The Building on Washington Street Has Had Five Names. The Mural Never Changed.

Walk the corner of Washington and Franklin in downtown Cuba this month and you'll pass a squat, multicolored-roofed building that has been a Phillips 66 station, a used car lot, a Pontiac dealership, a Mobil station, and three different restaurants, most recently trading its "Weir on 66" sign for one that reads Rich's Famous Burgers. What hasn't changed in any of those handoffs is the three-panel mural on its side, painted by Ray Harvey, showing a highway patrolman helping a stranded motorist outside the Wagon Wheel Motel, longtime owner Bill Wallis leaning against his 1966 Corvette Stingray, and Wallis handing out treats to kids during a station promotion sometime in the 1970s. The building keeps getting a new tenant. The story on its wall stays exactly where it was.

That's worth sitting with as Cuba heads into its biggest tourism season in years. The town has spent 2026 hosting the kind of attention that comes once in a generation, thanks to Route 66 turning 100 on November 11. But if you live here, the year has looked less like a single big event and more like a series of things arriving and leaving while the murals just kept doing what they've done since 2001: holding the town's history in place while everything around them turns over.

The exhibit that just left town

If you noticed extra out-of-state plates downtown between May and mid-September, that was the Route 66 Centennial Traveling Exhibit, which set up at the Crawford County Historical Society on North Smith Street starting May 3 and stayed through September 14. The opening weekend pulled in live music, food from local restaurants under a "Taste of Cuba" banner, and a panel discussion with Route 66 author Joe Sonderman and Cherokee historian Galen Gritts. Nearly two dozen large panels and short documentaries walked visitors through stories from across the state, curated as part of a statewide partnership tied to both the highway's centennial and the country's 250th.

It was a genuinely good exhibit, and it's also gone now. That's the nature of a traveling show: it lands, it draws a crowd, it packs up for the next town on the route. The murals a few blocks away don't work that way. The Apples and Barrels mural, Viva Cuba's second commission, went up in September 2001 and has stayed on its wall for a quarter century, depicting the years between 1895 and 1920 when Cuba was Missouri's leading apple producer. A newer one, A Day in the Cooperage from 2018, honors the McGinnis family's fifty years of barrel-making, a business that still ships wine and whiskey barrels worldwide using logs sourced from within a hundred miles of town. One is a temporary exhibit about history. The other two are permanent parts of the same history, painted directly onto buildings people still walk past every day.

What's actually behind the door these days

If you're planning to take out-of-town guests downtown this fall, it's worth knowing the current lineup, because some of what's written about Cuba online is a year or two behind. The Weir on 66 name that circulated in travel writeups for the better part of five years is no longer the one on the door of that Carr building. It's Rich's Famous Burgers now, still inside the same restored 1932 station, still surrounded by the same murals, just under new ownership. A few blocks down at 913 East Washington, Missouri Hick BBQ is still running its upstairs deck, a good spot to watch Route 66 traffic while you eat. Frisco's Grill & Pub is still a short walk from the mural district if barbecue isn't what you're after.

None of this is dramatic turnover by small-town standards. But it's the kind of detail that separates someone who actually lives here from someone quoting a five-year-old blog post, and it matters if you're the one fielding "where should we eat" texts from visiting family this season.

The mural count actually grew

Cuba became known as Route 66 Mural City because Viva Cuba set out in 2001 to commission twelve outdoor murals by the town's 150th anniversary in 2007, and it hit that mark. What gets less attention is that the project didn't stop there. The collection now stands at fourteen outdoor murals, still maintained by Viva Cuba, with additional pieces inside local businesses that aren't part of the official outdoor map. Most of the outdoor collection sits within a six-block, walkable stretch of Washington Street, which is also the old Route 66 alignment through town, so a lap of the mural district doubles as a lap of the corridor that put Cuba on the map in the first place.

If it's been a while since you've done the walk yourself, or if you've never had a reason to look closely at the ones near the Cuba Free Press Building or the corner near Hwy. 19, this is the season to do it. Not because a guidebook says so, but because the town just spent four and a half months proving those murals are the thing that outlasts everything else that comes and goes.

What's actually on the calendar

The one dated event worth circling is Cubafest, set for October 17 and 18. It's the town's own homage to itself: apple butter demonstrations that nod back to the era the Apples and Barrels mural depicts, a chili cook-off, a band competition, a classic car show, and guided mural tours for anyone who wants the stories behind the paint rather than just the photos. It's a fraction of the size of the centennial exhibit that just wrapped, and that's kind of the point. Cubafest isn't imported. It's the same weekend the town has run for years, built around the same history the murals already tell, and it doesn't need a national commission to make it worth showing up for.

The motel that's been booked out for months

One more marker of how unusual this year has been: the Wagon Wheel Motel on East Washington, the oldest continuously operating motel on the entire route, built in 1934 as the Wagon Wheel Cabins, has reportedly been booked out months in advance by travelers making a point of staying somewhere authentic during the centennial year. For a town of roughly 3,500 people sitting at Exit 208 off I-44, that's a real crowd, and if you've noticed more unfamiliar faces at the coffee shop or more cars idling outside the motel office than usual, that's why.

It also means the fall crowd headed to Cubafest won't be entirely local. Between the motel bookings and the traffic the centennial has already pulled through town, a decent share of the people at the chili cook-off this year will be seeing Cuba for the first time, drawn by the same murals residents walk past without a second thought most weeks.

The thing that stays put

The lesson in all of this isn't really about restaurants or exhibits. It's that the businesses in a small Route 66 town turn over on a normal cycle, the same way they would anywhere, and none of that turnover threatens what actually makes Cuba recognizable. A gas station becomes a used car lot becomes a burger joint. A traveling exhibit sets up for eighteen weeks and moves on to the next stop on the map. What holds the place together is the layer underneath all of it, the murals that Viva Cuba started painting in 2001 and hasn't stopped adding to since, sitting on the same buildings regardless of what business currently occupies them.

If you've lived here a while, that's probably not news you needed spelled out. But it's worth noticing this particular fall, with a centennial exhibit just packed up and a fresh building name over on Washington Street, that the thing everyone came to see this year isn't going anywhere when the crowds thin out after November 11.

Acar Real Estate has been rooted in this part of Missouri since 2003, and Cuba is one of the towns our agents know block by block, not just by the listing sheet. If you're weighing a move to Crawford County or just curious what a particular corner of town is actually like to live near, Acar Real Estate is glad to talk it through.