How one woman’s Route 66 story of segregation and hospitality is kept alive today

Christine Peoples feels the weight of an ancient task.

She is, in many ways, a community storyteller, a bearer of memory and meaning.

Today, one of the stories she tells begins inside her workplace: Timmons Hall , a former Black church lifted from its foundations and preserved in Silver Springs Park – once the only public park open to Black residents in segregated Springfield, Missouri.

Why We Wrote This

Alberta Ellis was a prominent businesswoman in segregated America. But like other historical figures, her story could fade were it not for people who believe in carrying forward the ways our past informs who we are today.

Ms. Peoples explains how, once upon a time, the old Timmons Temple was one of the spiritual centers of a thriving community. It helped organize Park Day, a late-summer celebration of reunions and beauty contests, food and music, and back-to-school fellowship that, at its peak, drew an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people.

“Park Day was a huge deal,” says Ms. Peoples, the education coordinator of Timmons Hall, which is now run by the Springfield park board. “It was made of mothers, fathers, and folks that really knew that they had to carry this baton for the next generation.”

To her, a city worker, carrying that baton is more than a civic task. It remains sacred. “I never wanted to just do something to do it,” says Ms. Peoples, also an outreach minister at a local church. “It had to have meaning.”

That search for meaning has led her, again and again, into the hidden rooms of her city’s past. She collects artifacts, oral histories, remembrances of her community’s forebears and their children, many who now, too, carry the weight of years, the joys and sorrows of Springfield’s past.

Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor

Christine Peoples, the education coordinator at Timmons Hall, explains archive materials about Alberta Ellis and her hotel for Black travelers on Route 66 during segregation, in Springfield, Missouri, June 9, 2026.

Those remembrances include a woman named Alberta Ellis, who once provided a haven for Black travelers on Route 66 during segregation that became a thriving space frequented by well-known musicians, athletes, and writers. Ms. Ellis has been, in many ways, a spiritual inspiration for the community work Ms. Peoples now does here at Timmons Hall.

Springfield is where Route 66 got its name in 1926 – a fact the city proudly celebrates as part of its claim on America’s most famous roadway. But Ms. Peoples’ story about Ms. Ellis reveals another side of the Main Street of America – one that begins with a question:

What did freedom of the open road mean if that freedom was not open to everyone?

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For generations, Route 66 has lived in the American imagination as a promise: a highway west, a ribbon of asphalt that moved people toward personal reinvention, a road trip through neon-outlined diners and motels, a path of endless possibility.

But for Black motorists during segregation, that promise required another map. They often traveled with food, water jugs, and a copy of “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” the guide that told Black Americans where they might safely buy gas, eat, or find a place to sleep.

In Springfield, one of those places was Alberta’s Hotel.

The woman who ran it was Ms. Ellis, a Black entrepreneur born in Springfield in 1909. By the mid-1950s, her hotel had become one of the city’s most important destinations for Black travelers – musicians, soldiers, and athletes, as well as families passing through the Ozarks.

For Ms. Peoples, Alberta Ellis is more than a name on an old travel guide. She is the woman who helped her understand what her own work at Timmons Hall was for.

“I see my grandmother’s richness in her,” Ms. Peoples says. “The way she dressed or she carried herself. And as I began to research her, guess what she did? She created sanctuaries. For kids and families in the community during that time.”

Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor

Marcella Donson, left, known as Rae Rae, stands in front of her research project on Alberta Ellis with grandparents Joseph and Marcella Donson at the Living Histories Freedom Ball at the Library Center in Springfield, Missouri, June 13, 2026. Ms. Donson is wearing the first prize medal she earned for her exhibit.

That word — sanctuaries — is the hinge between Ms. Ellis’ work and Ms. Peoples’s own. As an outreach minister, Ms. Peoples had long believed that churches and community institutions were supposed to be places where the vulnerable could find safety, dignity, and practical help. In Ms. Ellis, she saw a woman who had done that work along the highway.

Alberta’s Hotel stood on Route 66. It had been the old city hospital before Alberta bought it at auction and converted it into something the highway had created a need for: a place where Black travelers could stop.

“When you came to Alberta’s, you had all these other amenities, too,” Ms. Peoples says. “She had barbers in there. She had beauticians. Yo…