Children of the Mother Road: Community Development along Route 66 in Northern Arizona, 1921-1987

Daniel Milowski, Arizona State University

The interlocking valleys and canyons of northwestern Arizona are both an area that has historically facilitated significant western travel and migration and where significant environmental modification was required to support establishing permanent non-indigenous human settlements. Throughout this region in places like the Ash Fork Draw, Big Chino Wash and Aubrey Valley in northern Arizona, the land lacked fundamentally necessary natural resources like water required for establishing permanent settler-colonist communities. Therefore, the creation of transportation networks and communities in this area required construction of an engineered environment – first done in service of the railroad. As the nation transitioned to automobiles, this environment was re-engineered to support highway travel. Within this engineered transformation, complex human communities developed that reflected all of the major social issues coursing through American society at the time and unique characteristics related to specific regional aspects of race, class, and gender that stratified the communities for both residents and visitors. At first, these new communities existed in a vassal state to the railroad. With the development of highway infrastructure, these communities began to develop independently of the railroad with significant new impacts to the human communities and environment. Later planned disinvestment by the railroad and the federal government led to the abandonment of both the railroad and highway infrastructure. This abandonment caused the region to enter a period of economic and social decline with disproportionate racial and class impacts. In turn, the natural environment began to reclaim some of the land in the area. This emerging secondary environmental-state occurred in the shadow of new human activities focused on efforts to save the economies and social structures of the local communities. This argument is analyzed using multiple digital techniques including HGIS, topic-modeling, and text-mining. In particular, multi-layered maps generated by HGIS analysis are used to illustrate the argument.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 240. Settlement and Places