Clementine: The Basket Weavers of Route 66

If you look for Clementine, Missouri on a map you'll find a crossroads ghost, but for a few decades it was one of the more distinctive stops on the old road. The community had a post office from eighteen ninety-one until nineteen twenty-six, when Route Sixty-Six arrived and shifted traffic patterns. Clementine was not really a town so much as a cluster of roadside stands where Ozark craftspeople sold hand-woven hickory baskets and turned-wood objects.

Baskets strung on wires beside the highway were the local trademark. Travelers reportedly called the settlement the Ozark Basket Weavers. When Interstate Forty-Four was built through the area, new lanes erased the old westbound alignment through Clementine entirely.

The craft community dissolved, the road moved on, and the name lingered on almost nothing.