On March 15, 1931, Saint Patrick's Day, Rolla celebrated the completion of Route 66 in the area with Cyrus Avery, president of the U.S. Highway 66 Association, and Governor Henry S. Caulfield in attendance, and the festivities included dances, dinners, speeches, the highway dedication, and a parade that stretched for two miles along the newly paved highway. The sixty-five mile stretch from Rolla to Lebanon was the last portion of Route 66 completed in Missouri, and its arrival reshaped Rolla's streets, businesses, and travel economy. Pine Street and downtown Rolla had already been improved by brick paving begun in 1908, and after work on the concrete roadway began in 1928, the transcontinental highway authorized by Congress in 1926 ran down Pine Street before turning west on Sixth Street; within little more than a decade, traffic grew heavy enough that the main route through town was incorporated with U.S. Highway 63 while Pine Street became City Route 66. Roadside businesses grew with the new highway, including the Pierce Pennant Hotel, opened on November 4, 1929, as an elegant stop for motorists and later renamed the Sinclair Pennant Hotel, the Carney Motel, and Carney Manor; Schuman's Cottage City, opened in 1928 and expanded from cottage lodgings into a larger tourist complex before surviving into the 1960s; and the Bell Café and Cafeteria, which evolved from a garage opened in 1927 into a bus terminal and restaurant before later competition brought a new Greyhound depot and Reg and Andy's Café. Other prominent sites tied to this period included the Hotel Edwin Long and National Bank of Rolla building, completed in 1931 as a downtown landmark and headquarters for the Route 66 celebration, and the Missouri Trachoma Hospital, begun in 1939 as one of only four U.S. facilities devoted to treating trachoma before later use by the Missouri Highway Patrol and the Missouri University of Science and Technology.
