Munger Moss Motel Neon Sign

The Munger Moss Motel opened in 1946 — the same year Route 66 traffic began rebounding from the wartime fuel rationing of the early 1940s and a period when motor-court construction along the Mother Road was at one of its all-time peaks. The original owners were two business partners, Pete Munger and Emmett Moss, whose surnames produced the property's distinctive name. Both men had operated a small Route 66 sandwich shop in nearby Devil's Elbow (roughly 35 miles east) before deciding to consolidate their savings and build a proper motor court in Lebanon, which by the mid-1940s was emerging as one of the standard overnight stops on the Chicago-to-Springfield-Missouri leg of the highway.

The original Munger Moss was a fairly typical mid-1940s Route 66 motor court — a row of small detached cabins arranged in an L-shape around a gravel parking court, with a separate office building near the highway frontage. Cabin construction was wood-frame with painted clapboard siding; each unit had a single bedroom, a small private bath, and a covered parking slot adjacent to the door. The location on the eastern edge of Lebanon was strategic: travelers arriving from the east at the end of a long Ozark driving day could pull off the highway immediately upon entering town without having to navigate Lebanon's downtown grid.

Pete Munger and Emmett Moss sold the property in the early 1950s; the motel changed hands several times across that decade as the original cabins were gradually replaced with the longer row-style guest wing that still defines the property today. The 1950s renovations also added the iconic neon sign — the exact installation year is somewhere in the 1955-to-1957 range, with surviving documentation slightly ambiguous, but the sign has been a continuous feature of the property since at least 1957 and was prominently included in late-1950s Route 66 tourism photography.

The current ownership era began in 1971, when Bob and Ramona Hudson purchased the property from a previous owner who had let the motel slide into modest disrepair. The Hudsons bought the Munger Moss as a working-family business — not as a Route 66 preservation project — and their initial decade was focused on basic operational improvements: replacing worn carpet, upgrading bathroom fixtures, repainting cabin exteriors, and rebuilding the front office. Through the 1970s and 1980s the Munger Moss operated as a functional roadside motor court serving I-44 travelers, truckers, fishermen heading to Bennett Spring State Park, and a small but steady stream of Route 66 enthusiasts who had begun rediscovering the highway as a destination in its own right.

Bob Hudson passed away in the 1990s; Ramona Hudson Lehman has continued to operate the motel through subsequent decades with the help of family members and a small longtime staff. Ramona's tenure has coincided with the modern Route 66 preservation movement, and she has been one of its most visible and articulate spokespeople — appearing in documentary films, hosting Route 66 motoring clubs, and consistently making the Munger Moss available to writers and photographers documenting the Mother Road. The property's continued operation as a working motel rather than a frozen museum is largely her doing.

The most significant restoration work on the sign itself took place across the 2010s, with funding from a combination of family investment, the National Park Service's Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, and donations from the Route 66 community. The neon tubes were rebent and replaced; the sheet-metal field was stripped, repaired, and repainted; and the structural poles were stabilized. The result is a sign that is mechanically newer than the original 1950s installation but visually almost indistinguishable — a deliberate choice to preserve the period look rather than modernize the sign's appearance.

The consensus best photography window is the half-hour between sunset and full dark — roughly 7pm in midsummer, 5:30pm in midwinter — when the western sky still holds blue and pink color and the neon has just lit but ambient light hasn't yet faded. This window produces the iconic Munger Moss image: glowing pink-and-yellow neon against a slate-blue sky, with the motel's row of guest rooms silhouetted behind. Shoot from across the highway looking northwest. A tripod is genuinely useful because the exposure is in the slow-handheld range; a phone camera in night mode will produce a usable image but a proper camera with a wide aperture will produce the postcard-quality version.

Daylight photography is also worthwhile, especially in the late afternoon when the sun lights the sign's east-facing front and produces strong color saturation on the cursive lettering. Daylight shots emphasize the sign's hand-painted character and the broader motel context; night shots emphasize the neon. Most photographers shoot both. The least-flattering window is high noon, when overhead sun flattens the sign's relief and produces harsh shadows.

Parking is freely available in the Munger Moss's own parking lot — the Hudsons explicitly welcome non-guest visitors who want to photograph the sign, and there is no fee and no formal permission process. Common courtesy applies: park near the highway frontage rather than in the guest-room slots, don't block traffic, and consider stopping in at the front office to introduce yourself if Ramona or family members are visible. Many travelers leave a small donation in the office for the property's ongoing sign-maintenance fund.

Among Route 66 enthusiasts the Munger Moss sign is generally ranked in the top tier of surviving original neon on the entire 2,448-mile corridor — alongside the Blue Swallow Motel sign in Tucumcari, the El Vado Motel sign in Albuquerque, the U-Drop Inn sign in Shamrock, Texas, and a small handful of other top-flight examples. The specific feature that elevates the Munger Moss above many other surviving signs is the combination of size, color complexity, original placement, and continuous operation — the sign is still attached to a working motel that has been operating continuously since 1946, which is a categorically different preservation context than the more common situation of a restored sign in front of a closed property.

Lebanon's Route 66 stretch has lost most of the secondary neon that surrounded the Munger Moss during the highway's peak — the Andy's Street Car Grill sign, the Wrink's Market sign in its original neon configuration, and several smaller motel and gas-station signs have all been removed, modernized, or destroyed across the decades. The Munger Moss is therefore not just an exceptional sign in its own right but the surviving anchor of what was once a denser neon corridor through Lebanon.

For visitors building a Route 66 neon-photography itinerary across multiple states, the Munger Moss pairs naturally with the Wagon Wheel Motel sign in Cuba, Missouri (95 miles east) and the Boots Court neon in Carthage, Missouri (90 miles southwest) for a Missouri-specific neon route, or with the broader cross-state neon canon for a longer trip. Springfield, 50 miles west of Lebanon, has the recently-restored Rail Haven Motel sign and several other smaller examples worth a stop.

A focused photography visit to the Munger Moss sign takes 20 to 30 minutes — 10 minutes for the daylight shots, a return visit at twilight for the neon shots, and a brief stop at the office. For travelers staying overnight at the motel itself, you have the entire sunset-to-sunrise photography window available; for through-travelers stopping briefly, plan to arrive in Lebanon by mid-to-late afternoon so the twilight window doesn't force a difficult evening drive onward.

The natural Lebanon plan for travelers prioritizing the sign: arrive in town by 4pm, stop at the Lebanon-Laclede County Library to see the Route 66 Museum (45-60 minutes), have an early dinner at Wrink's Market or another Lebanon option, return to the Munger Moss for the 7pm-ish twilight neon window, and either continue west to Springfield (50 miles, roughly an hour) for the night or check into the Munger Moss itself for an immersive overnight stay.

For travelers continuing east the next morning, the natural sequence is Lebanon to Devil's Elbow (35 miles, roughly 45 minutes) for the Big Piney River truss bridge and the Elbow Inn, then on to Waynesville (another 10 minutes) for the Route 66 Pulaski County Museum and Roubidoux Spring. The combined Lebanon-Devil's Elbow-Waynesville day is one of the more satisfying single-day stretches on Missouri Route 66.