Arlington, MO

Arlington is an unincorporated community in western Phelps County, Missouri, United States, along a county road that was once U.S. Route 66. The town found its prosperity in the mid-19th century. Located near Rolla on the Ozark Plateau, the only remaining business at Arlington was a caravan park that closed permanently in 2008.

Arlington was originally called Little Piney. It was manned at times by troops form the 5th Missouri State Militia Cavalry. Originally settled by Thomas Harrison and James Harrison and later established as a township by General Fremont circa-1867, the town was renamed for the former Robert E. Lee plantation (later a cemetery) at Arlington, Virginia, Fok etymology maintains the name honors Arlie, the wife of a local merchant. Arlington was once a popular resort served by the Pacific Railroad. Located on the last section of U.S. Route 66 in Missouri to be paved in 1931, the tiny community served fishermen on the Gasconade and Little Piney Rivers.

Stony Dell Resort capitalised on U.S. Route 66 and the nearby Fort Leonard Wood military base to grow in the 1930s and early 1940s from a small group of tourist cabins to a popular oasis which included a stream-fed swimming pool, a restaurant, service station and bus stop, offering tennis, dancing, boating and fishing.

By 1946, the town was in decline due to re-routing of a widened US 66; the town site was purchased that year by R. E. Carney. The original 1923 US 66 road bridge, bypassed when the road was widened to four lanes in 1952, was demolished when Interstate 44 bypassed the town in 1966-1967, leaving the original two-lane US 66 a dead-end. Most of the Stony Dell Resort was lost to demolition during freeway construction; the restaurant, archway, the fish pond, the gas, food, and gift store, some of the classic stone work, and a handful of cabins remain, now abandoned. Even the 1952 four lane bridge was demolished and replaced as part of a 2005 alignment of I-44.

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