Route 66 in Missouri

In 1856, this spot had a post office with a strange name: Mount Helicon. It was named after a mountain in Greece that, legend says, was the sanctuary of the Muses. But the name didn't stick. Stephen Sullivan, who owned the land, donated ground for a railroad right-of-way and built the depot himself. The railroad called the station "Sullivan," and the post office soon followed. That's how this city got its name—not from a poet, but from a man who gave away land for a train.

In March 1931, a building opened at 8th and Pine Streets in Rolla, Missouri, that would anchor downtown for decades. It housed two things: the National Bank of Rolla on the first floor, and the Edwin Long Hotel above. The hotel had 75 rooms, a coffee shop, and a basement banquet hall that could seat 350. A single bed cost two dollars a night; a double, three. And the location was perfect — right on historic Route 66. Travelers came by car and by train, and the hotel became the premier stop in town. Famous guests included President Harry Truman, actress Marilyn Monroe, and actor Victor Mature. But then Route 66 was rerouted in the late 1950s, bypassing downtown. Motels sprouted along the new highway. Passenger rail service ended. Business slowly declined, and the hotel closed in the early 1970s. The building was bought by Phelps County Bank, which restored the exterior in 2001 and still operates there today. The bank now uses the old banquet hall as a boardroom. So the building lives on — but the era of road-trippers and two-dollar rooms is gone.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, lumbermen were busy upstream on the Big Piney River, cutting shortleaf pine and hacking railroad ties from the hardwoods. They floated their planks and ties downstream to the railroad yard at Arlington on the Gasconade River. But first, they had to negotiate a tight, incised meander in the river—a bend so sharp that rafts sometimes broke up and ties were lost. The rafters named it the Devil's Elbow. That name stuck, and the unincorporated community that grew here on historic U.S. Route 66 took it too. Today, the river still bends, but the rafts are long gone. Want to know more about the lumbermen and their wild ride?

The Old Stagecoach Stop in Waynesville, Missouri started as a one-story log building in the early 1850s, built by William Walton McDonald. It was a stagecoach stop and post office before the Civil War. Then the war came. In June 1862, Union Colonel Albert Sigel commandeered the building as a post hospital. Soldiers occupied the town until 1865. After the war, Alexander Bryan bought it in 1870, added a second story, and turned it into a ten-room hotel called the Waynesville House. For the next 110 years, it housed soldiers through both world wars, Korea, and the early Vietnam years, plus tourists on Route 66. But by the 1950s and 60s, it deteriorated. New motels near expanding Fort Leonard Wood made it obsolete. By the late 1960s, it was vacant. In 1980, it was listed on the National Register as the Old Stagecoach Stop, but that didn't save it. In December 1982, the city condemned it as a hazardous building. Local citizens formed the Old Stagecoach Stop Foundation in June 1983, bought it for $50,000, and spent nine years fundraising—bake sales to concerts—to pay off the note by spring 1992. Today it's a museum, each room restored to a different period.