The Hackberry General Store is a Route 66 souvenir shop built into a 1934 roadside grocery and Conoco station in Hackberry, crammed with gadgets, signs, mementos, billboards and other artifacts of the road from the 1940s through the 1960s, with vintage cars parked outside. Also known as the Northside Grocery, it opened on what was then a new alignment of Route 66 north of the railroad, and a 1937 directory listed it as the Northside Garage and Camp. Its trade ended once Interstate 40 bypassed Hackberry in the late 1970s, and the Conoco sign pole outlasted the pumps, which were gone by 1993. The store came back because of Bob Waldmire, the itinerant Route 66 artist, who reopened it in 1992 as a tourist information post and souvenir shop.
Waldmire, who lived from 1945 to 2009, drove an orange 1972 Volkswagen microbus that inspired the character Fillmore in Pixar's 2006 film Cars; Pixar dropped a plan to name the character after him when he refused to license it for McDonald's Happy Meal toys. He sold the store in 1998 to John and Kerry Pritchard, after local disputes over quarries cutting landscaping stone from the surrounding hills.
The Pritchards ran it until they retired in 2016, and John took his red 1957 Corvette with him when he went. The next keeper, Amy Franklin, parked a 1990 Corvette out front in its place, by the account of the Route 66 travel site theroute-66.com.
Getting there
35.3749, -113.7227
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
