Nelson's Old Riverton Store

The original building was constructed in 1925 by Leo Williams, a Riverton merchant who recognized that the new federal highway being routed through southeast Kansas — what would shortly be designated US Highway 66 in 1926 — would bring meaningful commercial traffic past the crossroads at Riverton. Williams built a substantial single-story wood-frame general store with a deep front porch, a large interior retail floor, and a small attached residential quarters at the rear of the building. The construction is generally dated to early 1925, making the store a few months older than the official 1926 establishment of Route 66.

The general-store model in 1925 was the standard rural-Kansas commercial format — groceries, basic dry goods, hardware, animal feed, kerosene, and a small selection of household items. Williams's store served the surrounding farming community in addition to whatever passing-through highway traffic the new road brought. By the late 1920s and into the 1930s, the increasing flow of Route 66 traffic — including Dust Bowl migrants heading west, depression-era travelers, and small commercial traffic — had transformed the store's customer mix toward a meaningful share of out-of-state travelers buying gas, sandwiches, and travel supplies.

Williams operated the store for several decades before passing the business through a series of owners across the mid-20th century. The building survived the entire Route 66 commercial heyday of the 1930s through 1960s without significant structural alteration, which is the operational reason the store retains so much of its original character today. Many comparable Route 66 retail buildings were extensively remodeled across the decades; the Riverton store was not.

The Eisler family acquired the store in 1973 when Joe Eisler and his wife Isabel purchased the business from its then-owner. Joe Eisler had grown up in the Riverton area and had a long-standing connection to the southeast Kansas community; the decision to buy the store was as much a community commitment as a commercial venture. Joe and Isabel operated the store through the 1970s and 1980s, gradually shifting the merchandise mix toward a combination of working grocery and Route 66 tourist destination as Mother Road tourism began its 1980s and 1990s revival.

The store's central identity shift came in the late 1980s and 1990s when Route 66 nostalgia tourism became a significant cultural and commercial phenomenon. The Eisler family — particularly Joe and Isabel's nephew Scott Nelson, who joined the business in the 1990s and gradually took on operational leadership — leaned into the Route 66 tourist trade, adding a substantial selection of Route 66 souvenirs, expanding the deli sandwich counter to serve travelers, and beginning to publish the now-famous red-and-white t-shirts and other merchandise that bore the Eisler Brothers' name. The store remained a working grocery for Riverton locals while simultaneously becoming a Route 66 destination.

The Eisler family era effectively ran from 1973 through 2014 — a continuous four-decade tenure across what travel guides typically describe as four generations of family involvement. Scott Nelson, who is technically a nephew rather than a son of the original Eisler owners, formally acquired the business in 2014 and renamed it Nelson's Old Riverton Store. The name change was emotionally controversial among long-time Route 66 travelers, but the operational continuity — same building, same deli counter, same wood floors, similar merchandise — has been substantial enough that most return visitors describe the store as essentially unchanged.

The building itself is the primary historical artifact. The original 1925 wood-frame structure is essentially intact — the same exterior footprint, the same deep front porch, the same large single-room retail floor, and a remarkable amount of original interior fabric. The wood floors are the originals, worn smooth by a century of foot traffic and showing the characteristic uneven patina that only genuine century-old plank floors develop. The pressed-tin ceiling is original and has been repainted but not replaced. The original wooden display shelving along the side walls survives.

The deli counter, while not original to 1925, dates to the mid-20th century and has the patina of decades of daily use. The cash-register area, the front entrance with its screen door, and the back-room workspace all retain mid-20th-century character. Walls are densely covered with vintage photographs of the store across the decades, historic Route 66 maps, license plates, old advertising signs, and an extensive collection of Eisler-era memorabilia that the Nelson family has preserved with care.

The exterior is white-painted clapboard with red trim around the windows and door — colors that match the famous red-and-white Eisler Brothers' t-shirts that the store has sold for decades and that remain a Nelson's-era retail staple. A large freestanding Route 66 shield sign sits in front of the store, and the structure's roadside profile is among the most-recognized images of Kansas Route 66. The store is most often photographed from the southeast corner, where the shield sign, the front porch, and the building's full white-clapboard length frame together against the surrounding rural backdrop.

Nelson's Old Riverton Store operates as a hybrid working grocery and Route 66 destination retailer. The grocery side carries staple items for Riverton locals — bread, milk, eggs, basic produce, canned goods, snacks, beverages, cleaning supplies, and the usual small-town general-store inventory. Local customers come in regularly for everyday shopping needs, and the store's role as a working grocery is part of what gives it the lived-in authenticity that distinguishes it from the more purely tourist-oriented Route 66 stops elsewhere on the Mother Road.

The deli counter is the operational center of the tourist trade. The kitchen prepares house-made sandwiches to order — ham, turkey, roast beef, club sandwiches, the occasional daily special — on fresh bread with simple, generous portions. Sandwich prices are modest (typically $6 to $9 for a full sandwich) and the quality is consistently good for what is functionally a small-town general store. The deli also offers chips, cookies, and cold drinks for an easy travel lunch packed and eaten at the picnic tables out front or carried onward to the nearby Rainbow Bridge for a roadside meal.

The Route 66 merchandise selection is unusually substantial for a store of this size. The famous red-and-white Eisler Brothers' t-shirts (now reproduced under the current ownership but visually unchanged) remain a top-selling souvenir; vintage-style Route 66 shields, Kansas Route 66 maps, postcards, magnets, mugs, posters, books on Route 66 history, and a selection of Eisler-era reproduction merchandise are all available. The store is a notably good single stop for Route 66 souvenir shopping in Kansas — most travelers who pass through buy at least a t-shirt or a sticker as a tangible marker of having visited.

The store is open Monday through Saturday from 7am to 6pm and Sunday from 9am to 4pm — generous hours by rural-Kansas standards. There is no admission, no parking fee, no required purchase. Most Route 66 travelers stop for 30 to 60 minutes — long enough to walk through the interior, read the photograph displays, buy a sandwich and a soft drink, browse the souvenir selection, and chat briefly with whoever is working the counter. The staff is consistently friendly and is accustomed to out-of-state travelers asking for directions, recommendations, and stories.

The natural Kansas Route 66 day-plan uses Nelson's as the middle anchor between Galena to the north and Baxter Springs to the south. A typical sequence: start at Cars on the Route (the Kan-O-Tex station in Galena, eight miles north), drive south through Riverton to Nelson's for an early lunch and shopping (45-60 minutes), continue two miles southwest to the Rainbow Bridge (Brush Creek Marsh Arch Bridge) for photography (15-20 minutes), then continue seven miles south to Baxter Springs for the Heritage Center and Cafe on the Route. The full sequence takes a comfortable three to four hours and covers the entirety of Kansas's brief Route 66 corridor.

Beyond Kansas, Nelson's is a natural lunch stop for travelers crossing through the tri-state Missouri-Kansas-Oklahoma Route 66 corridor. Joplin, Missouri is ten miles east of Riverton and is the standard overnight destination for travelers covering this stretch; Miami, Oklahoma is roughly fifteen miles south and is the next major Route 66 town heading west. Nelson's serves as the de facto Kansas visitor information point — staff are knowledgeable about Galena, Baxter Springs, the Rainbow Bridge, and the broader Kansas Route 66 experience, and most travelers leave the store with a clearer picture of what to see in the surrounding area than they had when they arrived.