Antique road show: before the Interstates passed the highway by, America got its kicks on Route 66.(The Object At Hand)

Back when the Model A Ford was America's ticket to ride, it must have seemed that half the nation was heading west on Route 66. In fact, the late songwriter Bobby Troup penned "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" during his own trip west on that legendary highway just after World War II, not only launching a songwriting career but also placing the road in the mythos of America. Those who took to the highway in the 1930s to escape drought in the Midwest and cross the desert to California might have been more inclined, if you'll allow me a complete anachronism, to hum a few bars of the hard-rockclassic "Highway to Hell." What it was, more accurately, was a highway from hell, with the hope of a paradise at the western end of a paved rainbow.

In today's age of major four- and six-lane thoroughfares to and from just about everywhere, it's not easy to conceive just how powerfully one stretch of two-lane highway could grip America's collective imagination. This country has historically looked west for a better tomorrow--Daniel Boone and his fellow woodsmen headed for the setting sun as soon as they could see three or four cabins from their homesteads. So when Henry Ford began producing affordable cars, and the Federal Highway Act of 1921 led to the linking of rural roads, a great convergence took place. The Way West, once a rigorous and dangerous passage by covered wagon, was even in the age of the Model T not a trip to be taken lightly. But it became far less daunting when Cyrus Avery of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a state highway official, and businessman John Woodruff of Springfield, Missouri, got the bright notion that there ought to be, in Avery's canny catchphrase, a "Main Street of America." The proposal to merge countless state roads into a true national artery was approved by Congress in 1926; the project was completed six years later.

Though not the first paved highway in the United States, Route 66 is the most storied, and quickly became a metaphor--the fabled two-lane blacktop--for this country's restless, rolling romanticism. (In fact, the road was sometimes dark asphalt, sometimes light-colored concrete.) So if ever a chunk of roadway belonged in a museum, it is the 40-foot-long, 20-foot-wide concrete section of Route 66 that will be displayed as part of the "America on the Move" exhibition at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), which opens November 22. This piece, representing the entire 2,448 miles of a road--now buried under or bypassed by Interstates--that once connected eight states, was taken from a two-mile ection near Bridgeport, Oklahoma. According to curator Steven Lubar, he and his colleagues were looking for artifacts of travel when they contacted historians who specialize in the history of Route 66. The NMAH researchers learned that, in Oklahoma, a section of the old highway was about to be replaced by a new interchange and was scheduled to be removed. "It seemed," says Lubar, "the best artifact of all."

Moving the Mona Lisa from the Louvre to a museum in another country may be more nerve-racking than shipping concrete slabs to Washington, D.C., but logistically it might just be a lot easier. Instructors at a truck-driver ...