Hackberry General Store: What Preservation Actually Preserves

Hackberry, Arizona, is a small settlement on the original Route Sixty-Six alignment in Mohave County, between Seligman and Kingman on the quietest surviving stretch of the highway in the state. The general store that stands here was a working gas station and roadside stop during the Route Sixty-Six decades, serving the traffic that the highway carried through a landscape with very little else in it. When the bypass came and the traffic left, the store closed.

In nineteen ninety-two, Bob Waldmire, the Route Sixty-Six illustrator who spent his working life on the highway, used the Hackberry property as a base during one of his Route Sixty-Six periods. The store subsequently changed hands and reopened as a combination working shop and Route Sixty-Six museum, selling memorabilia from a building that is itself genuine Route Sixty-Six infrastructure.

This is the most honest model for Route Sixty-Six preservation: a commercial operation selling the memory of a commercial operation, in a building built for commerce, on a road built for travel. Nothing about it is false. The vintage gas pumps out front are authentic. The Route Sixty-Six signage on the walls was removed from actual Route Sixty-Six locations. The car parked out front as a decoration was once someone's actual car. Bob Waldmire's illustrated maps are for sale inside.

The Hackberry store is also what Route Sixty-Six preservation critics mean when they note that the revival economy has a complicated relationship to the history it commemorates. The business model is essentially the same as the original: serve the traveler, sell the traveler something, wave goodbye when they leave. The traveler is now coming for the nostalgia rather than the gasoline. The economics are otherwise quite similar.