Odell: One More Gas Station That Outlasted the Road

Odell is a small village in Livingston County where Route Sixty-Six cut through the flat northeastern Illinois corn belt, a stretch of the highway with little topography and a lot of sky. The town's marker on the Route Sixty-Six map today is a single building: a nineteen thirty-two Standard Oil station on the main road that the village bought in nineteen ninety-nine and restored with the Illinois Route Sixty-Six Association and other partners after decades of neglect. Like the gas station in neighboring Dwight, the Odell station represents what travelers along this corridor needed most in the highway's early decades, a reliable place to fill a tank and check the oil in an era when cars required much more attention per hundred miles than they do today.

The station is now a welcome center for the village and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is the kind of building that would have been demolished without the Route Sixty-Six preservation movement's arrival in the nineteen nineties.