History Museum on the Square

Under the federal highway plan of 1925 the Chicago to Los Angeles road was to be US 60, until Kentucky's governor, William J. Fields, persuaded officials to put 60 on a road through his state from Newport News to Springfield, Missouri, and to number the Chicago route 62. Cyrus Avery of Oklahoma and Missouri's chief highway engineer said they would take only 60. Then, in a meeting in Springfield, Avery noticed that 66 was unclaimed, and on April 30, 1926, a telegram went from the Colonial Hotel to federal officials accepting it. The route was approved on November 11, 1926. The next year the US Highway 66 Association was founded with a Springfield lawyer, John T. Woodruff, as its first president.

That story anchors the museum's Birthplace of Route 66 gallery, where a turquoise 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible sits in the John T. Woodruff Theater and interactive neon recalls local stops such as Red's Giant Hamburg, Sanders' Standard Oil station and the Sunset Drive-In. The museum began as a Bicentennial exhibit in 1975 and opened here, in the renovated Barth's Building, on August 8, 2019.

Another gallery tells of the Osage, Kickapoo and Delaware people who lived in the Springfield country and of their forced removal west, around Andy Thomas's mural The Trail of Tears through Springfield, painted for the room. The Northern Route ran through the city, roughly along the later Missouri Pacific line toward Wilson's Creek, and its first party passed in December 1837.