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On a curving Missouri segment of Route 66 between Springfield and Carthage lies what is left of Spencer, a cheery bit of which we see here in this 8x10 documentary art photo. The door on the rock and stone building is brand new-wooden frame and spindles painted a bright white. The red, white, and blue Holsum bread door sign, the focus of my photo, is likely vintage (or at least a reproduction). Proclaiming that the store behind the door offers "Fresh Holsum Bread", it seems that the sign doesn't realize that though the old stone building's walls still stand, there is no roof!

It's an odd sight as we look through the perfect, unharmed screen door below the Holsum sign to see weathered but impressive slab rock walls rising up to reveal the bright blue sky above them. I immediately knelt down to take this photograph-sights like this aren't all that unusual along 66, but this was prettily perfect: the warm russets and creams of the slab stone walls and the weathered door frame just inside the screen contrasting with that charming, brand-new door and screen and vintage blue Holsum bread sign-all beneath a perfect cerulean spring sky.

I don't know where the roof of this 1920s row of buildings went, but perhaps someday it will be replaced and this little watcher of Route 66 will bustle again (maybe even selling bread, though I don't think Holsum is around anymore). Several years ago, a Kansas couple purchased the property from its original owner, and have been working on restoring this part of a tiny little Route 66 town, one that truly lived and died with the Mother Road.

Professionally printed on archival-quality 8x10 photograph paper, this photo of a semi-abandoned Route 66 shop has a white border for easy framing and to protect the image itself. I sign, date, and number each photo on back prior to mailing it.

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Founded in 1876, Spencer, Missouri was a ghost town by the time Titanic sank in 1912; it was with the birth of Route 66 that Spencer came to life with a dry goods store, a small supermarket, a filling station and auto body shop (of course!) and a barbershop. Sadly, after the opening of I-44, fewer and fewer cars rumbled over the 1923 "pony bridge" crossing Johnson Creek into Spencer, and the town faded into silence once again.

Though Spencer is still a bit of a ghost town, with just a handful of buildings, it is my hope and the hope of many other "Routies" that the new owners of this row of old stone buildings can turn them into yet another marvellous stopping-point for those journeying along the Mother Road. As they've already spruced up the rock buildings with new doors and windows, as well as vintage signs like the pretty red, white, and blue Holsum bread door ad, it seems to me that these 1920s buildings are in good hands!

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