Ask any Route 66 traveler which stop between Seligman and Kingman they photographed the most, and the answer is almost always the same: a low, weathered building with a porch full of vintage gas pumps and a Corvette parked out front, at a bend in the highway called Hackberry. It shows up in more Route 66 Instagram feeds than any other building on this stretch of the Mother Road. Our guide to the Arizona ghost towns along this corridor and our driving guide from Seligman to Kingman both cover it in passing. It deserves its own entry — because the building’s actual history is more interesting, and stranger, than the postcard version suggests.
A Silver-Mining Camp Before It Was a Gas Station
Hackberry existed for half a century before Route 66 ever ran through it. The settlement dates to 1874, founded around silver deposits that prospector Jim Music began developing as the Hackberry Mine the following year. The name comes from a hackberry tree that grew near a local spring — a detail typical of how so many high-desert Arizona place names were assigned, by whatever distinguishing feature happened to be nearby.
The mine was productive enough to sustain a real town for a few decades, but by 1919 declining ore quality and a tangle of litigation over the claims had gutted the operation. Hackberry came close to disappearing entirely before it had a second act.
The Conoco Station and the Realignment
That second act arrived with the highway. U.S. Route 66 reached this part of Arizona in 1926, following an existing Atlantic & Pacific Railroad alignment through Hackberry from 1883, and for a while service stations were enough to keep Hackberry’s small population employed. The building most travelers recognize today — the one with the Route 66 shield out front — dates specifically to a 1934 realignment of the highway through this section of Mohave County, when a business called the Northside Grocery built a Conoco station on the new road to catch the traffic the old alignment had carried.
That arrangement held for over four decades. Then Interstate 40 bypassed this stretch of Route 66 by roughly 16 miles, and the Northside Grocery’s Conoco station closed in 1978 along with most of the rest of Hackberry’s commercial life. For fourteen years, the building sat closed — one more shuttered filling station on a road that had lost its purpose.
Bob Waldmire’s Revival
What makes Hackberry General Store different from the other closed stations scattered across this stretch of the corridor is what happened in 1992: artist and Route 66 folk-icon Bob Waldmire reopened the old Northside Grocery building as a souvenir shop and travelers’ information stop. Waldmire was already a well-known figure in the Route 66 revival — a hand-drawn-map-and-postcard artist whose work is still sold in gift shops up and down the highway — and his choice to invest in this particular derelict building gave Hackberry a reason to exist again.
Waldmire didn’t run it for long. In 1998 he sold the store to John and Kerry Pritchard, reportedly following a local dispute over nearby quarrying operations that Waldmire wanted no part of. The sale came with an informal understanding that mattered more than any contract: whoever took over would preserve the store’s deliberately unpolished, accumulated-over-decades character rather than renovate it into something slicker.
The Pritchard Era, and What Changed in 2016
The Pritchards ran the store for eighteen years, and it was during their tenure that Hackberry General Store built its reputation as one of the most-photographed buildings on the Arizona corridor — the exterior gradually filling in with old gas pumps, signage, and automotive memorabilia, and a bright red 1957 Chevrolet Corvette parked out front as the store’s signature photo prop.
When the Pritchards retired in 2016, they took that Corvette with them. The store was sold to Amy Franklin, who kept the arrangement Waldmire had asked of the Pritchards nearly two decades earlier — preserve the place rather than modernize it — and placed a different Corvette, a 1990 model, in the spot the 1957 car had occupied. It’s a small detail, but worth knowing if you’ve seen an older photo of the store online and expect to find the same car waiting for you: the building is the same, the inventory of memorabilia keeps accumulating, but the specific Corvette out front has changed hands along with the business itself. Ownership details at small roadside attractions like this one can shift with time, so travelers planning a visit around a specific detail should treat anything beyond the building’s general character as subject to change.
What’s Actually There
Strip away the mythology and the Instagram captions, and Hackberry General Store is, functionally, a gift shop built inside a well-preserved 1934 gas station. What makes it worth the stop is the density and specificity of what’s accumulated there rather than any single spectacular object:
- The original station structure, largely intact, with the shape and proportions of a mid-century Conoco outlet still legible under the additions
- A porch and yard full of vintage gas pumps, oil cans, and automotive signage collected over more than three decades of ownership
- The current Corvette parked as the photo anchor, alongside other period vehicles that rotate through the property
- An interior stocked with Route 66 souvenirs, postcards, and memorabilia, dense enough that browsing takes real time
- A small museum-like quality to the whole property — not curated in the formal sense, but genuinely accumulated rather than staged for a single photo opportunity
This is worth stating plainly because Route 66 attracts a fair amount of manufactured nostalgia — buildings dressed up to look older and more storied than they are. Hackberry isn’t that. The store is a real 1934 building that actually served the highway, sat closed for fourteen years, and was brought back by people who chose preservation over renovation at every ownership change since. The mythology (a perfectly preserved time capsule, untouched since the 1950s) oversells what’s genuinely true (a real historic building, continuously curated by three different owners with the same instinct to leave it alone).
Visiting Hackberry Today
Hackberry General Store sits directly on Historic Route 66 roughly 28 miles northeast of Kingman, on the stretch our Seligman-to-Kingman driving guide covers in detail. The store is generally open daily, roughly 9 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m. depending on the season, and there is no admission fee — it operates as a working gift shop, not a ticketed museum. Hours at a small, owner-operated roadside stop like this can shift with the season or an owner’s schedule, so calling ahead before a special trip is reasonable if the stop is the whole point of your detour.
Plan on 20 to 30 minutes if you’re mainly there to photograph the exterior and browse the gift shop, longer if you want to read through the accumulated signage and memorabilia in detail. Combine it with the rest of the Truxton-to-Kingman stretch — this is one stop among several in a section of highway that rewards slowing down rather than treating any single location as a final destination. For the broader context of what else has survived and what hasn’t along this part of the corridor, our Arizona ghost towns guide covers Truxton, Peach Springs, and the other communities the Interstate bypass left behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the history of the Hackberry General Store?
The building started as Hackberry’s Northside Grocery and Conoco station, built in 1934 when Route 66 was realigned through this section of Mohave County. It closed in 1978 after Interstate 40 bypassed the area, sat vacant for fourteen years, and was reopened as a souvenir shop in 1992 by Route 66 artist Bob Waldmire.
Who owns Hackberry General Store now?
Bob Waldmire sold the store to John and Kerry Pritchard in 1998. The Pritchards ran it for eighteen years before retiring in 2016 and selling to Amy Franklin, the most recently reported owner, who has continued the store’s long-standing practice of preserving rather than renovating the property.
Is Hackberry, Arizona a ghost town?
Hackberry is a near-ghost town. It was founded in 1874 as a silver-mining settlement, declined by 1919, had a second commercial life along Route 66 starting in 1926, and lost most of that when Interstate 40 bypassed it in the late 1970s. A small residential population remains, but the General Store is the town’s primary reason for a traveler to stop.
How much does it cost to visit Hackberry General Store?
There is no admission fee. It operates as a free roadside attraction and working gift shop rather than a ticketed museum, though of course purchases support the business that maintains the property.
How far is Hackberry General Store from Kingman?
Hackberry sits roughly 28 miles northeast of Kingman on Historic Route 66. It fits naturally into a half-day drive of the Seligman-to-Kingman corridor alongside stops like Grand Canyon Caverns and the near-ghost towns of Truxton and Valentine.
