A group of Route 66 enthusiasts has amassed an online image collection of about 650 matchbox covers from businesses in Texas that existed along the Mother Road, and they now looking for submissions from the other seven states.
Phil Gordon stated in an email that contributors who scanned and uploaded images of the matchcovers have included Steve Rider of New York, Mike Ward of Arizona, Kevin Fleming of California, Clem Pater of Ohio, Dan Bitter of Oklahoma, Mike Hothan of Missouri, Loren Moore of California, John Bachochin of Oklahoma, John Mathot of California and Dave Nudleman of Texas.
The matchcover database, which is searchable, can be found here.
Gordon believes about 100 other matchcovers along Route 66 in Texas are waiting to be scanned and uploaded.
That brings us to growing the database beyond the Lone Star State:
We hope to expand the database to other Route 66 states. It could be a slow process, though, as building this Texas database was nearly a two-year effort. Ouch! But now that we are down a learning curve it could go faster.
Matchcover collecting is kind of a visual hobby to be sure but matchcovers can make an interesting complement to postcards and other paper in determining the history of businesses along Route 66. Texas Route 66 fans in particular should enjoy the images on the website.
The matchcovers are sorted in default order by towns in Texas from east to west, from Shamrock to Glenrio. Within each town the businesses are sorted alphabetically. Matchcovers usually say “66” on them somewhere but others do not so the street address or other information places the business on Highway 66. We limited the matchcover images from businesses that a traveler would likely patronize so most are lodging, eating and auto servicing establishments. But a few other business types are also represented. […]
Some matchcover collectors are picky and they consider any difference in a matchcover’s artwork to be a reason to collect that cover and consider it a different member of their collection. Therefore viewers of this data base will find many examples where a matchcover image appears to be identical to another image from the same business yet a difference will exist in some subtle way, such as the manufacturer’s name, or telephone number, or text style or alignment. If the artwork for two matchcovers is identical but the colors used to print the matchcover are different, we considered those covers to be identical and we did not include all the various color combinations of the same artwork.
One challenge in sorting the online collection was the Texas-New Mexico border town of Glenrio (often listed as Glen Rio) because of some uncertainty of which side of the border the business sat and the fact the village had only one post office. Gordon said they’re now fairly certain which side of the line the businesses operated, and anything on the New Mexico side will be included in the forthcoming New Mexico database.
Gordon said anyone who owns a Route 66 matchbook cover that is not in the database should scan it and email it to him to pgord5_5 (at) yahoo (dot) com for possible inclusion.
“We’re looking forward to getting more viewers of the Texas Route 66 matchcover database and seeing if we can get more images or content,” he wrote. “I will also contact the Route 66 Association of Texas as they apparently distribute a monthly email newsletter to also get some more publicity.”
Gordon’s main website also contains scans of postcards and other paper collectibles from the Mother Road. Check it out.
(Matchbook cover image of the U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas, via the Texas Route 66 matchcover database)
Wow, what a cool idea! Awesome!