Spencer, Missouri: The Man Who Bet on the Road

Spencer started as a mill community in the eighteen sixties, got a post office in eighteen sixty-eight, and then slowly faded. What brought it back was a rumor. In the mid-nineteen twenties a man named Sidney Casey heard a store in Spencer was for sale and that a brand-new road was about to pass right in front of it.

The road was Route sixty-six. Casey bought the property in nineteen twenty-five and built a new store in nineteen twenty-six, built a gas station in twenty-seven, added a diner and barbershop in twenty-eight. For three decades travelers stopped here in the Ozark hills.

Then in nineteen sixty-one the highway was realigned a mile away and Spencer went quiet again. New owners bought the property in two thousand twenty-two and are now restoring the station and store toward their original nineteen twenties look, making Spencer one of the most intact rural Route sixty-six crossroads in Missouri.