The motel might seem like an ageless fixture of the American landscape, but in fact, this roadside mainstay didn’t exist before Dec. 12, 1925.

That’s when Arthur and Alfred Heineman, two brothers with a successful Southern California architecture practice, opened the Milestone Mo-Tel, the first “motor hotel,” in San Luis Obispo, roughly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

At the time, motorists had limited options. Their dust-covered clothes hardly suited the highbrow standards of most hotels, and parking in cities could be challenging. So many drivers stayed in autocamps, roadside resting places that sometimes offered basics like firewood and communal bathrooms, pitching tents off their running boards and cooking underneath the stars.

In contrast, the brand-new Milestone featured novel comforts like hot showers and private garages. “There were orange trees in front of every door,” said Thomas Kessler, the executive director of the History Center of San Luis Obispo County, adding, “The idea of being able to reach out and pick an orange from out your window — you know, they talk about that in ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ It’s such a concept of the American dream.”

Like those trees, motels blossomed, giving a century’s worth of asphalt explorers a place to park their cars, lay their heads and contemplate what’s down the road, and fulfilling a promise perhaps best expressed in the words of those once-ubiquitous ads for Motel 6:

“We’ll leave the light on for you.”

Hitting the road

The history of the motel begins with the automobile.

1908: Ford introduces the Model T, a mass-produced car aimed at the middle class. A newly mobile nation suddenly needs better roads.

1916: President Woodrow Wilson signs the Federal Aid Road Act, laying the groundwork for a novel way to travel: the road trip.

1925: In September, the Joint Board on Interstate Highways completes the first federal numbered highway system. One of those future highways, Route 66, from Chicago to Santa Monica, will come to symbolize driving through the Southwest.

1925: The Milestone Mo-Tel, the first official motel, opens Dec. 12. The property, later called the Motel Inn, got its name, according to local lore, because the sign painter determined that the words “Motor Hotel” would not fit in letters of the desired size.

Rise of the chains

Motels market themselves as roadside attractions.

1929: The stock market crashes, fueling the Great Depression, in which large numbers of Americans take to the roads, seeking work and a better life. Those who could afford accommodations increasingly chose lower-cost motels over more expensive hotels.

1929: Edgar Lee Torrance opens the original Alamo Plaza in East Waco, Texas. With a facade designed to look like the Alamo, it will become one of the first major motel chains in the country.

1933: The first Wigwam Village opens in Horse Cave, Kentucky, featuring a clutch of tepees marked with distinctive zigzag stripes. A notable example of programmatic architecture, in which the building itself advertises the property, it eventually grows to become a chain of seven motels in six states. Three locations remain open today: in Cave City, Kentucky; Holbrook, Arizona; and San Bernardino.

1937: The American Automobile Association begins field inspections of lodgings and restaurants. It also begins publishing a guide that will influence generations of travelers.

War and wanderlust

As the nation mobilizes, Americans catch the travel bug.

1941: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor draws the United States into World War II, and millions of men and women join the war effort, many traveling far from home. This new mobility whets Americans’ appetites to explore their country.

1942: Gas rationing is imposed, first in 17 states, then nationwide, temporarily discouraging long recreational road trips and stoking a desire for travel that explodes when rationing ends in 1945.

1944: Ellis Marsalis Sr., trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’ grandfather, opens the Marsalis Mansion Motel, a 40-room property in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, to house Black travelers, who faced few options in an era of segregation.

1945: The portmanteau “motel” is added to Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition.

Mom and pop

Small motels flourish in an era of color, kitsch and civil rights.

1945: Japan surrenders, ending World War II, and gas rationing winds down. Americans fill up their cars and head out on the highways, where motels are waiting.

1947: John Lautner, an architect who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, builds the Desert Hot Springs Motel, near Palm Springs. He gives it clean lines and large picture windows, midcentury modern features that will become the calling cards of many roadside motels.

1952: Kemmons Wilson, an entrepreneur, opens the first Holiday Inn in Memphis, Tennessee, after a road trip with his family. A single room costs $4 per night, the equivalent of about $49 today. By 1972, when Time magazine lauds Wilson on its cover as “the man with 300,000 beds,” the chain will have more than 1,400 locations in 50 states and 20 countries or territories.

1954: The Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge opens in Savannah, Georgia, expanding on a chain of restaurants known for its many flavors of ice cream.

1954: The A.G. Gaston Motel opens in Birmingham, Alabama. A Black-owned motel catering to Black travelers, it will become a central fixture in the Civil Rights Movement, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy use it to organize protest marches and sit-ins.

1955: Vladimir Nabokov publishes “Lolita,” in which the narrator, Humbert Humbert, conducts his illicit relationship with a minor in motels across the country, building on an unsavory reputation of motels that is already taking root in American culture.

1956: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the law establishing the Interstate System of highways. During his term, about 10,440 miles of interstates will open across the country. (There are more than 45,000 miles of interstates today.)

1960: The Alfred Hitchcock film “Psycho,” set at the fictional Bates Motel, hits theaters, forever changing how Americans look at motels — particularly motel showers.

1964: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans racial segregation by businesses offering food, lodging, gasoline or entertainment to the public. That same year, motels hit their peak, with some 61,000 operating around the country.

1968: King is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4. The National Civil Rights Museum is established at the motel in 1991.

End of Golden Age

Corporate dominance and lurid associations take a toll.

1970: The United States now has about 30,000 miles of interstate highways, which often bypass small routes and the locally owned motels along them. Several Chains like Motel 6, Super 8, Days Inn and Rodeway Inn will come to dominate the roadsides.

1973: The original Holiday Inn, in Memphis, is sold and changes names. The company begins to retire its “Great Sign” — the chain’s ubiquitous symbol, topped with a flashing star — in the early 1980s. The sign is engraved on the headstone of the chain’s founder when he dies in 2003.

1984: Interstate 40 bypasses the last section of Route 66, near Williams, Arizona, and the next year, Route 66 is officially decommissioned, severing many landmark motels’ last link to through traffic.

1986: The Marsalis Mansion Motel closes.

1991: The Motel Inn shuts down as newer, more modern hotels siphon customers away. Most of the Motel Inn’s buildings will be demolished in 2004.

1991: “Thelma & Louise,” a memorable road trip film featuring two best friends on the run, debuts. Some of the most pivotal scenes are set in Western motels.

1992: Roy Lichtenstein paints “Interior With Motel Room Painting.”

Renaissance

Nostalgia fuels a movement to rehabilitate classic motels.

1995: Liz Lambert, a former lawyer in New York, returns to her home state of Texas and buys the run-down San José Motel in Austin. She revamps and reopens it in 2000 as the Hotel San José. Lambert is widely credited with kicking off the motel renovation boom.

1999: Congress creates the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, which works for the “preservation, restoration and rehabilitation of historic Route 66 properties,” including classic roadside motels.

2012: Only about 16,000 motels remain in the United States. The move to rehab and reopen old properties gains momentum, driven by companies like Lambert’s Bunkhouse Hotels and others.

2015: The riches-to-rags Rose family in the TV series “Schitt’s Creek” takes up residence in a dated roadside motel in the tiny town of Schitt’s Creek, eventually reviving it as the Rosebud Motel.

2020: COVID-19 leads to lockdowns across the United States. Once people begin to travel again, many eschew flying for driving, and hotels for motels, because they tend to have exterior hallways and open stairs instead of elevators.

2021: “Re(Motel),” a restoration-themed TV show, debuts, quickly followed by “Motel Makeover” and later, “Motel Rescue.”

2025: Renovated motels become hot destinations, commanding prices that would make the Milestone Mo-Tel’s founders blush. High-season rooms go for up to $699 a night at the 1959 Skyview Los Alamos, in Los Alamos, which appeared in the first season of “Re(Motel).” At the 1957 Silver Sands Motel & Beach Bungalows in Greenport, New York, rooms in the original motel building typically go for up to $695 in high season. Both motels often have waiting lists.