Read Ghost Towns of Route 66 Online
Authors: Jim Hinckley
Ghost Towns of Route 66 (7 page)
Heatonville also dates to 1868 and the platting of a town site by Daniel Heaton. Albatross, established the same year Route 66 was designated (1926), began as a bus stop for the Albatross Bus Lines. By the 1950s, it had morphed into a service hub with six gas stations.
Phelps, named for Colonel Bill Phelps, an attorney for the MoPac Railroad, predates the Civil War with a post office that opened in 1857. During the infancy of Route 66, travelers could avail themselves of a wide array of services, including a café, a barber-shop, a boardinghouse, a service station, a restaurant, and cabins.
Mr. and Mrs. Roy Rogers (no relation to the famous cowboy duet, who had a ranch along Route 66 near Victorville, California) put Rescue on the map for Route 66 motorists in the 1920s with a lodge, cabins, and a service station. This facility was later known as Reed's Cabin Court and today survives in part as a private residence.
Officially, Plew dates to 1893, but settlement in the area began at least fifty years earlier. Today, it is not much larger than the dot on the map that represents it.
These small villages are now even less than the wide spots in the road they once were. Rittenhouse notes in his 1946 travel guide that Heatonville offered the services of garages, groceries, gas stations, a general store, and Castle Rock Cabins. The business district in Albatross consisted of a garage, several gas stations, and Carter's Cabins. Phelps had gas stations, a café, a few houses, and “two very old store buildings.” Rescue was “a small village” with Brown's Garage, Rescue Garage, and Reed's cabins.
From Springfield to Avilla, a wide array of remnants and ruins dot the roadside, standing in mute testimony to this history. This is Missouri's ghost town trail, where the vestiges of the modern era seem oddly out of place.
DON'T MISS
Missouri contains a veritable treasure-trove of roadside artifacts and towns that hover somewhere bet ween resurrection and obscurity induced by abandonment. A mply sprinkled among these are true time capsules, such as the recently refurbished circa-1934 Wagon Wheel Motel in Cuba and Meramec Caverns, a classic roadside attraction.
To cruise Route 66 through Hooker Cut and over the 1923 Big Piney River Bridge at Devil's Elbow or grab a snack at the Circle Inn Malt Shop in Bourbon is to discover the very essence of the Route 66 experience. To cruise Route 66 from St. Louis to Joplin is an opportunity to experience a ghost highway where the past is never very far removed from the present.
AVILLA
I
NDICATIVE OF THE SLOW-MOTION
slide to oblivion that marks Avilla's past century is a population that today numbers around 120, compared to the 500 who resided here in 1874. Nestled in a rich agricultural district, the town began as a business and trade center established on the western fringe of the Ozarks in 1856.
On October 28, 1861, Governor Jackson met with the Missouri General Assembly in Neosho and declared Missouri the twelfth state to join the Confederate States of America. Upon hearing the news in Avilla, a group of leading men gathered in the park to hoist the stars and stripes of the United States. To defend their homes and farms from Confederate raiders and guerillas, Dr. J. M. Stemmons organized a militia that consisted of men deemed too old to serve in the military. On March 8, 1862, the reserve of this stalwart group was put to the test when a group of Confederate raiders under the leadership of William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson moved on Avilla.
Killed in the ensuing action were Dr. Stemmons, three of his sons, and at least two Avilla militiamen, but Avilla was spared the fate of Carthage, which was almost erased from the map in a skirmish. In the late summer of 1862, the Union Army took possession of the area, headquartered in Avilla in 1863, and authorized the local militia to patrol portions of Jasper and Lawrence counties.
Spared much of the destruction that neighboring communities experienced during the war, Avilla became a boomtown at the center of postwar reconstruction. By the early 1870s, the town supported boot stores and a cobbler, several dry goods stores, grocers, livery stables, a drugstore, doctors' offices, and several attorneys. The town also had a school, three churches, an Odd Fellows Lodge, and a Freemasons Lodge.
The railroad that connected Springfield with Carthage and Joplin bypassed Avilla, and the town began a slide only briefly interrupted by the flow of traffic on Route 66, which sparked a resurgent growth in new businesses. Rittenhouse notes that the population in 1946 was 178 and that the town consisted of “Gas, café, stores. The lumber yard and farm implement stores here indicates its importance as agricultural trading and supply center.”
By the late 1970s, a decade after Interstate 44 replaced Route 66, Avilla was a ghost town. Just a few businesses remain in operation. Vacant lots now outnumber buildings, but the structures that remain are most interesting. The most notable is the bank building, built in 1915 and now serving as the post office, one block north of former U.S. 66.
The forest slowly reclaims businesses and homes alike, transforming the landscape into one not seen in Avilla since the Civil War.
Avilla is located on State Highway 96 several miles west of Plew.
Hints of better times abound in the weathered façades and overgrown vacant lots of Avilla's business district.
The quaint little post office in Avilla, housed in a former bank that opened in 1915, epitomizes the solid nature of those who established the town and stood against the Confederacy.
KANSAS
Kansas may lay claim to less than fourteen miles of Route 66, but there is pride in every mile of that association.
Built in 1923, the Marsh Arch Rainbow Bridge is the lone survivor of three such bridges that once carried traffic on Route 66 in Kansas.
I
T MIGHT SEEM ODD
to include Kansas in a book about ghost towns found along Route 66. After all, less than fourteen miles of Route 66 run through this state. Though the three towns along this section of highway are quite historic, only two have sizable populations. Still, Galena (population 3,168), Baxter Springs (population 4,344), and Riverton (population 600) are key components in the story of Route 66. They are also shadows of the boomtowns that they once were.
J
UST ONE MILE FROM
the Missouri state line lies the site of the Eagle-Picher Smelter, once a leading producer of lead and the location of yet another bloody chapter in the history of U.S. 66. It was here in 1935 that a strike was led by John L. Lewis, the union boss of the United Mine Workers.
For a short period, striking miners blocked the highway. Cars that failed to heed their demand to stop were pelted with stones, rock salt, and even bullets. Targets of even more violent attacks were the carloads of “scabs” from Missouri who dared to run the gauntlet for employment during the hard times of the Great Depression.
A colorful banner proclaiming Galena's rich heritage adds contrast to a weathered brick façade that predates the highway by decades.
Under order from Alf Landon, governor and presidential candidate in 1936, the National Guard arrived in Galena to quell the violence. The murder of nine men at the headquarters of the International Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union office in Galena marked the culmination of this violent chapter on April 11, 1937.
At its peak, the estimated population of Galena was more than fifteen thousand. Remnants from its mining boomtown
daysâand the era when Route 66 served as the town's main streetâabound.
Even a vintage Chevy truck seems oddly modern when viewed against the backdrop of century-old buildings with towering façades in downtown Galena.