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10 years in the making, Lincoln adds 2 new Route 66 landmarks
By Kevin Barlow
kbarlow@pantagraph.com
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LINCOLN -- There are now two new stops in Lincoln on the official Route 66 History Tour.

Volunteers with the Illinois Route 66 Association Preservation Committee placed signs this week at The Mill, a long-closed restaurant at 738 S. Washington St., and the Postville Courthouse State Historic Site, 914 Fifth St.

“It took 10 years of work to get us to this point where we could proudly put these signs up,” said Geoff Ladd, executive director for the Abraham Lincoln Tourism Bureau of Logan County. “But that hard work is all worth it because it’s important to preserve these landmarks and make them available for tourists to visit.”

A small ceremony was held at each landmark as Ladd christened the new signs with an official bottle of Route 66 Root Beer. He was joined by volunteers John and Lenore Weiss, John Sutton and Shirley Bartelmay, coordinator for the Postville site.

The Route 66 roadside attraction program began in 1996 as a grass-roots project of the preservation committee. It began as a way to identify sites where the committee had done preservation work, but it soon became a way to identify additional sites that contain elements of Route 66 significance.

Currently, there are 25 locations on Route 66 in Illinois that are listed as official roadside attractions.

Postville Courthouse is a reproduction of Logan County’s first seat of county government. Serving from 1840 to 1848, the original building was one of the courthouses in which Abraham Lincoln argued cases while traveling the historic Eighth Judicial Circuit.

Built in 1929 as a takeout sandwich shop along historic Route 66, the Mill is a classic example of early American roadside architecture. The building resembles a windmill.

The managers’ children dressed in traditional Dutch outfits to attract customers on opening day.

The restaurant was abandoned in 1996. Despite years of vacancy and general deterioration, the historic site remains a nostalgic landmark along the “Mother Road.”

In 2006, the Route 66 Heritage Foundation of Logan County acquired the property and stabilized the building, but its future remains uncertain. It recently was added by Landmarks Illinois, a statewide preservation advocacy group, to its list of the 10 most endangered historic sites in Illinois.

“It’s not an easy process to get official historic site signs through the state of Illinois,” John Weiss said. “This is a controlled program that must be approved before the signage is allowed. If this was not the case, then the program would lose its significance and identity.

“We are proud that the Postville Courthouse and the Old Mill restaurant restoration projects are becoming part of this selective group of Route 66 Roadside Attractions,” he said.

Both sites will be included in a planned brochure featuring the official Route 66 attractions in Illinois.

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