If you grew up traveling Route 66, there’s a good chance you remember a service station. Maybe it wasn’t the destination, but it became part of the trip. Your parents pulled in for gas, you stretched your legs, grabbed a soda from the cooler or wandered toward a rack of postcards while someone cleaned the windshield. The stop only lasted a few minutes before everyone piled back into the car, but it became part of the rhythm of traveling. Looking back, those ordinary moments are often the ones people remember most.
At the time, they didn’t seem important. They were simply part of the journey.
That’s one of the reasons so few of those places still exist today. Service stations were built to serve a purpose, not to become historic landmarks. As the interstate highway system changed the way Americans traveled, many of the family-owned stations that once lined Route 66 quietly disappeared. Some were replaced by larger convenience stores. Others closed when traffic moved elsewhere. A few were remodeled beyond recognition. Along with the buildings went thousands of small stories that had connected travelers to the communities they passed through.
Route 66 has always been different from most highways because it was never just about getting somewhere. It encouraged people to slow down. Travelers stopped for lunch at local cafés, spent the night in family-owned motels and asked for directions from people who had lived along the road their entire lives. Every town added something different to the trip, and every stop became part of the experience. Missouri has always played an important role in that story. When U.S. Route 66 was established in 1926, it crossed the state from St. Louis to Joplin before continuing toward Oklahoma. For decades, it carried families on summer vacations, truck drivers hauling freight, military personnel heading to new assignments and thousands of people chasing opportunity farther west. The road helped shape communities all across Missouri, and those communities, in turn, helped shape what people came to think of as the Route 66 experience.
It wasn’t the pavement that made the Mother Road memorable. It was everything built beside it.
That’s what makes Campbell’s Service in Pacific feel different from many museums dedicated to Route 66. It certainly has the pieces visitors expect to see. Restored gas pumps stand beside porcelain signs that once advertised familiar brands. Shelves hold vintage oil cans, road maps, license plates and advertising that disappeared from everyday life decades ago. There are countless objects that immediately transport visitors back to another era of American travel. After spending a little time there, though, you begin to realize the collection isn’t really about the artifacts. It’s about the people who used them. Every gas pump reminds someone of filling the family station wagon before a vacation. Every road map recalls a time when getting lost was simply part of the adventure. Old advertising signs, once overlooked as ordinary business materials, now tell the story of how communities welcomed travelers long before interstate exits looked nearly identical from one state to the next. The museum exists because one person recognized that those everyday pieces of history were worth saving.
For years, Duane Campbell quietly assembled what would become one of the Midwest’s most significant private Route 66 collections. His interest wasn’t limited to collecting rare objects. He wanted to preserve the experience of traveling the Mother Road, and he understood that experience couldn’t be told through a single artifact. It took hundreds of pieces, each adding another chapter to a much larger story.
He searched for items that many people overlooked. Old service station signs, gas pumps rescued before they were scrapped, advertising displays, maps, globes and memorabilia gradually found their way into the collection. Individually, each object represented a small piece of history. Together, they recreated an America that was slowly disappearing. As the collection grew, Campbell began thinking about its future. Anyone who has spent years building a collection eventually faces the same question. What happens to it next? Too often, collections are divided, sold piece by piece and scattered across the country. Every item survives, but the story they tell together is lost. Campbell hoped for something different.
He wanted the collection to remain intact.
When Larry West learned the collection might become available, he immediately understood why that mattered. West didn’t need to be convinced that Route 66 was worth preserving. Like many Missourians, he already had his own connection to the highway. Family trips along Route 66 had given him memories that stayed with him long after the vacations ended. He remembered the roadside attractions, the local restaurants and the feeling that every small town had its own personality. Long before he considered opening a museum, he appreciated what the Mother Road represented. When he purchased Campbell’s collection, he wasn’t looking to own one of the largest Route 66 collections in the region. He wanted to make sure it stayed together.
Larry West wasn’t simply buying memorabilia. He was accepting responsibility for decades of someone else’s work. Every sign, every gas pump and every map represented years of searching, restoring and preserving. Campbell had spent a lifetime building something that told a story larger than any single artifact, and West understood that breaking the collection apart would mean losing part of that story forever. Instead, he found a permanent home for it. The museum now occupies a former church in Pacific, a building that probably wasn’t designed with Route 66 in mind but somehow feels perfectly suited for it. Rather than trying to recreate an old service station, the space lets the collection speak for itself. Visitors aren’t guided through a carefully choreographed experience as much as they’re invited to wander. One display leads naturally to another, and before long it’s easy to lose track of time. In many museums, visitors spend most of their time reading labels. At Campbell’s Service, they spend much of their time talking to one another. The artifacts become prompts for memories that had been sitting quietly for years. It doesn’t matter whether someone grew up along Route 66 or simply traveled it once. Before long they’re telling stories about places they remember, people they met or trips they thought they had forgotten.
That may be the museum’s greatest accomplishment.
It doesn’t just preserve Route 66 history. It reminds visitors of their own. That’s one reason the collection has remained so meaningful. Although the museum now belongs to Larry West, it is still unmistakably Duane Campbell’s collection. West intentionally kept it intact because that was important to Campbell, and because the collection tells a more complete story together than it ever could divided among dozens of owners.