The long-closed Wayside Inn bar near Hazelgreen, Missouri, reputedly once was said to be a motel, but recently uncovered evidence has refuted that claim.
It goes to show that even as Route 66 approaches its centennial, new or obscure information can be unearthed about the highway and its businesses.
Gary Sosniecki, a longtime journalist, posted at least two stories on the Lebanon-Laclede County Route 66 Society website about Rich Green and his Wayside Inn.
In the first, Green was soliciting information about the bar east of Hazelgreen, which he believed to have earlier been called the Central Motel, owned by the late Ed Lentz. Recent editions of the Laclede County Route 66 Guide & Map identified it as the Central Motel, and Green put up a sign on the building that stated it as such.
Recent research determined the Central Motel actually was on Highway AB (aka Route 66) about two miles away. But Green and others still believed the property was an old Route 66 motel and were searching for its name.
An update initially reported a historian writing for Show Me Route 66 magazine in 1995 identified the building as Hancock’s Motel, dating to 1945.
But that wasn’t correct, either.
“It was never meant to be a motel,” Glenda Watson, a history buff who lives nearby, said late Tuesday afternoon after talking to Pat Hancock, whose parents, Neil and Mildred, built it. “Her dad built it to be apartments.”
The mystery, which triggered dozens of comments after a Route 66 Society interview with Green was posted Saturday to two Facebook pages, appeared to come to an end Tuesday morning just as Green was wrapping up an interview with KY3 morning anchor Chad Plein.
At that time, Watson gave Green a printout of an email from a lifelong friend who grew up just east of the property. The friend’s memory was that the Hancocks “worked like dogs” to build a cinder-block motel with 12 units. But a dispute with the state over a property line caused the project to be downsized to six units. […]
Hancock told Watson that she helped lay the blocks as a child and lived in one of the apartments when she got married. Hancock said her parents rented the apartments to military families.
“She said the highway (New Route 66/Interstate 44) was supposed to come through and take the whole thing,” Watson said. Hancock’s father removed all the furnishings, but the highway then was routed to the north. The building survived.
Elva Lea Stewart converted two of the apartments into a bar during the 1960s, and it operated until 1997.
Green, who inherited the property about a decade ago, said he’d like to eventually reopen the Wayside Inn as a flea market, antique shop or pizza parlor.
KY3 has its story about the Wayside Inn here.
(Screen-capture image from KY3 video of the Wayside Inn bar near Hazelgreen, Missouri)