giant.

It's something from the 1960s and that fits very well with Route 66.

That's why people travel it, right?

They want to live a little bit of that time back in the '60s and get a little bit of that taste of what that was like.

They're driving the old cars and now they can come to this place and see all these old giants that once dotted our roadsides back in the '60s and get to relive a little bit of that.

I think one thing people might not know about Route 66 is that in the early days of automobile travel, it was really dangerous.

There were a lot of car accidents, a lot of fatalities.

As cars developed, they got safer, more people had more cars, the road had to expand.

And President Eisenhower commissioned the interstate system, and that's really what ultimately led to the decline of Route 66.

The interstates began to bypass a lot of the communities.

Route 66 really formed a lot of the places along the route with the creation of hotels and restaurants and travel lodges and places for people to stay as they went along their journey.

When the interstates came along and bypassed those towns, a lot of those towns really experienced devastation economically that continued to transform the landscape.

Route 66 today exists because of the people that preserved it, the people that experienced it in its heyday, people that formed the communities along the route and see the value in the spaces that have been created along Route 66.

So what remains today is a network of people who are passionate about meeting other people and experiencing the freedom of hopping in your car and going wherever you want.

I think we take infrastructure for granted a lot of the time.

The creation of Route 66 was mundane federal legislation.

It's not anything that anyone would think is sexy today, but at the time it was an innovation.

It was an investment in developing this land to accommodate the people that live here.

I think it is a great example of the power of investment in communities.

Route 66 has connected people in this area and in this region and across the country for the last a hundred years.

Most of Route 66 in Illinois today is still drivable.

It passes through more than 90 towns and communities.

One of the more scenic spots you'll pass through is Funks Grove in McLean County.

It's the largest intact prairie grove in Illinois, and it has one of the largest remnants of virgin forest in the state.

Another natural feature you might see here on the open road is our state's many wetland areas.

Now, wetlands might look to you like swamps or marshes that you really should avoid, but the preservation of the wetlands here in Illinois is critical to the ecological health of our state and so many others.

Wetlands are one of the most biodiverse but highly degraded areas of the Illinois landscape.

The state used to be covered with more than eight million acres of wetlands.

Today, about 90% of the original wetland landscape has been mostly drained and filled for farming and urban development.

Every county in the state has wetland areas, which are defined as land covered with shallow water or saturated soil for parts of the growing season.

In Hennepin, Illinois, Justin Seibert manages the Sioux and West Dixon Waterfowl Refuge for a nonprofit called the Wetlands Initiative.

The organization has spent 25 years restoring wetlands on a floodplain of the Illinois River, 40 miles north of Peoria.

Basically the refuge, when we first purchased it, it was 2,700 acres and it was all farm land, it was corn and beans.

And right now we're sitting around 3,100 acres of restored habitat, almost 800 plant species on site.

And that has actually made this place Ramzar International Wetlands of importance.

And one of the main criteria of reaching that goal is to have a very biodiverse area.

So we're walking on one of the hiking trails that are out here and we have miles and miles of hiking trails out here.

This is probably my favorite plant, the compass plant.

Why is it your favorite?

I think it's just because it grows so tall and it can see out over the prairie and it's growing to the sky.

It's very, I don't know, kind of strong-willed, I guess.

Wetlands are really important because they act as nature's filtration system.

It filters sediment.

It also sucks up chemicals that is run off from farm fields, and then it improves the overall water quality of our drinking water.

We don't want to just protect remnant sites.

We want to restore these sites that have been degraded and we don't want to just restore it.

We want to restore it to high value, high biodiversity, high quality wetland.

The biggest threat to this area is invasive species.

If we didn't manage it as much as we did, the invasive species would just take over.

If you don't have biodiversity in the plants, you're not going to have biodiversity in the birds and the reptiles and the insects.

Another major threat is a lack of education about how we recognize wetlands in and around urban communities, even when they don't look like wetlands.

For wetlands, from the basis of holding water, they only have to hold water for 14 consecutive days out of an entire year.

So that makes it really, I think, difficult sometimes from an education standpoint, especially to people who make big decisions in cities about where things go from a development standpoint, because if it looks dry for 90% of the year, except for when it's incredibly important that it is wet, that can lead to a lot more development in places where it maybe shouldn't be going.

West of Hennepin in Rock Island, Illinois, a longtime wetland owner is fighting a daily battle to keep his acres healthy as developers close in.

My name is Tim Presley.

I've actually owned this property for over 50 years.

I got involved in it primarily for protection of the wetlands.

There's a 10 acre parcel up in front where they've actually gone to look at developing, putting in a dispensary and a truck stop.

All the drainage is going to go down into this beautiful wetland.

If you have a spill, a diesel gasoline spill, it'll kill everything.

It will kill all the vegetation.

You'll probably waterfowl.

I mean, how many pictures do we see Dawn protecting of cleaning the oil off of baby ducks?

So it isn't just the damage that occur is just not just going to be limited to here.

It'll affect all these thousands of acres.

Once the damage has happened, you can't go back.

Figuring out how to translate the benefits of nature into dollars and cents is really where you get the people who make the biggest decisions to listen.

I talked to the DOTs, the state, some of the environmental people on that.

It's just a constant trying to make sure everything is done correctly.

And a lot of times you don't see it as being done or it's going around.

Sometimes it feels really helpless on the larger scale.

And when people ask me for advice on that, I just say, okay, just focus on what's in your vision, which it could be as simple as paying attention to, do you know who your alder person is?

Do they know what wetlands are?

Is there a storm water fee?

Where does that tax go?

Does it support things like restoration?

I mean, there's a lot of really smaller scale ways that we can be involved by just being aware.

If you grew up with it, it's a part of you.

You remember all the good times with your boys down here hunting and just spending time together, and it is gorgeous.

It's a gorgeous place.

It's hard to give up.

Just across the Mississippi River, not too far from Tim Presley's property is Nahant Marsh.

It was a sportsman's club and shooting range for nearly 30 years.

In the late '90s, government agencies removed 140 tons of lead from the contaminated marsh.

Today, it is a thriving urban wetland.

Nahant Marsh is located in Davenport, Iowa.

We're literally a block away from the Mississippi River.

Illinois is a stone's throw away from us.

We've got areas that were never farmed.

We've got areas that were sort of intermittently farmed, but it got too wet.

And then we have areas that were farmed fairly intensively for well over a hundred years that we've been working to restore back to native wetlands in prairie.

When this project started, it was 78 acres.

Today, we're almost 400 acres and we're negotiating for more land.

We get a lot of pollution from runoff from parking lots, runoff from people's lawns, and also runoff from agricultural land.

And all those pollutants prior to us doing these restorations was running directly into the marsh.

Our goal is to slow that down, and so we've done several big restoration projects where we can hopefully capture some of that pollution, clean it up before it hits the main marsh, and ultimately the Mississippi River.

As we've restored this marsh, things that were really rare in our area have come back.

Things like river otters that were completely wiped out of the state of Iowa a hundred years ago.

We see river otters in here all the time now.

It just goes to show you if you can carve out some habitat and keep some connectivity with other pieces of habitat nearby, a.k.a.

The river, the myelin bottoms, the species will come here and they'll thrive and survive.

Last year we provided educational programming for 25,000 people here.

About half of those are kids.

To me, that's one of the most important things we do because these kids are going to be the stewards of the future and we want them to appreciate and learn and be inspired by places like Nahant Marsh.

When you have the community support, anything can really be possible, right?

We can do big things on a small scale, and while when you zoom out, it doesn't necessarily feel like it's really big, when you zoom in, they're a really big deal.

We are here in Bloomington, Illinois at another Route 66 stop.

It's called Sprague's Super Service Station, and it is the largest of only three remaining two level gas stations in the United States.

Now, not too far from Bloomington, also off of Route 66, is the tiny town of Gridley, Illinois, and it has the most unique old little telephone museum that you are going to love.

Alexander Graham Bell had come up with his telephone invention, and it was presented to the world in 1876 at the Philadelphia Exposition.

And at that time, people saw by speaking into it, sound traveled along a wire, and they all were interested and they all wanted to have one of these telephones.

Until then, communication was limited to voice talking, writing letters, sending telegrams, and so this made communication so much faster and so much easier.

When you come to the Gridley Telephone Museum, you will see a collection of a hundred years of telephone equipment that was used in the Gridley community between 1900 and 2000.

Mr.

Heisert had a hardware store here in Gridley, and he was an inventor and a collector, and he decided that he wanted to start a telephone company in Gridley.

So in 1900, they had 63 phones that were installed, and these were in operation until a fire burned down the hardware store in 1901.

And then at that time, they revamped the telephone company and put in the first switchboard.

Then in 1914, Mr.

Hubler, Charles Hubler, became the sole owner of the telephone company, and he remained the sole owner from 1914 until 1970.

And at that time, they had a switchboard in place, and most of the communities had gone to a dial system, but Gridley did not.

They still maintained their switchboard using an operator to place the calls.

So when Mr.

Kaufman purchased the telephone company in 1970, he immediately made plans to update the phone company, and the first thing he did is pull down the telephone poles, wires, and buried the cable, and then he began plans to switch from the switchboard to touch tone phones.

When Mr.

Kaufman purchased the telephone company in 1970, he realized that Mr.

Hoopler had saved all of the equipment throughout his years of owning the company.

When pieces of equipment were taken out of service, they weren't burned or disturbed, they were saved.

And so Mr.

Kaufman found all these telephones that had been used throughout the years, and he knew that that was worthy of creating a museum.

What we have here in the museum is a recreation of what was the telephone office of 1920.

95% of all of the equipment that we have here is local and was used here.

There's a handful of telephone museums throughout the country.

However, none of them have a working switchboard that I've been able to locate.

So as far as I know, this is the only working switchboard, and it's connected to vintage telephones so that you can actually see how the switchboard worked.

We get a variety of people that visit our museum.

I've had people travel from both coasts to come and see our museum and to see how the switchboard works.

Children that come visit here at first, I don't think even understand what they see on the wall is an actual telephone.

So we have to, first of all, get across the point to them that this is an early telephone.

This is what a cell phone started out as, so to speak.

So once they get that concept in their head, then we go ahead and explain some of the details about the telephones, but they are most interested in making a phone call.

And so the vintage phones that we have on our wall here are a delight for them to make a call so they watch how the call is connected and then they talk to each other on these vintage phones and have a wonderful time.

Gridley was a vibrant community, although a small one always.

It had three grocery stores when I grew up here, and today we have none.

So through the years as the automobile became more widely used after Route 24 was put into place, people started working and shopping out of the community of Gridley.

So as a small town, it just dwindles.

Many of the businesses along with that have drifted away.

So there aren't a whole lot of items or a lot of things left in Gridley that are functional, but the Gridley Telephone Museum is one that is special and a reason to come to Gridley.

We'll introduce you to more interesting people and places along Route 66 throughout our season.

And for more information about Route 66 or any of our stories, you can visit our website at will.illinois.edu/prairiefire.