Every Route 66 town has a bypass story, and most of them are the same story: the interstate arrived, the traffic left, and the businesses on the old alignment closed one after another over the following decade. Williams, Arizona has a different version. Williams fought the bypass in court, delayed it for years, and when it finally lost, it lost on terms it had negotiated.
It was the last town on Route 66 to be bypassed — October 13, 1984 — and the way it went out is the most instructive bypass story on the whole road.
Why Williams Was Last
By the early 1980s, Interstate 40 was essentially complete across northern Arizona except for one gap. Williams sat in it.
The town’s business owners understood exactly what a bypass meant, because they had watched it happen everywhere else along the corridor. A town of a few thousand people whose economy runs on travelers stopping does not survive travelers no longer passing through. They went to court, and they kept going to court — lawsuit after lawsuit blocking construction of the final stretch of I-40 around the town.
The delay was not sentiment. It was leverage, and it worked. The suits were eventually dropped as part of a settlement under which the state agreed to build three interchanges serving Williams, rather than the single exit that would have been standard. Three exits meant a traveler on I-40 could reach downtown Williams easily from either direction, and that the town would remain legible from the highway rather than becoming a name on a sign.
Whether that settlement saved Williams is a fair question, and the answer appears to be largely yes — though the Grand Canyon deserves as much credit as the interchanges do.
October 13, 1984
The day itself was handled with more ceremony than most bypasses received. Roughly 500 people gathered at the new Grand Canyon Boulevard exit to mark the occasion.
Bobby Troup was there. The man who wrote “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” in 1946 performed the song at the event and added “Williams” to the list of towns in the lyrics — a small, generous gesture at a ceremony that was, in every practical sense, a funeral for the road he had written about.
The following year, U.S. Route 66 was formally decommissioned. Williams’ bypass was the last link in a process that had run for nearly three decades, and the road ceased to exist as a federal highway shortly after the last town on it was routed around.
There is a mural in Williams commemorating the town as the last bypassed. It is one of the more honest pieces of Route 66 public art on the corridor — a town marking the date it lost rather than the years it won.
What Williams Actually Has Now
Williams did not become a ghost town, and it did not become a preserved museum piece either. It became a functioning small town with a tourism economy, which is a genuinely different thing from most of the corridor.
Three factors explain it, and only one of them is Route 66:
The Grand Canyon. Williams bills itself as the Gateway to the Grand Canyon, and the geography supports the claim — it is the closest interstate town to the South Rim approach. This is the load-bearing part of the local economy.
The Grand Canyon Railway, which runs from the Williams depot to the South Rim. A rail excursion to the canyon is a genuine attraction independent of the highway.
The historic business district, which retains a real concentration of pre-interstate commercial buildings along the old alignment, functioning as businesses rather than as a themed streetscape.
That combination means Williams is one of the few Route 66 towns where the historic district is busy for reasons that would exist even without the road’s mythology. It also means Williams is more expensive and more crowded than the smaller towns west of it, and visitors expecting the empty-highway experience will not find it here.
Driving the Corridor: Williams to Seligman
For anyone working the Arizona stretch, Williams is the eastern anchor of the best-preserved run on the whole route. West of Williams, I-40 and the old alignment diverge, and the Seligman-to-Kingman stretch is the longest continuous surviving segment of Route 66 anywhere — the piece that exists because of the preservation work that began in Seligman in the 1980s, in the same years Williams was in court.
That is the pairing worth understanding. Williams fought to keep the traffic. Seligman, bypassed in 1978, organized to bring it back after the fact by getting the road designated as Historic Route 66. Two towns, forty-five minutes apart, running opposite strategies against the same problem — and both, unusually for this road, still here.
Practical notes for the drive:
- Williams sits at about 6,800 feet, and winter conditions are real. Snow closures on I-40 through here are routine in January and February, and the old alignment is worse.
- Three exits means you can enter downtown from either direction without backtracking. Use the Grand Canyon Boulevard exit for the historic district.
- Summer weekends are heavily trafficked by canyon-bound visitors. Early morning is a different town from midday.
- Heading west, the old alignment through Ash Fork and on to Seligman is the point of the drive. Do not stay on the interstate.
Why the Story Matters
The standard Route 66 narrative treats the interstates as an impersonal force that happened to a passive road. Williams complicates that. A town of a few thousand people slowed the federal highway program for years and extracted concessions from the state before it gave in.
It is worth being clear-eyed about the outcome. The lawsuits delayed the inevitable; they did not prevent it. But the settlement — three exits instead of one — is the reason Williams is a town you can drive into rather than one you pass a sign for. On a road defined by places that got neither, that is not nothing.
The National Park Service Route 66 program documents the corridor’s preservation history, and the Historical Marker Database entry for Williams carries the text of the town’s own account of the bypass.
