Route 66 — the "Mother Road" that connects Chicago to California and whose creation marked the beginning of the United States' love affair with the cross-country road trip — turns 100 this year.
Among the landmarks and highlights in the highway's early years were the tourist stops, restaurants and motels.
Most of them are gone, closing over time as the interstate system supplanted Route 66 and modern culture and travelers' expectations changed.
But in Sullivan, one of those attractions of a bygone era is back up and running. The Shamrock Court Motel is giving guests a taste of what it was like to travel Route 66 in its heyday, decades ago.
The Shamrock Court Motel was built in 1948, just as the postwar boom and automobile travel took full advantage of Route 66. The Weiland family of Chicago bought it in 1953. The couple and their three kids moved in and lived in the center portion of the motel, running it as their main income — a true mom-and-pop operation.
When the interstate system officially bypassed Sullivan around 1980, the Weilands converted the guest rooms to efficiency apartments.
John Weiland died in 2009, leaving the Shamrock to his three sons who grew up there. Billy Weiland said he and his brothers almost sold the Shamrock to a neighboring business interested in tearing it down. But he couldn't get himself to sign the papers.
"I just thought there's got to be somebody out there that would be able to and want to restore it and keep it alive," he said. That's where Rich Dinkela of St. Peters comes in.
He drives a lot for the businesses he owns. One day in 2016, the Route 66 enthusiast was on Interstate 44 and saw something he had missed many times before.
"I caught this stone building out of the corner of my eye," he said. "Now you got to understand, back then this was all covered with brush and shrouded with trees and stuff. You couldn't see it from the highway, and [I] became infatuated with this place immediately."
Billy Weiland and his brothers sold the Shamrock to Dinkela and his wife in 2021, but they had no plans for a full restoration. They wanted to stop the damage caused by it being unoccupied since 2009 and find the right person to bring the Shamrock back to life.
Dinkela put a new roof, and referring to pictures of the original sign that was long gone, he re-created the classic neon sign to get attention from the highway, thinking that would attract a buyer to restore it.
He got offers, but none of them was right. "If you don't understand Route 66 roadside America, the romanticism of Americana. You're not going to get this place," Dinkela said. "And the people who were interested didn't get it."
That's when Dinkela came to the conclusion that if he wanted it done right, he had to do it himself.
That started a years-long renovation of the 10-room motel that he will only say cost "north of $1 million" to complete, and the building had a lot of problems. The floor in the lobby area was gone, exposing dirt below. Ceilings were drooping. Walls were falling apart. To repair the plumbing, a trench was dug throughout the entire building. "We hauled out roughly 90 tons of soil by hand to make this happen," Dinkela said.
That effort included labor done by dozens of volunteers, many donations to the project from the community and Route 66 enthusiasts, and grants from the U.S. Department of the Interior and the National Trust.
"There's a lot of unsung heroes involved in this project," Dinkela said. "There's been a lot of sweat equity put into this project. A lot of volunteers have put forth effort and money to make this thing happen."
While a lot of the motel's interiors needed major work, the outside and its most unique and prominent architectural feature — its stonework on the exterior walls — was in excellent condition.
"This is a conglomerate-style masonry design where they basically just took any rocks they could find, and threw them against the wall, and mortared them as such," Dinkela said. "There's a lot of native Missouri stone here."
The stonework includes 22 decorative sunburst patterns on the exterior walls, which Dinkela said were in good shape but were also critical to preserve and accentuate.
"When they built the Shamrock, they found these nice flat pieces of sandstone in creek beds, and they chose those because they're easy to work with to make the sunburst patterns and the diamond patterns," Dinkela said.
Dinkela chronicled his journey renovating the Shamrock on social media, building a big online following. Those fans include Cheryl and Scott Michel of Ellisville, who celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary this summer with a stay at the Shamrock.
"I guess I'm into saving old things," Sherri Michel said. "[The motel is] a throwback to a time when things were a lot more simple, and I can appreciate that. We wanted to do something unique for our anniversary."
The Michels stayed in the Neon Room, which is full of neon artwork and vintage-inspired details designed to capture those simpler times.
"It's kind of cool how up and down this road people are at least trying to save some of these places," Scott Michel said. "Because, how many of them were there? You know, even when I was a kid, there were all these kinds of hotels everywhere. Now they're not."
That search for nostalgia may be at the heart of the Shamrock's long-term financial viability.
"There's tremendous interest, both from Americans and from our international friends that visit Route 66, to have an authentic experience," said Cheryl Eichar-Jett of Edwardsville, an author and historian who studies Route 66.
She said even with just 10 rooms to let and being in a small town in Missouri, the Shamrock Court Motel has an enthusiastic target market.
"This whole mystique, this whole experience, of the wind in your hair and traveling across the country and seeing all these various landscapes, it's developed over a long period of time and carried over to the younger generations," she said.
The Shamrock has been open for three months, but the work continues. Dinkela has a lot of ideas for the future, which could even include an expansion.
While the motel has fans and supporters in the international Route 66 community, it also has the support of the former owners who called the building home for decades.
"I'm happy beyond words that now at least the Shamrock is going to be part of Route 66's story going forward," Billy Weiland said. "Hopefully Sullivan will grab the coattails of that and bring more people to town."
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