Dwight: Old Fellows Drug Store and the Last Old Pump

Dwight, Illinois, is one of the first Route Sixty-Six towns southwest of Chicago, a farm-service community in Livingston County that began along the Chicago and Alton Railroad in eighteen fifty-four. For Route Sixty-Six travelers heading out of Chicago, Dwight was where the city's gravity started to release and the Illinois prairie opened ahead. The town's most visited landmark today is a restored nineteen thirty-three Standard Oil gas station on the old highway alignment, one of a handful of original Route Sixty-Six filling stations that has survived and been restored to its Depression-era appearance, right down to the red crown logo and the globe pump.

Dwight also has a history as the location of the Keeley Institute, a nineteenth-century facility that treated alcoholism with a then-controversial gold chloride treatment. Patients came from across the country. Some of the institute's buildings still stand on the grounds of a former hospital campus, now partly used by the state as a developmental center.