Towanda Trifecta

Long before Route 66 was a gleam in anyone's eyes, a precursor of the fabled highway was a mere dirt street through Towanda, Illinois.  In this circa 1908 photo expertly colored by Maestro Gary Cascio, you caneasily see the two-track street through Towanda's fledgling "downtown".  It was gradually improved until bypassed in 1924 by State Route #4 which became Route 66 in 1926.

 

Towanda, Illinois, has created a world famous mini monument to Old Route 66.  In fact, a credible case could be made that it's one of THE BEST such monuments on the entire route from Chicago to LA.  There's so much to love about Towanda's Historic Route 66 Trail!  But, wait, there are also two other routes of 66 thru Towanda!  It's a Towanda Trifecta!

Towanda started strung out along a steam puffing railroad. The typical dust-to-mud-to-dust dirt main street featured stereotypical clapboard businesses.  The first so-called "highway" would have been a road paralleling the Chicago & Alton Railroad.  

By the 1920's, we betcha traffic began zooming through town, local folks cried out for a bypass.  Sure enough in 1924, The Illinois Highway Department obliged and ran State Bond Issue 4 along East Jackson Street, bypassing so-called downtown Towanda. This is the highway that became the first official Route 66 in 1926.

An interesting tidbit we did not know is that the entire length of Route 66 was paved in Illinois in 1926!  

Well, time passed and that didn't work out too well either.  So in the postwar period, the State rebuilt Route 66 as a divided four lane highway etching a graceful curve around the west side of Towanda.  This would be the iteration of Route 66 that people remembered and the one that became today's memorial trail.

Blue is the original 19th Century "highway" through Towanda. Red is the 1924 version that became Route 66.  Yellow is the 1950's bypass and pink is today's I-55.

Eventually, of course, Ike Eisenhower's grandiose interstate highway system supplanted the 1950's four lane Route 66.  I-55 moved even farther west of Towanda.  Meanwhile, the Illinois Highway Department abanadoned Route 66 through Towanda and began plans to demolish the Money Creek bridge.

That's when things changed for the better and Good News began to roll.

Fred Walk figured Route 66 could be the hook to get his high school students motivated in civic engagement. He proposed the students place a memorial sign by the closed road.

“They didn’t quite see my vision,” Walk said with a laugh, recalling the initial response. “It was like, ‘Why are we out here? Just a barren stretch of road; there is nothing there.’”

Their attitudes changed once they learned more about Route 66’s importance nationally and in their backyard.

“After we did the sign, I started thinking we could do much more,” Walk said. He met with state officials about turning the road to nowhere into a parkway. There was one problem: The state planned to tear down an old bridge over Money Creek that would have cut the parkway in two.

Walk and the students launched a successful “save the bridge” campaign that upset the contractor who was to receive $80,000 to remove it. But they won over local politicians.

“I wanted to provide an avenue for my students to model for them how they could become activists and model that sense of activism whereby they could get involved in their community,” Walk said.

See: https://route66towanda.org/

Today, Towanda's Ode to Route 66 is world famous.  It's an EZPZ way for Highway Heritage Fans to safely walk a stretch of the old Mother Road.  And that's Good News.  We love it.

HUGE KUDOS to Fred Walk and Towanda People for keeping Route 66 Alive & Well!

You can get a glimpse of Old Towanda with postcard views we downloaded from eBay listings.  We put them into a Google Photos album here.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/8G93Fq7K8bwYdY4A6

Here are lots of Towanda links

https://news.illinoisstate.edu/2014/11/alums-driving-force-preserving-route-66/

https://web.archive.org/web/20090612095445/http://towandahistory.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towanda,_Illinois

https://www.duncanmanorhouse.com/

NOTE that the word "Towanda" is far more associated with the movie "Fried Green Tomatoes" than with this small dinky, little town.  Towanda, Illinois, actually draws its name from Towanda, Pennsylvania, and it's a long story.  Towanda, Kansas, also exists.  All three town names have Native American linguistic roots.

The "Towanda" used in the movie probably traces its roots to an African name but the linguistic roots are very unclear.  In the movie, the word "towanda" is used as a sort of rallying cry for self-affirmation.

Interestingly in Fannie Flagg's original book, the word "towanda" is only used on roughly two pages.  Its usage in the book s extremely aggressive and may be offensive to some tender readers.  We transcribed the entire pages in which "towanda" was used in the book and you can read those passages here:

https://towandatales.blogspot.com/2025/02/birth-of-towanda.html