Historic Meteor City Trading Post has been bought by Joann and Mike Brown from Jeffersonville IN. The couple finalized the purchase on Monday March 27th and are looking forward to bringing back the location to what it looked like when it was in its former glory.
Joann and Mike first saw the property while traveling Route 66 towards the west where they are originally from and they kept gravitating towards the trading post. Joann says her husband is a huge fan of Two Guns and the locations were very close to each other.
“This is our working retirement, if that is what you want to call it” said Joann. It was back in Aug when they just came home from traveling the route and decided that they wanted to really look into the possibility of purchasing the trading post. “These places need to be saved and this one had our name all over it. We remember it being for sale at one time but the price was a little too high” Joann stated.
She told me about a rock she took from the trading post and kept it in her car and said every time she was driving around, she would see the rock and it kept the trading post in her thoughts. They contacted the previous owner and after many phone calls, and literally to the last day which a lien was already on the property and was due to expire; Joann and Mike finally came to an agreement with the previous owners to purchase the property.
After checking to make sure it had a clean deed and getting the green light to close on the property, the Brown’s are now the new owners of Meteor City Trading Post.
The plans are to have them relocate to the trading post from Indiana and live there permanently while rehabilitating the trading post and surrounding property. “The first thing we have to do is to secure the property and get the majority of the place cleaned up. A lot of folks still stop out there to take photos and we want to make sure it is getting ready for them” Joann said.
The next phase will to be getting the electric shored back up and stable and start getting T-shirts designed and sold to help fund repairs and remodeling as well as other merchandise to sell.
Also on the list of things to do is not only getting the original map wall back up, but to make it longer than what it currently is. The longer term plan is to bring the look and feel of the trading post back to when Route 66 was just outside of its front door, without any knowledge or planning of the I-40 interstate. Joann plans on making the inside of the geodome part of the building a small little ‘historical walk’ through the different times and uses of the trading post. Part of the plan is to finally let the public see the original Justice of the Peace building, which has been sitting to the right (or west) of the geodome, as it was when it was in use back in the 1930’s.
The Brown’s have created a Facebook page for the trading post – visit it by clicking HERE and LIKE it to follow the progress of the restoration of the trading post over the next year.
The Meteor City Trading Post, which is located just outside of Winslow AZ on Route 66 – opened as a service station in 1938. The quirky trading post was another Mother Road casualty of the Interstate system. Located on Route 66 near the Barringer Meteor Crater, Arizona the trading post still stands to see travelers from around the world stop, take photographs and relish in its history.