Arlington

The story

Arlington had three lives, each tied to a road or a rail. It began in 1867 when the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway — the Frisco — reached the mouth of the Little Piney River in the Missouri Ozarks, and a Virginian named Thomas Harrison platted a town on his father's land and named it for Arlington, Virginia. For decades it was a pleasant river-and-railroad resort, drawing visitors into the hills.

Its second life came with Route 66, which ran through in 1926 and brought the Stony Dell Resort — a spring-fed swimming pool, cabins, a restaurant, and a filling station that did a brisk trade with travelers and soldiers from nearby Fort Leonard Wood. But the same highway that made Arlington eventually unmade it. As Route 66 was straightened and widened in the 1950s it bypassed the town, and when Interstate 44 came through in 1966 it severed Arlington from the highway entirely and demolished the old bridge. The post office had already closed in 1958.

What is left sits marooned between the interstate, the railroad, and the river: the ruins of Stony Dell, fragments of the old road, and a few structures slowly being reclaimed.

What remains today

Ruins of the Stony Dell Resort, including its pool, sections of old Route 66 roadbed, and scattered building remains between the Frisco line and the Little Piney.