Route 66 Begins

June 23, 1907
Los Angeles

The Auto Club of Southern California has begun posting white enamel signs with blue lettering along Foothill Boulevard between Los Angeles and Riverside.

Spending about half a day, auto club President George Allen Hancock and Charles Fuller Gates, who is in charge of the county’s signage, staked the route through Highland Park, South Pasadena and Pasadena, Lamanda Park, Baldwin’s ranch, Monrovia, Azusa, Glendora, Claremont, Uplands, Cucamonga, Etiwanda, Stalder (34.0119/117.3125 to folks with GPS) to West Riverside.

To protect the signs, a $200 reward ($4,104.71 USD 2005) was offered for anyone caught vandalizing them. “For a while the motoring public did not understand these signs,” The Times said, “but gradually their value dawned upon them and then the rest of the highway traveling public understood them too. After that, very few were destroyed. Now it is seldom that any are molested.”

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