Between Philipsburg and Marshfield, Route 66 escapes the presence of the Interstate, and travels through some beautiful rural scenes via County Route CC. I briefly detoured off the route to check out the town of Niangua, thinking that any town with a name that difficult to pronounce must be home to something interesting–but I didn’t find anything.
I imagine very few towns have a scale-model of a satellite sitting in front of their courthouse, but Marshfield, Missouri does, and with good reason. Marshfield is home to Dr. Edwin Hubble, the astronomer whose name became a household word, when it was given to the Hubble telescope.
The Hubble Telescope replica is 1/4 the size of the real thing.
After you’ve walked around the courthouse, you can take a moment to explore Marshfield’s sleepy main street. There are a few businesses in operation, but I didn’t find much to draw me inside. A giant grain elevator looms over the town, but I couldn’t find a good place to take a clean picture of it.
Note: This trip was first published in 2008.