Visitors of all ages had the chance to explore the Route 66 Centennial Traveling Exhibit at the Lebanon-Laclede County Library last Thursday and Friday, which celebrated the multifaceted histories of the Route 66, also known as the Mother Road.
The free exhibit, whose website notes was made possible with the help of the Missouri Route 66 Association, Missouri Humanities, the Missouri Centennial Commission and other contributions, visited the library as part of a larger tour last week and also held a panel Thursday evening. The road’s 100th anniversary is this year.
Those who shared their family's stories for documentaries like the exhibit, exhibit producer and educational content creator Kari Kussmann said during the panel, made their stories' retelling possible.
While many people think that their family history is normal or not particularly interesting, she said, those oral histories and other included historical items can reveal new parts of history.
“And so I think that if there’s anything we’ve, I feel like we’ve taken away from this, is that every single family, every single person is part of history,” she said, “and you have a story to tell. And when you do, it really enriches a historical study, the historical record.”
The family-friendly exhibit had panels and videos that showcased a wide range of Route 66 history and culture, including giraffe rock masonry, inventions, and local entrepreneur Arthur T. Nelson. Passports for the exhibit added to the tour younger visitors took.
Documentary film director and visual media specialist Katrina Parks said Thursday before the panel that the children (there were three school groups in addition to other visitors that day) who explored the exhibit responded to it well.
This was a sort of soft opening, she explained, and the first time the project creators had seen the exhibit fully laid out.
Having researched Route 66 history in her previous work, some of the new information Parks learned for this exhibit was related to Lebanon and Cuba, Missouri’s Route 66 history.
During Thursday’s panel, where Parks and Kussman as well as Larry Sernyk, scientist, preservationist and Missouri Route 66 Association chief financial officer, discussed some of how their backgrounds connected to the Mother Road, like Sernyk’s experiences with friend and artist Lowell Davis’s Red Oak II. The panel also discussed the road’s international reputation and the topic of sharing history.
The library partnered with the exhibit for the event. Kussman and Parks talked about the value of libraries in preserving and sharing history.
There are also free lesson plans and activities for the third grade and up available through the exhibit’s website or directly on the “Route 66: The Untold Story of Women on the Mother Road” website. The exhibit’s website noted they could be used together with the exhibit.
Kussman said the project had collected many valuable primary sources available in the lesson plans with the goal of getting younger people involved in history.
“Both of us are historians, and we are also public historians, so we believe in the idea that history is something that anyone can interpret, that we should dialogue about, that we should take outside of the classrooms and outside of universities.
“And so we really want to encourage everyone but especially young people to feel empowered to look at primary sources, to watch these oral histories, and help us interpret the past so we can better understand our present,” she said.
The rest of the exhibit’s Missouri tour schedule runs through September.
From April 30-May 2, the exhibit will be at the Gillioz Theatre Gallery in Springfield. From May 3-Sept. 13, it will be at the Crawford County Historical Society in Cuba. It will be at the Red Cedar Inn Museum and Visitor Center Sept. 16-17, and Sept. 18-20 it will be at Red Oak II in Carthage, Missouri.
Kussman said the hope was to create a much larger exhibit that could travel more extensively in the future.
