For the first travelers on brand-new Route 66, there were no neon cathedrals. No glowing shield billboards shouting from the next rise. Just an empty highway stretch — and every driver whispering the same question: What’s ahead?

Someone had to tell them.

Old Route 66 just east of Winslow, Arizona — before the signs told you where you were.

Before the national shield

In the late 1920s, wayfinding was still a local craft. Entrepreneurs painted what the road had not yet standardized — arrows, place names, homemade shields that almost look like the mark we know, but not quite. Dates get fuzzy; painted history often does.

One rare piece in our collection still carries that early grammar: EAST | WEST, bold arrows, a 66 shape emerging before the emblem settled into the icon America memorized. It marks the beginning of Roadside America as sign language — not just asphalt, but messages you could read at speed.

Early Route 66 East–West sign — arrows and shields before the highway marker looked the same everywhere.

The road learns to speak

As traffic grew, the signs evolved. Mile markers. Hand-lettered boards pointing to water, food, or fuel. Playful billboards. Enameled porscelain tat could take weather and still shout a brand. Then neon - light as advertisement, lights as promised: open, safe, still here.

Oil companies, tire makers, and dealers learned the same lesson the highway towns did: if you want the traveler to stop, you have to speak clearly from the curb. Instructional boards like Conoco’s DO NOT OIL WHILE IN MOTION turned the garage wall into a classroom. A tire sign sold trust between towns. A service mark said you were not alone with a broken fan belt.

Roadside America was not only built of diners and motor courts. It was built of letters, arrows, shields, and light.

"HERE IT IS" billboard

Out past Joseph City, Arizona, the Jack Rabbit Trading Post still stops the car with four words and a rabbit silhouette: HERE IT IS.

In a lot of American vernacular, here sounds like hare — and a jackrabbit is a hare. The billboard is a joke the desert tells at highway speed. Step inside the tourist trap and the gag continues: taxidermy of the ultra-rare jackalope, antlers on a hare, folklore sold beside postcards and cold drinks.

Roadside America didn’t only sell fuel and pie. It sold wonder you could photograph.

Keeping the signs lit

The story does not end when the paint peels. Neon restorers, historians, car clubs, and stubborn locals climb ladders in the heat, chase original colors, and re-bend glass tubes so the Mother Road can still speak after dark. That work is the quiet half of the centennial — not nostalgia as decoration, but memory as maintenance.

We are archiving both: weathered originals like the East–West board, and the living jokes like Jack Rabbit’s hare. There will be signs. We intend to keep lighting them — one essay, one card, one photograph at a time.

Your turn

What sign do you remember from the Mother Road — still standing, or gone? A shield, a motel arrow, a billboard that made the kids shout from the back seat?

Tap Comments at the bottom of this post and leave your story. No wallet, no extra app — just your words. Every reply is another mile marker.

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Route 66 Kicks · Car Culture, Inc. · Centennial 2026–2029

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Route 66 Kicks • There Will Be Signs

How the Mother Road learned to speak — and built Roadside America