Day 3 (continued). Thursday 9 Feb. Springfield to Granite City on the banks of the Mississippi. The next morning I crossed over to Missouri. To the left is a vintage postcard of the Chain of Rocks Bridge which was the prior Route 66 crossing (more on that next post); at the end of day 3 I stayed not all that far away from where that is.
This drive was through one old town after another. It was yet another fantastic day on Route 66 in the Illinois prairie. Virden, Girard, Carlinville, Litchfield, Mt. Olive and more. Yes, these places really exist – it is not the Twilight Zone. Most of this set consists of pictures taken on an older alignment of Route 66; they were already bypassed by a re-routing of Route 66 in 1940. Time has seemingly stood still since then.
I had lunch at Doc’s Soda Fountain in Girard (formerly, Deck’s Drug Store, 1884). The Deck family closed the pharmacy in 2001 and it reopened as a soda fountain and café in 2007 with the Deck pharmacy collection in back. That’s the Ladies Club having a meet-up. Fantastic root beer. Priceless.
One of my later stops was in Mt. Olive which boasts another beauty of a gas station (1926) and the resting place of Mother Jones herself in the Union Miners Cemetery there. The Virden miners rest with her, too. The Virden Massacre, on October 12, 1898, was an infamous labor union conflict in Virden (north of Mt. Olive on this stretch of Route 66 and also a stop this day – see below) involving the United Mine Workers of America and the Chicago-Virden Coal Company in which seven miners were killed (as were four security guards) and another 30 people wounded. Read about the the Union Miners Cemetery here (from a labor perspective). The first four shots in this set are Virden; in the fourth, one can see the railway crossing. The confrontation (and the violent result) took place along those tracks.
As the light was waning and I neared the Mississippi I got those shots of the historic Luna Cafe on Chain of Rocks Road, Granite City IL. I can’t always get the old neon signs when the lights are on, but this time I did and at just the right time.
