Travels on the Mother Road, Route 66: Part 16, Adrian, Texas

We have reached the mid-point of the Mother Road, the town of Adrian, Texas. It is supposed to be an equal distance to Chicago or to Los Angeles from here.

In the 1950s, Adrian was bustling with Route 66 tourists, but today, the town looks rather lonely.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many of these Route 66ers stopped at the famous Midpoint Cafe. Unfortunately it was closed as of August 2017.

There are still a number of old gas stations. I do not know enough about the architecture of American gas stations to identify their origins, but some readers can probably help.

The Sunflower was closed when we stopped by. But it was cheerful with flowers.

This is a historic Phillips 66 station. A reader told me it was brought in from Vega, Texas, with, I assume, the intent to be restored. I wrote about this station in a previous article.

Photographs taken with a Fujifilm X-E1 digital camera. I opened the RAF files with Adobe Photoshop Elements and used the black and white emulation for Tri-X film from DxO Filmpack 5.

The Mysterious Moving Phillips 66 Station, Adrian, Texas

Adrian, Texas, is the midpoint of Route 66, meaning it is equidistant to Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles or to Lake Michigan in Chicago.

There is not much to Adrian, just some old gasoline stations, junk yards, and the Midpoint Cafe (closed as of August 7, 2017). But I saw this adorable little gasoline station with a Phillips 66 sign. This was a Phillips 66 station, but a similar architecture with a peaked roof was used by Cities Services Company in various southern states. One of Thomas Rosell's articles in Preservation Mississippi describes the architecture of early 20th century Cities Services gasoline stations.

Just to the left (east) of the little station is a more modern Phillips 66 station, but also not in operation.

I checked the locations of these buildings on Google Maps and was perplexed. Look at the Google Street View from 2011: The little station is not present. Someone trucked in this the little building from somewhere else and placed it next to the tree. Did the aliens move it?