A Museum on the Road, Built by the Road

Most museums are built apart from the things they celebrate — the artifacts brought in, the context assembled around them, the building chosen for convenience or prestige rather than history. The California Route 66 Museum in Victorville, California works differently. It sits on D Street in Old Town Victorville — which is Historic U.S. Route 66 itself, the same stretch of pavement that carried Dust Bowl families west in the 1930s, military convoys during World War II, and postwar vacationers in the great American highway boom of the 1950s. The museum is not near Route 66. The museum is on Route 66. It sits inside a building that Route 66 travelers ate in for decades — the former Red Rooster Café and Cocktail Lounge — in the heart of a town whose entire history is inseparable from the Mother Road.

The museum opened on November 11, 1995 — the 69th anniversary of Route 66’s official commissioning on November 11, 1926 — and it has been welcoming visitors ever since under the stewardship of the Old Town Victorville Heritage Preservation, Inc., a volunteer-run nonprofit whose mission is to preserve the artifacts, stories, and visual culture of Route 66 and the communities the highway built. Admission is free. The staff is composed entirely of volunteers who are passionate about the Mother Road and eager to talk about it. The exhibits rotate constantly alongside permanent displays that include some of the most historically significant Route 66 artifacts in Southern California. It is one of the most rewarding, most undervisited Route 66 stops in the state, and it is completely free to enter.

Where Is the California Route 66 Museum?

The California Route 66 Museum is located at 16825 D Street, Victorville, California 92395, in Old Town Victorville, San Bernardino County. D Street is the local name for the National Trails Highway — the Historic U.S. Route 66 alignment through Victorville — and the museum sits on the right side of the street heading east toward Apple Valley, between 5th and 6th Streets.

From Interstate 15, take the D Street / Apple Valley exit and head east. The main road is Route 66 itself. In approximately three quarters of a mile, the road enters Old Town Victorville, and the museum is on the right side of the street — it is recognizable by the historic building facade and Route 66 signage out front. Small parking is available on-site; additional parking is available around the building and on adjacent streets. The Victorville Transit Center — built on the site of the old Santa Fe Railroad depot that once stood across the street — is directly opposite the museum.

Victorville sits approximately halfway between Barstow and San Bernardino on the I-15 corridor, at an elevation of roughly 2,875 feet in California’s High Desert, in the Mojave River Valley. For Route 66 travelers making the full drive from Chicago, Victorville comes near the end of the California leg — about 35 miles northeast of San Bernardino and well within the final push toward the Santa Monica Pier.

The Red Rooster Café: A Route 66 Building with Its Own History

Built for Route 66 Travelers: 1930

The building that houses the California Route 66 Museum was not purpose-built as a museum. It was purpose-built for exactly the kind of people who now visit it: Route 66 travelers crossing the Mojave Desert who needed a meal, a cold drink, and a place to sit down. The Red Rooster Café, Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge opened in 1930 at its D Street location in Old Town Victorville, just as Route 66 was cementing its role as the primary cross-country highway in California. In the decades that followed, the Red Rooster served travelers navigating one of the most demanding stretches of the Mother Road — the long desert crossing from Barstow through the High Desert toward the Los Angeles basin.

The building is a substantial structure for its era — the 5,000 square feet of floor space that now houses the museum’s three exhibit rooms and gift shop reflect the ambitions of a proprietor who expected significant business from the highway traffic flowing past the front door. In the 1930s and 1940s, when Victorville’s population was growing rapidly and Route 66 was carrying tens of thousands of vehicles per year through the High Desert, that expectation was fully justified. The Red Rooster was part of the ecosystem of services — gas stations, motor courts, diners, and garages — that made Route 66 drivable across the California desert.

From Red Rooster to Les Pyrénées to The Jazz Singer: 1930–1994

After the Red Rooster Café closed, the building continued in commercial use under various operators. One notable incarnation was Les Pyrénées Restaurant, which brought a very different culinary identity to the old Route 66 roadhouse. The building’s most unexpected chapter came in 1980, when it served as a filming location for Neil Diamond’s film The Jazz Singer. The production used the building to stand in for a Texas café — a testament to the building’s authentic mid-century roadside character, which Hollywood found easier to borrow than to recreate. The Jazz Singer filming added a layer of pop-cultural history to an already historically significant structure, and the connection is noted in the museum’s exhibits today.

Becoming a Museum: November 11, 1995

By the early 1990s, the building had cycled through its commercial uses and was available for adaptive reuse. The Old Town Victorville Heritage Preservation, Inc. — a nonprofit organization focused on preserving the heritage of the Old Town Victorville district and its Route 66 history — recognized the building as an ideal home for a Route 66 museum: a historic structure on the actual highway alignment, with enough floor space for meaningful exhibits, located in the heart of a community whose identity was deeply intertwined with the Mother Road. The museum opened on November 11, 1995 — the 69th anniversary of Route 66’s commissioning — and the date was chosen deliberately to honor the connection between the museum’s mission and the highway’s history.

The Exhibits: Three Rooms, 2,448 Miles of History

The Route 66 Room

The core of the California Route 66 Museum’s collection is its Route 66 Room — a gallery dedicated to the history, culture, and visual memorabilia of the Mother Road from its commissioning in 1926 through its decommissioning in 1985 and into the contemporary preservation era. The room is filled with historic photographs, antique road signs, original promotional materials, and artifacts documenting the experience of driving Route 66 at the height of its use. Gas station memorabilia, motel ephemera, highway maps, postcards, and the kind of roadside advertising that defined mid-century American travel culture are represented throughout the collection.

The exhibits in the Route 66 Room follow a broadly narrative arc: the early highway era of the late 1920s and 1930s, the Dust Bowl migration period that John Steinbeck immortalized in The Grapes of Wrath (and for which Route 66 earned its other great nickname — the “Road of Flight”), the wartime years, the postwar boom of the late 1940s and 1950s when American car culture reached its peak expression on Route 66, and the long decline following the opening of Interstate 40 and the other freeways that systematically bypassed the old highway through the 1960s and 1970s. The Route 66 revival — the preservation movement that gathered momentum after decommissioning and that has accelerated in recent years toward the Route 66 Centennial in 2026 — is also represented in the exhibits.

The Victorville Room

One of the features that distinguishes the California Route 66 Museum from purely highway-focused institutions is its dedicated Victorville Room — a gallery focused on the specific history of Victorville and the High Desert communities that Route 66 made possible. This room contextualizes the broader Route 66 narrative through the lens of a specific place: how the highway transformed this Mojave Desert community, who built it, who worked in it, and what Victorville looked like at different moments in its Route 66 history.

Victorville’s history is, in many ways, a compressed version of Route 66’s own story. The city grew from a railroad junction (the community was named for Jacob Nash Victor, a construction superintendent for the California Southern Railroad) into a thriving highway town, reached its peak during the 1940s and 1950s when the highway and nearby George Air Force Base sustained a booming local economy, and then experienced the familiar Route 66 pattern of decline when Interstate 15 bypassed much of the original alignment in the 1970s. The Victorville Room tells that story with local specificity, using photographs, artifacts, and documents that bring the history of a particular community to life rather than treating Route 66 as an abstraction.

The Transportation Room

The museum’s Transportation Room focuses on the vehicles and technologies that made Route 66 travel possible — a reminder that the highway was not merely a geographic or cultural phenomenon but a product of specific mechanical and industrial developments in American transportation. The room includes automobile memorabilia, vehicle-related artifacts, and exhibits on the evolution of the cars and trucks that defined Route 66 travel across different eras.

Interactive Exhibits: Photo Opportunities and Hands-On History

What sets the California Route 66 Museum apart from many comparable institutions is its commitment to interactive, photo-ready exhibits that invite visitors to place themselves physically inside the history they are exploring. Rather than a collection of artifacts behind glass barriers, the museum is designed for hands-on engagement — a philosophy that makes it exceptionally well-suited for families with children and for the social-media-era traveler who wants to bring the history home in the form of images.

The 1917 Ford Model T

The museum’s most historically significant interactive exhibit is a genuine 1917 Ford Model T — a vehicle that predates Route 66 itself but represents the generation of automobiles that the early highway was built to serve. The Model T is available for visitors to climb into and be photographed in, with museum volunteers typically available to take group shots. The T’s presence in the museum is not merely decorative: it anchors the Route 66 story in the specific mechanical reality of early 20th-century American road travel, reminding visitors how demanding the transcontinental journey actually was in the years before the highway’s paving, signage, and services were developed to support it.

The 1950s Diner Booth

The recreated 1950s diner booth is one of the museum’s most popular photo opportunities — a fully appointed booth in the style of the roadside diners that defined the Route 66 experience at the height of the highway’s golden era. Visitors can slide into the booth, pick up the period-appropriate props, and photograph themselves in one of the most iconic environments of mid-century American road travel. The exhibit evokes the thousands of diners, coffee shops, and truck stops that lined the Mother Road from Chicago to the Pacific — establishments where travelers refueled themselves as well as their vehicles and where the social fabric of Route 66 culture was woven, cup of coffee by cup of coffee.

The VW Love Bus

For a very different slice of Route 66’s cultural history, the museum offers the 1960s VW Love Bus — a period Volkswagen van outfitted with props including wigs and sunglasses that invite visitors to inhabit the counterculture highway era. Route 66 was not only a highway of the 1950s family vacation; it was also a highway of the 1960s road trip, of the Kerouac generation, of the young Americans heading west in Volkswagen vans with their futures open in front of them. The Love Bus exhibit captures this chapter of Route 66’s history with affection and humor, and it is one of the most photographed features of the museum.

The Historic Outhouse

The museum also maintains what may be described as its most whimsical exhibit: a historic outhouse that serves as both a genuine artifact of pre-modern roadside travel and one of the museum’s most reliably entertaining photo opportunities. Before modern restroom facilities were standard at highway stops, travelers on the early Route 66 encountered exactly this kind of facility at the less-developed motor courts and roadside businesses of the 1920s and 1930s. The outhouse at the California Route 66 Museum captures this unglamorous but historically accurate aspect of the early highway experience.

The Original End of the Trail Santa Monica Sign

One of the museum’s most significant recent acquisitions — and one that has quickly become among its most popular exhibits — is a replica of the End of the Trail sign associated with the Santa Monica Pier, the symbolic western terminus of Route 66. The display is described by the museum as the first such reproduction booth, and it provides an inland, accessible version of the iconic photo opportunity that travelers completing the full 2,448-mile route typically seek at the Santa Monica Pier. For visitors who may not be making the complete Route 66 drive or who want to mark the journey in this High Desert context, the exhibit offers a meaningful connection to the highway’s most resonant endpoint.

The Hulaville Collection: A Lost Route 66 Landmark Preserved

Among the California Route 66 Museum’s most historically irreplaceable holdings is the Hulaville Collection — a set of artifacts, a scale model, and artworks recovered from what was once a celebrated and eccentric Route 66 roadside attraction in the High Desert: Hulaville, also known as Mahan’s Half Acre, the life’s work of Miles Mahan (1896–1997).

Miles Mahan was a self-taught artist and collector who spent decades accumulating found objects, bottle sculptures, vintage signs, and roadside curiosities at his property on Mesa Street in the High Desert. Hulaville — named for the large Hula Girl figure that served as its centerpiece, a salvaged decoration from a defunct tropical restaurant — was a genuine piece of Route 66 folk art: a roadside environment built by one person’s obsessive vision, visible from the highway, and impossible to drive past without noticing. It was, in spirit, a predecessor of the more famous Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch in nearby Helendale — itself a landmark of California’s Route 66 corridor. (Elmer Long, who built the Bottle Tree Ranch, was reportedly aware of and inspired by Hulaville.)

Hulaville was eventually demolished, but the California Route 66 Museum intervened to rescue several of Mahan’s most significant pieces before they were lost. The museum now holds:

The Original Hula Girl Figure — the large female figure that gave Hulaville its name, salvaged from the ruins of a tropical restaurant by Mahan and installed as the defining icon of his roadside environment.

The Howdy Cowboy — another of Mahan’s signature figures, a cowboy form that welcomed visitors to Hulaville from the highway.

A Detailed Scale Model of Hulaville — a miniature recreation of the entire Mahan property as it appeared at the height of its development, preserving the layout and visual character of the attraction for visitors who will never be able to see the original.

The Hulaville collection makes the California Route 66 Museum the primary custodian of one of the High Desert’s most distinctive pieces of Route 66 folk art history — a role that would be impossible to replicate if the museum had not intervened. For visitors interested in the folk art and outsider art traditions of Route 66, this collection alone justifies a stop.

The Gift Shop and Library

The California Route 66 Museum’s gift shop is one of the more comprehensively stocked Route 66 retail operations in Southern California. The shop carries Route 66 books (including histories, travel guides, and photographic collections), DVDs documenting the history of the highway, branded merchandise including mugs, magnets, t-shirts, and keepsakes, and a selection of Route 66 collectibles and vintage-style items that reflect genuine curatorial attention. Free handouts covering Route 66 history and nearby attractions are also available at the desk — a useful complement to the museum’s exhibits for travelers planning the next leg of their drive.

Adjacent to the gift shop, the museum maintains a library and research collection of Route 66 and High Desert historical materials — a resource used both by visiting researchers and by the museum’s own volunteers in their ongoing documentation of the region’s history. The library reflects the museum’s ambitions as more than a tourist attraction: it is a genuine preservation institution, and the library is part of that mission.

Victorville on Route 66: History of a High Desert Highway Town

From Railroad Junction to Highway City

Victorville’s connection to American transportation runs deeper than Route 66. The community was established around 1885 by Jacob Nash Victor, a construction superintendent for the California Southern Railroad (an affiliate of the Santa Fe Railroad), who helped lay the rail line through the Mojave River Valley. Named “Victor” after its founder and later incorporated as Victorville on September 21, 1962, the city grew from a railroad stop into a regional center supported by the cement industry — which expanded dramatically around the turn of the 20th century — and later by George Air Force Base, constructed in 1941 and operated until its decommissioning in 1992 (the site is now the California Logistics Airport).

Route 66 and the Golden Years: 1926–1972

When U.S. Route 66 was commissioned in 1926, Victorville was positioned at a strategically important point on the California alignment: the last significant desert city before the highway descended through Cajon Pass into the San Bernardino Valley and the Los Angeles basin. Every vehicle traveling from the east — from Needles, from Barstow, from the entire desert crossing — passed through Victorville before reaching the mountains and the coast. The highway brought gas stations, motor courts, diners, and services clustering along D Street and the surrounding blocks, and Victorville’s population grew from a few thousand in the 1920s to nearly 100,000 by the 2000s.

The Victorville area was also home to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the famous cowboy actor and his wife, who owned a ranch along the Mojave River in nearby Oro Grande. Roy Rogers’ connection to Route 66 country — and the presence of a 24-foot-tall statue of Trigger, his Golden Palomino horse, in neighboring Apple Valley — adds a layer of mid-century American celebrity culture to the region’s Route 66 history.

Interstate 15 and the Bypass: 1970s

The construction of Interstate 15 through the upper Mojave Desert between Victorville and Barstow — completed through this stretch in the 1970s — had the familiar Route 66 effect: through traffic was diverted to the faster, more direct freeway, and the commercial district along the old D Street alignment declined as the businesses that had depended on highway traffic lost their customer base. Unlike completely bypassed towns like Amboy — which nearly became a ghost town after I-40 opened in 1972 — Victorville survived the transition because its size and regional importance gave it economic resources beyond highway commerce. But the Route 66 district suffered, and the Old Town that once hummed with cross-country traveler activity became quieter and more worn.

The founding of the California Route 66 Museum in 1995 was partly a response to this history — an effort to restore meaning and purpose to Old Town Victorville by recognizing and celebrating what Route 66 had meant to the community, and by creating a destination that would bring travelers back to D Street.

Practical Information for Your Visit

Address: 16825 D Street, Victorville, California 92395

Phone: (760) 951-0436

Website: califrt66museum.org

Admission: Free. Donations gratefully accepted and directly support the museum’s operations.

Hours: Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Sunday, 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. The museum is run entirely by volunteers — hours may vary, so calling ahead is recommended.

Parking: A small parking lot is available on-site and around the building. Pull around 6th Street to access the alley connecting to the rear parking area. Certain spaces are reserved for volunteers.

Accessibility: The museum is housed in a ground-floor commercial building. Contact the museum for specific accessibility information.

Time Required: Plan approximately one hour for a complete visit, though enthusiasts and families with children may find themselves staying longer given the interactive exhibits.

Best Time to Visit: Year-round. The High Desert climate means hot summers (temperatures regularly exceed 100°F in July and August) and cool winters; spring and fall are the most comfortable visiting seasons for those spending time outdoors in the vicinity.

Photography: Encouraged throughout the museum. The interactive exhibits — the Model T, the diner booth, the Love Bus, the outhouse, the End of the Trail display — are specifically designed for visitor photographs, and the volunteer staff will typically help with group shots.

Nearby Route 66 Highlights Along the California Corridor

Emma Jean’s Holland Burger Café, Victorville — Just 1.3 miles north of the museum on D Street (Route 66) at 17143 N D Street, Emma Jean’s is the oldest standing restaurant in the Victorville area, open since 1947. Built by Bob and Kate Holland from cinder blocks manufactured at a local plant, the diner has been a fixture of Route 66 life in the High Desert for nearly 80 years, serving truckers, locals, and travelers from a small dining room with counter stools and booths. The signature Brian Burger — named for former owner Brian Gentry — is the essential order. A California Historical Landmark plaque marks the café’s significance.

Route 66 in San Bernardino, California — About 35 miles southwest of Victorville via I-15, San Bernardino is home to the iconic Wigwam Motel and the Original McDonald’s Museum site — two of the most significant Route 66 landmarks in the state.

The Wigwam Motel, San Bernardino — Sleep in a teepee! One of only three surviving Wigwam Village motels in America, operating since 1950 on Route 66 in San Bernardino — a California Historic Place and a Route 66 icon.

Roy’s Motel and Café, Amboy, California — The most photographed landmark on California’s Route 66, located in the Mojave Desert approximately 80 miles east of Victorville via Barstow. The 50-foot Googie neon sign, restored in 2019, is a Route 66 essential.

Route 66 in California — Complete Guide — The full overview of California’s 314-mile Route 66 corridor, from Needles on the Arizona border to the Santa Monica Pier, with every major attraction along the way.

Route 66 Centennial 2026 — Route 66’s 100th anniversary is November 11, 2026 — the same date the California Route 66 Museum chose for its own opening in 1995. Centennial events are planned across all eight states; check this page for the California celebrations calendar.

Route 66 — Complete Guide — The definitive guide to all 2,448 miles of the Mother Road, from the Begin sign in Chicago to the End of the Trail at the Santa Monica Pier.