'We saw there was this great narrative about Route 66 out there that tended to be focused on the traveler's experience,' Kaisa Barthuli, project manager for the National Park Service Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program tells Susan Montoya Bryan for the Associated Press. Founded by filmmaker Katrina Parks, the oral history project seeks to gather the stories of the females who lived and worked along Route 66, just like the many male travelers whose stories have dominated the narratives set along the highway. Titled “The Women on the Mother Road,” the project is supported by the National Park Service and Cinefemme, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting women filmmakers and documentarians. Now, an oral history project sponsored by the National Park Service is seeking to tell the stories of the women who lived and worked along the famous highway.

But while many of these stories center on the experience of the travelers and road trippers who rode down the highway, Route 66 was central to the lives of many people along its path.

Once stretching almost all the way across the country, the highway that John Steinbeck called “the Mother Road” has been memorialized in songs and stories over the decades. Perhaps no single road is more significant to modern American folklore than the fabled Route 66.