Welcome to the Route 66 Hall of Fame & Museum
For travelers driving Historic Route 66 through Illinois, there is a moment in Pontiac when the highway stops being a road and becomes a story. That moment happens at 110 West Howard Street — the address of the Route 66 Association of Illinois Hall of Fame and Museum, housed in the city’s beautifully restored historic firehouse. This is Illinois’s definitive Route 66 museum: the official repository for thousands of artifacts, photographs, and memorabilia from the Mother Road’s golden era; the home of the legendary Bob Waldmire Experience; the backdrop for the world’s largest painted Route 66 Shield Mural; and one of the most visited and most warmly reviewed Route 66 attractions in the entire state. Free to enter, staffed by passionate volunteers, and rich enough to keep even the most seasoned Route 66 enthusiast occupied for hours, it is an essential stop on any Illinois road trip.
Where Is the Route 66 Hall of Fame & Museum?
The museum is located at 110 West Howard Street, Pontiac, Illinois 61764, between Main and Mill Streets in the heart of downtown Pontiac. The city sits approximately 100 miles southwest of Chicago and about 80 miles northeast of Springfield, just off Interstate 55 at exit 197. From the interstate, follow Illinois Route 116 approximately two miles east into downtown and turn right onto Howard Street. The museum — unmistakable thanks to the enormous Route 66 Shield Mural on its exterior wall — occupies the corner of Howard and Main Streets on the south side of the block. It is the anchor of Pontiac’s remarkable downtown museum district and the first major Route 66 museum many travelers encounter after leaving Chicago on the Mother Road.
History of the Museum and the Hall of Fame
The Illinois Route 66 Hall of Fame: Origins in 1990
The Illinois Route 66 Association Hall of Fame predates the Pontiac museum by more than a decade. The Hall of Fame was established in 1990 as a formal mechanism for recognizing the individuals, families, and businesses that had made significant contributions to the history, culture, and preservation of Route 66 in Illinois. From the beginning, the Hall of Fame was conceived not just as an honor roll but as a living institution — a way to keep the stories of the road’s people alive for future generations.
In the years that followed, the Hall of Fame grew steadily, adding inductees who spanned the full range of Route 66 life: motel owners and diner founders, gas station operators and roadside attraction entrepreneurs, artists and preservationists, historians and community leaders. Each inductee brought a distinct chapter of the Mother Road’s story, and together they formed a portrait of American highway culture that no single exhibit could have assembled on its own.
A New Home in Pontiac: 2004
The Hall of Fame’s exhibits were originally housed in McLean, Illinois, but by the early 2000s the collection had outgrown its space and the organization was searching for a new permanent home. Pontiac stepped forward with an extraordinary offer: the city’s historic former City Hall and Firehouse building at 110 West Howard Street. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Romanesque Revival brick building — constructed in 1891 — proved nearly ideal: spacious, architecturally distinguished, centrally located, and carrying its own layer of civic history. Using a tax increment financing program, the city helped bring the building up to code and carry out the renovations needed to transform it into a proper museum.
The Illinois Route 66 Association Hall of Fame and Museum opened in 2004 and immediately became one of the most celebrated Route 66 attractions in Illinois. The city of Pontiac had been largely off the Route 66 tourism map before the museum’s arrival; within years, it had become one of the most visited stops on the entire Illinois corridor. Today, the museum is the centerpiece of a museum complex that spans multiple floors and adjacent buildings, housing not only the Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum but also the Livingston County War Museum, the Walldog Mural and Sign Art Exhibit, the Bob Waldmire Experience, the Life in the 1940s exhibit, and several other permanent and rotating collections.
Inside the Museum: What to Expect
The Main Gallery: Illinois Route 66 from Start to Finish
The heart of the museum is its main gallery on the first floor, where visitors encounter thousands of artifacts and memorabilia items tracing Route 66 in Illinois from its 1926 commissioning to its 1985 decommissioning and beyond. Display cases, wall exhibits, and freestanding installations guide visitors through the full 301-mile Illinois corridor — from the official starting point in downtown Chicago to the Chain of Rocks Bridge at the Mississippi River. As one longtime museum guide famously observed, “People will come in and they’ll read everything. Everything. They’ll be here for hours.”
The collection includes vintage gas pumps and original neon signs; road maps spanning the eight Route 66 states; license plates from every era of the highway’s life; vintage photographs, some rare and never before published; postcards, diner menus, motel keys, and roadside advertising materials; miniature dioramas depicting famous Route 66 scenes; and original signage from businesses that once lined the Mother Road. The cumulative effect is overwhelming in the best sense — a dense, lovingly curated archive of the culture that grew up around America’s most famous highway.
The Hall of Fame Wall: Honoring the People of the Road
A defining feature of the museum is the Hall of Fame itself — large display boards lining the walls with photographs, biographies, and stories of every person and business inducted since 1990. Inductees range from motel owners in small Illinois towns to artists who spent decades drawing the road’s vanishing landscapes, from diner founders who fed generations of travelers to preservationists who fought to keep the highway’s memory alive when the interstate threatened to erase it entirely. Reading these inductee profiles is one of the most humanizing experiences the museum offers — a reminder that Route 66’s story is, at its core, the story of individual people who chose to make their lives along the road.
Artifacts from Vanished Illinois Route 66 Icons
Some of the museum’s most treasured exhibits belong to Route 66 businesses that no longer exist, preserved here as the only surviving evidence of their time. Among the most famous is a set of original diner booths from the world’s first Steak ‘n Shake, which operated in Normal, Illinois on Route 66 and closed in the 1990s. The booths were rescued by Hall of Fame member Chester Henry, who saved them specifically for the future museum. They have proved so popular with visitors — who sit in them, as visitors sat in the 1930s and 1940s — that the museum has had to repair the upholstery more than once.
Another notable exhibit is a lithograph by Ken Turmel, known as the “postmark artist.” Turmel drove the entire length of Route 66 and stopped at every post office along the way, having each one stamp his hand-drawn Route 66 map. He printed exactly 2,448 copies — one for each mile of the highway. The Pontiac museum holds one of them. Other artifacts include items from the legendary Cozy Dog Drive-In in Springfield — paper hot-dog sheaths and 1950s-era posters from the diner that claims to have invented the corn dog on a stick — and a 78-rpm record of Bobby Troup’s iconic hit song “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66,” which did as much as the highway itself to keep the road’s name alive in the American imagination.
The museum also preserves a vintage Wishing Well Motel neon sign from the original Wishing Well Motel, which opened in 1941 in Countryside, Illinois near Chicago, operated for decades, and was demolished in 2006. The sign — a glowing artifact of mid-century roadside design — stands near the museum’s exterior as a memorial to the thousands of motels that once lined Route 66 and are now almost entirely gone.
Route 66 Photo Journal by Michael Campanelli
Upstairs, the museum houses a significant photographic exhibition: a series of images by photographer Michael Campanelli titled the “Route 66 Photo Journal.” Campanelli’s photographs capture the spirit of the Mother Road with documentary precision and emotional depth — the faded diners, abandoned motels, crumbling alignments, and resilient roadside characters that define Route 66’s contemporary landscape. For visitors who have never driven the full highway, Campanelli’s images offer a vivid preview of what awaits. For those who have, they serve as a deeply resonant reminder.
Life in the 1940s Exhibit
Among the most immersive exhibits in the museum complex is the “Life in the 1940s” display — four fully furnished rooms recreating the domestic and commercial environments of Route 66’s wartime and postwar heyday. Complete with period furniture, household goods, and the kind of carefully sourced knick-knacks that define a decade, the exhibit transforms an abstract historical era into something immediate and tactile. Visitors who grew up in the 1940s often find themselves overcome with recognition; younger visitors find themselves genuinely surprised by how different — and how similar — life was then. The adjacent “Stage Door Canteen” invites visitors to relax and enjoy vintage 1940s music.
The Bob Waldmire Experience: The Soul of the Museum
If the main gallery is the museum’s brain, the Bob Waldmire Experience is its soul. Located on the second floor of the museum complex, this dedicated exhibit honors one of the most beloved figures in Route 66 history: Robert Waldmire (1945–2009), artist, cartographer, naturalist, and wanderer — described by one Route 66 historian as the “Johnny Appleseed of Route 66’s revival.”
Who Was Bob Waldmire?
Bob Waldmire was a Springfield, Illinois native who spent decades traveling Route 66 in his iconic converted vehicles, drawing extraordinarily detailed bird’s-eye maps and whimsical illustrations of the road’s towns, businesses, landscapes, and characters. His artwork — intricate, affectionate, and infused with a deep naturalist’s eye for detail — was instrumental in nurturing the national enthusiasm for preserving Route 66 at a time when the interstate system had left much of it crumbling and forgotten. He was the son of Ed Waldmire, the Springfield entrepreneur who invented the Cozy Dog — the corn dog on a stick served to this day at the Cozy Dog Drive-In, one of the most celebrated stops on Springfield’s Route 66.
Bob’s orange 1972 VW Microbus — which he drove across Route 66 for years, the rolling studio from which he produced much of his artwork — was the direct inspiration for the character Fillmore in Pixar’s animated film Cars (2006), voiced by comedian George Carlin. Pixar approached Waldmire about naming the character “Waldmire,” but Bob declined — he was unwilling to sell marketing rights to Disney for merchandise to appear in McDonald’s Happy Meals. The character became Fillmore instead, but the story of the negotiation has become part of Route 66 lore.
The Exhibit and the VW Microbus
The Bob Waldmire Experience traces the full arc of Waldmire’s artistic and spiritual development — from his early career as a poster-map artist, through his discovery of Route 66, to his years running the Hackberry General Store in Arizona and his final decade as the most celebrated advocate for preserving the Mother Road. The exhibit displays original artwork, sketchbooks, maps, and personal items that reflect his nomadic, deeply principled lifestyle.
At the center of the exhibit is the orange 1972 VW Microbus itself — Bob’s beloved vehicle, lovingly preserved inside the museum. For Route 66 pilgrims who grew up with his maps, or who loved Fillmore in Cars, or who simply know Bob’s reputation as the road’s great wandering artist, standing beside this van is one of the most moving moments in the entire Illinois Route 66 corridor. The van is everything you’d expect: paint-worn, road-worn, full of character, and irresistibly alive.
The Road Yacht: Bob’s Mobile Home
Outside the museum — currently being prepared for display at the new Centennial Plaza behind the building — is Bob Waldmire’s Road Yacht: a 1966 Chevrolet school bus that Bob purchased in the 1980s, gutted, and converted into a remarkable mobile home and traveling studio. The Road Yacht is a visual time capsule of Waldmire’s life on the road: his rocking chair made of branches, his rock collection, his Jethro Tull vinyl records, his hand-built sauna and composting toilet, and the thousands of small details that made the bus not just a vehicle but a way of living. Bob Waldmire’s bus is available for tours on the third Saturday of each month from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Check in advance as availability may vary.
Outside the Museum: The World’s Largest Route 66 Shield Mural
Before you even enter the museum, the building announces itself with one of the most photographed sights on the entire Mother Road: the Route 66 Shield Mural on the exterior back wall, painted in 2007 by Diaz Sign Art of Pontiac. Spanning nearly the full height and width of the building’s rear facade, this is the largest painted Route 66 shield in the world — the iconic black double-sixes on a white hexagonal background, rendered at a scale that can be seen from the adjacent parking lot like a billboard for the road itself.
In front of the mural, a short strip of original Route 66 brick pavement — salvaged from the old highway alignment that once ran through Pontiac and re-laid here — creates a dedicated photo area where visitors park their cars, motorcycles, or other vehicles for the classic “me on Route 66” photograph. The spot has hosted cars, motorcycles, a covered wagon, and on at least one occasion a man on stilts. If there is a single Route 66 photo opportunity in Illinois that captures everything — the scale of the road, its visual culture, and the community pride that keeps it alive — this is it.
Centennial Plaza: Coming in 2026
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Route 66, Pontiac is developing a new Centennial Plaza in the space behind the museum complex where the Shield Mural and Road Yacht are located. The plaza — anticipated to open in the summer of 2026 — will feature a custom neon sign designed by Springfield’s Ace Sign Company, a mid-century modern awning to protect Waldmire’s bus during outdoor tours, and a purpose-built drive-up area for shield mural photographs. The project represents Pontiac’s commitment to continuing to invest in Route 66 heritage infrastructure even as the centennial draws in visitors from around the world.
The Historic Firehouse Building
The museum’s home is itself a historic landmark worth appreciating. The Pontiac City Hall and Firehouse, built in 1891 in the Romanesque Revival style, is a two-story brick building with arched windows, stone detailing, and the solid civic gravitas that characterizes the best small-city public architecture of the late 19th century. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and underwent careful renovation before the museum opened in 2004. The space retains much of its original character — high ceilings, brick walls, the feel of a working institutional building repurposed with intelligence and respect. Visiting the museum, you are not just seeing Route 66 artifacts; you are seeing them in a space that has its own century-plus of Illinois history.
The full museum complex across multiple floors also incorporates the original city jail and spaces that once served as Pontiac’s civic administrative center. These layers of history give the building an extra dimension that purpose-built museums rarely achieve.
Other Exhibits in the Museum Complex
Livingston County War Museum
Sharing the building complex is the Livingston County War Museum, a “living history” institution staffed entirely by veteran volunteers and dedicated to honoring the men and women from Livingston County and the surrounding region who have served in the military. The museum features uniforms, artifacts, photographs, and personal memorabilia from conflicts spanning from the Civil War through recent deployments, each item accompanied by the human story behind it. The War Museum is free to enter and is one of the most moving stops in the entire complex.
The Walldog Mural and Sign Art Exhibit
Also within the museum complex is the Walldog Mural and Sign Art Exhibit, celebrating the 2009 Walldog Meet in Pontiac during which more than 150 international sign painters and muralists descended on the city and produced 18 outdoor murals in just four days. The exhibit documents the history and techniques of the Walldog tradition — the traveling sign painters of the early 20th century whose work can still be seen as faded “ghost signs” on barns and buildings across the Midwest — and celebrates the modern artists who carry that tradition forward.
Route 66 Photo Journal by Michael Campanelli
Upstairs, the photographic exhibition by Michael Campanelli documents the full character and texture of Route 66 as it exists today — the surviving diners and gas stations, the abandoned motels and fading alignments, and the communities that have built their identities around the road. The photographs are both beautiful and informative, and they function as an ideal orientation for travelers who are just beginning their Route 66 journey.
Life in the 1940s and the Stage Door Canteen
The four-room “Life in the 1940s” exhibit immerses visitors in the domestic world of Route 66’s wartime and postwar golden age, with period furnishings, household artifacts, and personal effects that bring the era to life with surprising intimacy. Adjacent to the exhibit, the Stage Door Canteen plays vintage 1940s music and creates a gathering space that extends the immersive quality of the nearby rooms.
The Gift Shop
Before leaving, take time to browse the museum’s well-stocked gift shop, which carries Route 66 books, postcards, T-shirts, and souvenirs — including items featuring Bob Waldmire’s distinctive artwork. Many items are locally made or specially produced for the museum, supporting both Illinois artisans and Route 66 preservation efforts. The gift shop is one of the better-curated Route 66 retail selections in the state, and a worthwhile stop for anyone looking to take home something more meaningful than a generic highway trinket.
Planning Your Visit to the Route 66 Hall of Fame & Museum
Getting There
From Interstate 55, take Exit 197 and follow Illinois Route 116 approximately two miles east into downtown Pontiac. Turn right onto Howard Street. The museum is approximately one mile east, at the corner of Howard and Main Streets — you can’t miss the giant Route 66 Shield on the building’s exterior.
Hours and Admission
April through October: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week. November through March: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (verify current hours before visiting). Admission is free; donations are accepted and deeply appreciated. The museum is a volunteer-driven institution that operates on community support.
How Long to Allow
Budget at least 90 minutes for the museum itself, and more if you plan to explore the full museum complex. Combining the Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum with the Pontiac-Oakland Automobile Museum across the street and a walking tour of the downtown murals makes for a full and very rewarding half-day in Pontiac. Many visitors find they need more time than they expected.
Practical Tips
- Address: 110 West Howard Street, Pontiac, Illinois 61764
- Phone: (815) 844-4566
- Website: visitpontiac.org
- Parking: A museum complex parking lot is available across the road. Street parking is also available throughout downtown. Note: the lot directly behind the museum building is currently closed for Centennial Plaza construction.
- Road Yacht tours: Third Saturday of each month, 11 a.m.–4 p.m. Confirm before visiting.
- Free mural guides: Available at the museum desk. Pick one up to guide your walking tour of Pontiac’s 24+ outdoor murals.
- Volunteers: The museum is staffed by knowledgeable, enthusiastic volunteers — many of them Route 66 experts. Don’t hesitate to ask questions.
- Donations: Items for the collection can be brought in on Saturdays from 10 a.m. Contact the museum in advance for large donations.
Continuing Your Route 66 Journey from Pontiac
The Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum makes Pontiac one of the great anchor stops on the Illinois Route 66 corridor. From here, the road leads north toward Joliet, Illinois — home of the Rialto Square Theatre and the Route 66 Welcome Center — and on to Wilmington, Illinois, where the legendary Gemini Giant stands watch over the highway in his silver space suit. South of Pontiac, the road leads to Springfield, Illinois — home of the Cozy Dog Drive-In (whose founder Ed Waldmire was Bob Waldmire’s father, making the connection between Pontiac and Springfield unusually personal) — and then further to Litchfield, where the Ariston Café and the Skyview Drive-In represent two of the oldest continuously operating Route 66 businesses in the state.
Final Thoughts: Why the Route 66 Hall of Fame & Museum Matters
There are Route 66 museums across all eight states of the Mother Road, but the Illinois Route 66 Association Hall of Fame and Museum in Pontiac holds a special place among them. It is the official institutional home of Route 66’s Illinois legacy — the keeper of the stories, the guardian of the artifacts, and the place where the road’s human history is preserved not as nostalgia for its own sake, but as something living, contested, and genuinely worth understanding. The Hall of Fame inductees are not just names on plaques; they are the people who chose to spend their lives along a road that the rest of America eventually drove past without stopping.
Pontiac earned its place as a Route 66 destination by choosing to invest in that history — by offering a building, building a museum, painting a mural, and making space for Bob Waldmire’s van and bus. The result is one of the most rewarding free attractions anywhere on the Mother Road. If you only stop at one museum on your Illinois Route 66 road trip, make it this one.
Nearby Route 66 Highlights in Pontiac and Beyond
- Route 66 Murals, Pontiac — Over 24 outdoor murals including the iconic Shield Mural, the Bob Waldmire Memorial, and 18 Walldog paintings throughout downtown Pontiac.
- Pontiac-Oakland Automobile Museum — The world’s premier Pontiac and Oakland car collection, just one block from the Hall of Fame.
- Joliet, Illinois — Home of the Rialto Square Theatre, Route 66 Welcome Center, and the Old Joliet Prison.
- Gemini Giant, Wilmington — The towering 28-foot fiberglass astronaut, one of the most photographed figures on all of Route 66.
- Springfield, Illinois — Illinois’s state capital and Route 66 classic, home to the Cozy Dog Drive-In and Lincoln heritage sites.
- Cozy Dog Drive-In, Springfield — Founded by Ed Waldmire, father of the Bob Waldmire whose van and bus are the museum’s most treasured exhibits.
- Ariston Café, Litchfield — The oldest continuously operating restaurant on Route 66, south of Pontiac.
- Skyview Drive-In, Litchfield — The last original drive-in theater still operating on Illinois Route 66.
- Route 66 in Illinois — Complete Guide — The definitive guide to all 301 miles of Illinois’s Mother Road corridor.
