Thirty-Fifth Parallel Route

The 35th Parallel Route is of regional significance in the categories of exploration/ settlement and transportation. The 35th Parallel Route was pioneered in historic times by traders and trappers, explored and mapped by Army topographical engineers, developed into a wagon road by the Beale Camel expedition, surveyed for a railroad by a government survey party, and used by a stagecoach line across northern Arizona, constructed as a railroad route roughly paralleling the wagon road, the wagon road portion later taken over by automobiles and upgraded through successive pavings and realignments to an automobile highway, and in recent years, reconstructed as a divided interstate highway. Thus, the route was a historically significant avenue of discovery. Settlement, and transportation. The 35th Parallel Route has been used by all forms of ground transportation and today forms a major traffic artery, across the desert Southwest.

The first white Americans in the Southwestern United States were the traders and trappers who in the 1830s and 1840s developed a route between the Zuni villages in western New Mexico and the crossings of the Little Colorado River, near the present-day Arizona towns of Holbrook and Joseph City. Very likely, they were preceded by prehistoric Indians who, of course, left no written record.
After this region was acquired from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the U.5. Government undertook an exploration of its new acquisition, employing principally the U.S. Army's Corps of Topographical Engineers. in 1851, Captain Lorenzo Sitgives carried out a reconnaissance along this route, crossing northern Arizona from Albuquerque to Colorado from September to December that year.

In 1853, Congress appropriated $150,000 for six transcontinental railroad surveys, one of which, along the 35th Parallel, followed this route. In 1853 and 1854. Ist Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple led an expedition across this route and surveyed it as the 35th Parallel Route. Whipple's survey was the detailed examination of the route which made it prominent, and it was published as Senate Executive Document 78 and House Executive Document 91, 33rd Congress, Second Session. (Volumes 111 and IV of the Pacific Railroad Surveys.)
From August 1857 to January 1858, an expedition to establish a wagon road from Fort Defiance to California followed Whipple's route. It was headed by a civilian (and ex-Navy Officer) named Edward Fitzgerald Beale, and although Beale's survey was not as important as Whipple's, it became equally famous due to the fact that Beale's party employed camels that the U.S. Army Imported to Texas for experimentation in the Southwest. References to the 35th Parallel Route as the "Beale Camel Trail" commemorate Seale's passage and his work clearing a wagon road, although Beale's party neither pioneered the trail nor was the first to survey it.

The trail was used by others in the intervening years, including wagon freighters, emigrants, and stagecoaches. Between 1800 and 1884, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad constructed Its Western Division along this route between Albuquerque and Needles, forming part of yet another transcontinental railroad route and proving the feasibility of Whipple's route. In the 1890s, this division of the AEP was absorbed by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, and today comprises part of one of the main transcontinental lines of the Santa Fe railway system.

The 35th Parallel Route across northern Arizona continued to accommodate occasional wagons, and in the early 20th Century automobiles began to use it. Thus, it evolved into U.S. 66 Interstate 40) along basically the same route, although engineering requirements of modern highway construction have altered the route in many locations. In Petrified Forest, part of the old wagon road remains intact, roughly parallel to the modern highway and the tracks of the railroad. This nomination applies to the wagon road remains of this route, and a space of 50 feet on either side of the route, except where the modern highway crosses it. There are no structural or building remains associated with the route within Petrified Forest National Park.
The railroad and the modern highway are not subject to
his nomination.

The railroad exists as a modern main line of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, and is owned and operated by that company, therefore, not within the scope of the National Park Service's responsibility under the provisions of Executive Order 11593. The present Santa Fe right-of-way, tracks, and structures represent a thoroughly modern railroad plant that is the result of evolutionary processes in railroad technology, and in its present form is ineligible for the National Register under the fifty-year restriction in National Register criteria.

Interstate Highway 40 is in a status similar to that of the railroad, not subject to National Park Service responsibility or authority in terms of historic preservation, and in its present form a thoroughly modern divided highway which represents the result of evolutionary processes in highway design, in its present form ineligible for the National Register under the fifty-year restriction in National Register criteria.