Ghost Towns of Route 66 Read Free Page B

highway here: gas stations, cafes, antique shops, stores.” Today, traffic still flows through town on State Highway 266 but not in volume enough to support the businesses noted by Rittenhouse. Even with the resurgent interest in Route 66, Halltown slumbers.

    The overgrown ruins of a former casket company are among the last remnants of Plano.
    Join State Highway 266 at exit 72 on Interstate 44 west of Springfield. Continue west to Spencer and the junction with State Highway 96. Highway 96 continues to Avilla.

    The remnants from Halltown’s glory days, such as this stone duplex, stand in silent testimony to more prosperous times.
    The stunning time capsule that is the refurbished Gay Parita Garage and Sinclair station dominates Paris Springs Junction. Many modern maps inadvertently list this as Paris Springs even though the site of the town founded in 1870 that lent its name to the junction is actually a half mile north of this intersection.
    Name changes and confusion over them are merely part of the colorful history of the site. The first settlement, called ChalybeateSprings, became Johnson Mills after O. P. Johnson of Cherry & Johnson established a mill to grind flour and cornmeal, as well as a chair factory, a sawmill, and a wool mill on Clover Creek.
    DON’T MISS
    The Halltown Cemetery, also known as the Rock Prairie Cemetery, is a somber place that invites reflection amid the monuments under ancient trees. The cemetery dates to about 1840 and, during the Civil War, was used by both Confederate and Union forces.

    The Whitehall Mercantile, now an antiques shop, has cast a shadow across the road for more than a century.
    By 1872, when Eli Paris opened a spa and hotel to capitalize on the purported healing powers of the mineral-rich springs, the town also sported a wagon manufacturing enterprise and a profitable blacksmith shop. The spa led to the next and final name change.
    When the newly built Route 66 bypassed the fading little community by half a mile, a number of entrepreneurial-minded citizens opened businesses at the junction—and Paris Springs Junction was born. This proved to be the death knell for Paris Springs, and today, very little remains to mark the site.
    One of the first buildings raised at the intersection was a cobblestone-faced garage, followed four years later by a Sinclair station. Business was brisk at the Gay Parita Garage, and in the years that followed, owners Gay and Fred Mason added a small café and several cabins. But all good things must end, and for the Masons and Paris Springs Junction, the beginning of the end came in 1953 with the death of Gay and, two years later, the destruction of the Sinclair station by fire.
    The decommissioning of Route 66 and the bypass by Interstate 44 completed the first chapter of the building’s history. Unlike many properties along the old double six, however, the Gay Parita Garage and even the old Sinclair station received a new lease on life with the acquisition of the property by Gary and Lena Turner.
    West of Rolla, at the intersection of County Road T, is a well-worn wide spot in the road designated by a sign as Doolittle. Jack Rittenhouse notes in his 1946 guidebook that Doolittle is “a community loosely strung along about two miles of highway.”
    Counted among the services strung along the road was Ramsey’s Garage. The 1946 edition of the AAA
Service Station Directory
lists this as the only recommended repair facility.
    Originally called Centerville, the community found itself in the international spotlight for but a moment on October 10, 1946. That was the day Medal of Honor recipient General Jimmy Doolittle landed his plane on the eastbound lane of U.S. 66 to attend the ceremony in which the town was renamed in his honor.
    Under the Turners’ careful stewardship, the store and café are now a residence, with the front façade appearing as it did during the 1930s. The garage and resurrected Sinclair station