Vintage 1970s Phillips Route 66 Illinois Map 🗺️ NOS Historic Americana!

Remember Phillips 66 Road Maps? 🗺️ Phillips 66 Road Map of Illinois, 1970s

Size: 9" x 4" ~ folded, about 30 x 18 inches open. New Old Stock, in excellent condition with barely a crease out of place. ~ when closed and 30 "x 18 " ~ when open, this map is in excellent condition with little to no wear, ensuring its longevity and value.

Remember when the map was the navigator's whole job? One of these spread across the dash, somebody in the passenger seat trying to find the turnoff before the driver missed it. This is a vintage 1970s Phillips 66 road map of Illinois, the free kind every gas station handed out, New Old Stock and never used on the road. The cover is a soft sky blue with ILLINOIS across the top and a Phillips 66 attendant in his cap looking off into the distance beside the big orange-and-white Phillips 66 shield, over the slogan "At Phillips 66 it's performance that counts."

🔍 What's on It

Flip it over to "The Performers" and there's a sample Phillips 66 credit card made out to good old JOHN Q PUBLIC, a gold can of Trop-Artic All Season Motor Oil in front of a gas pump, and the pitch: the card costs you nothing to get and it's honored at thousands of Phillips 66 stations across the country, and you could even charge your room and meals at participating Best Western and Quality Motels. A little red, white and blue map of the country carries the line "A country that runs on oil can't afford to run short."

Open it up and it's the whole state, from Lake Michigan and the Wisconsin line down past Springfield to St. Louis, with Chicago, Peoria, Rockford, Champaign-Urbana, Decatur, Galena, Kankakee and the rest, a mileage log, a city index, and a box with the tolls of the day: about 2 cents a mile for passenger cars on the Illinois Tollway, and 35 cents to cross the Chicago Skyway.

⛽ Phillips 66 and the Road It Was Named For

Brothers Frank and Lee Eldas "L.E." Phillips incorporated the Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma on June 13, 1917, with $3 million in assets, 27 employees and land throughout Oklahoma and Kansas. After the huge Panhandle gas field turned up in Texas in 1918, and the Hugoton Field north of it in Kansas, the company went deep into natural gas, and by 1925 it was the nation's largest producer of natural gas liquids.

The name is the best part. As the Phillips Petroleum Company Museum in Bartlesville tells it, three 66s came together at once: the new gasoline's specific gravity was close to 66, the test car was doing 66 miles per hour, and the test ran on U.S. Route 66 near Tulsa. The naming committee voted unanimously for "Phillips 66," and the first Phillips 66 station opened on East Central Avenue in Wichita, Kansas on November 19, 1927.

And the Prairie State is where the Mother Road began. Route 66 was designated on November 11, 1926, starting in downtown Chicago near Jackson Boulevard and Michigan Avenue and running through Joliet, Bloomington and Springfield to St. Louis. Illinois was the first of the eight Route 66 states to get its whole stretch paved, and most of the old road has since been replaced by Interstate 55. So a Phillips 66 map of Illinois covers the first miles of the most famous highway in America.

🏡 Display

It's great framed open on a wall, tucked in the glove box of a classic car, or given to anybody from Illinois, a Route 66 fan, or anyone who remembers road trips before GPS.