Route 66 shaped Williams as a highway town serving travelers bound along the route and to the Grand Canyon, with car camps in 1925, early gas stations, downtown businesses, and the Sultana Movie Theater appearing along its course through town by the 1930s and 1940. Commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration on November 11, 1926, Route 66 stretched 2,451 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles (Santa Monica). Its role in Williams effectively ended when the last link of Interstate 40 opened there on October 13th, 1984, and it was decommissioned by the Federal Highway Administration on June 27th, 1985. Williams later marked this legacy with Gateway Arches, the first built on Grand Canyon Boulevard in 2009 as a community project and the second over East Route 66 in 2013 through another community effort. The arches were built using four 100-year old Santa Fe Railway cantilever signal structures donated to the museum by BNSF after they had regulated train movements in Arizona and New Mexico until replaced by more modern signals and communications.