Lexington, Illinois: Corn Belt Town on the Mother Road

Lexington was established in eighteen thirty-six in McLean County, making it one of the older settlements along the central Illinois Route Sixty-Six corridor. It sits in the heart of the Grand Prairie, the agricultural expanse that nineteenth-century settlers initially passed over because the dense sod was too tough for wooden plows. It was John Deere's steel plow and the railroad's arrival in the eighteen fifties and sixties that finally broke the prairie open for farming.

By the time Route Sixty-Six was designated in nineteen twenty-six, Lexington was a prosperous farm-service town with grain elevators visible from the highway. The road brought a gas station economy on top of the farm economy, motels and diners serving the stream of traffic moving between Chicago and the Southwest. The Lexington area also keeps stretches of old Route Sixty-Six pavement, part of a road that was paved here as early as nineteen fifteen.