Route 66's 2024 preservation grants

The National Park Service's Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program gives
matched grants for preserving, researching, recording and teaching the
history of the road. Since 2001 it has funded **179 projects with $2.72
million**, matched by $4.5 million from the grantees — $7.1 million in all
spent on keeping Route 66 standing and remembered.

Four projects were chosen in 2024. Two save buildings; two teach.

The "Ski Slope House" — Daggett, California

$20,000, matched $20,000 by the private owner.

At the junction of US 66 and 91, in the heat of the Mojave, sits a small
building with a steep roof that belongs somewhere with snow. Locals call it
the Ski Slope House or the Russian House.

It was built in 1926 as a California welcome centre. The California
Information Society, founded in 1891, did what the state tourism office does
now: free advice at the points where travellers entered the state, full
itineraries, and every booking — trains, hotels, restaurants, tours — at no
charge. Its offices stood beside the agricultural inspection stations at
Daggett, Yuma, Blythe, Truckee, Hornbrook and Crescent City; Dorothea Lange
photographed some of them.

Daggett's later became Ma Millet's Cafe, and it is the last one known to
survive. The grant restores it to how it looked, to open as a museum.

Osterman Fueling Station — Peach Springs, Arizona

$30,000, matched $30,000 by the Hualapai Indian Tribe.

Peach Springs is on the traditional lands of the Hualapai and is the tribe's
political and commercial centre. Route 66 came through in 1926. In 1929 a
Swedish immigrant, John Osterman, built a fuel station there from a concrete
block kit ordered out of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.

It has not pumped fuel for years, but it holds a great deal for Hualapai
elders who worked or shopped there. The tribe bought it in 2005 and had it
listed on the National Register. Then extreme weather brought down the roof
and a wall, and in 2023 the National Trust named it one of **America's 11 Most
Endangered Places**. The grant supports a preservation and reuse plan, as
part of a wider revival of the town.

*The Arizona–New Mexico state line, by Arthur Rothstein, 1940. Farm Security
Administration.*

Road to Discovery and Learning — New Mexico

$15,550, matched $23,250 by 302 Stories, Inc.

Three video modules for middle and high schools across New Mexico, built to
the state's education standards. They draw on archival photographs, new
footage and **more than 30 hours of broadcast film of Route 66 in New Mexico
that has never been shown**, woven with oral history.

Route 66: Wartime Women — along the whole road

$24,182, matched $35,681 by the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership.

Route 66 was part of the Strategic Highway Network, the roads the
Department of Defense counted as critical. Through the Second World War and
the Cold War, women worked along it in trades that had been men's. Assertion
Films is making short documentaries, a story map and a lesson plan for grades
6 to 10 about them — and taking it beyond classrooms, to the Girl Scouts and
international institutions.

Sources

Written from the National Park Service's announcement of the 2024 Route 66
Corridor Preservation Program cost-share grants, a work of the United States
government in the public domain.