Red Cedar Inn (Historic Site)

James 'Pappy' Smith was born in the 1890s in the Ozark country south of Pacific and grew up working on his family's small farm. He and his wife Bertha married in the 1920s and moved into central Pacific in the late 1920s as the new Route 66 was being constructed through town. Pappy worked initially as a construction laborer on the highway itself — many of Pacific's working-age men in the late 1920s and early 1930s found at least temporary employment building the new federal highway — and the experience gave him a direct view of the volume of traffic the highway would carry once construction was complete.

The Smiths bought the property at 1047 East Osage Street in 1933 with savings from Pappy's construction work and a small loan from a Pacific-area bank. Construction of the cedar-log roadhouse began in early 1934 using lumber harvested by Pappy himself from the family land south of town, and the Inn opened to the public in late 1934 or early 1935 (precise opening dates vary across different historical sources). The Smiths lived in a small apartment attached to the back of the building, allowing them to operate the restaurant essentially 24 hours a day during the highway's peak travel seasons.

Bertha Smith was the original chef and ran the kitchen entirely on her own through the Inn's first several years. Pappy ran the bar (legal beer service began at Red Cedar Inn within months of the December 1933 repeal of Prohibition), managed the dining room, and handled the business side. The Smiths' three children grew up in the apartment behind the restaurant and worked in the operation from young ages — a pattern of family operation that continued across multiple generations until the Inn's eventual closure.

Red Cedar Inn's original menu was straightforward American roadhouse fare adapted to Ozark country tastes — fried chicken (the signature dish through the Inn's entire operating history), pan-fried catfish from the nearby Meramec River, hand-cut steaks from regional beef, country ham, and various plate dinners with mashed potatoes, gravy, and seasonal vegetables. Bertha's fried chicken became legendary along the Missouri Route 66 corridor and was featured in multiple regional travel guides through the 1940s and 1950s as a must-stop for travelers crossing the state.

The Inn's bar served beer and (after 1936 when Missouri liquor laws fully normalized post-Prohibition) full mixed drinks. The bar room was a separate space from the main dining room, with its own entrance, and developed a strong local clientele of Pacific-area residents in addition to the traveler trade. Live country music on Saturday nights was a regular feature through the 1940s and 1950s, with regional Ozark musicians performing on a small bandstand in the bar area.

Through the 1950s and 1960s — the peak of Route 66 travel before the I-44 bypass — the Inn served substantial volumes of traveler trade. Tour buses carrying families on cross-country trips made regular lunch stops, regional businessmen on St. Louis-to-Springfield routes used the Inn as a standard lunch destination, and Pacific-area residents continued to use the bar room and the dining room as social gathering spaces. The Smith family added a small banquet room to the back of the building in the 1950s to accommodate larger group bookings.

The Inn's slow decline began with the opening of I-44 through the Pacific area in the early 1970s, which bypassed the original Route 66 alignment and dramatically reduced the volume of through-traffic on East Osage Street. The Smith family adapted by emphasizing the Inn's role as a destination restaurant for St. Louis-area diners and Pacific locals rather than a roadside service for passing travelers, but the customer base shrank substantially through the 1970s and 1980s as travel patterns reorganized around the interstate.

By the 1990s the original Smith family had sold or leased the operation, and the restaurant operated under several different operators with varying success across the decade. Renovations to the kitchen and dining room in the 1990s modernized some equipment but generally preserved the historic log-cabin character. The Inn finally closed for regular dining operations in the early 2000s after several years of declining business and rising operational costs.

Historic preservation efforts began immediately after the closure. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and Pacific civic organizations — primarily the Pacific Chamber of Commerce, the Pacific Historical Society, and Missouri Route 66 preservation groups — began working to ensure the building's long-term preservation. Multiple proposals to reopen the Inn as an active restaurant have been floated across the years since closure but none have come to fruition. The building remains preserved as a historic landmark with no current dining service.

The Red Cedar Inn building at 1047 East Osage Street is preserved as a historic landmark with no active dining operations. The exterior is photogenic and is fully viewable from the public sidewalk along Osage Street — the distinctive cedar-log construction, the prominent gabled roof, the small porch over the front entrance, and the original signage are all preserved essentially in their 1930s-1950s configuration. A historical marker installed by Pacific civic organizations explains the Inn's history and significance.

Interior access is generally not available. The building is privately owned (current ownership has changed several times in the decades since closure) and is not open as a museum or interpretive site. However, the exterior is genuinely worth a stop — the building is one of the most architecturally distinctive Route 66 roadhouses surviving in Missouri, and the log construction is more visually striking in person than photographs typically convey.

Several proposed reopening efforts have been discussed over the years, including a potential restoration-and-reopening campaign by Pacific tourism organizations. Whether any of these efforts will succeed in returning active dining operations to the Inn remains genuinely uncertain — historical-restaurant restoration projects are notoriously difficult to finance and operate sustainably, and the Inn's relatively rural location off the modern interstate makes it a challenging commercial proposition. Visitors interested in the Inn's current status should check with the Pacific Chamber of Commerce before making the trip.

The Red Cedar Inn historic site pairs naturally with the other Pacific Route 66 stops for a focused 2-3 hour Pacific visit. The classic plan: arrive at Jensen Point for the panoramic Meramec valley overlook (45 minutes), drive 5 minutes east into central Pacific to photograph the Red Cedar Inn exterior and read the historical marker (15-20 minutes), drive west along Osage Street to the silica cave roadside pull-offs (20-30 minutes), and conclude with a hike at Pacific Palisades Conservation Area south of town.

For dining in Pacific today, several casual options operate along Osage Street and at the I-44 exits — the standard regional chain restaurants (Cracker Barrel, McDonald's, Applebee's at the I-44 commercial strip) plus several local Pacific establishments that come and go across the years. None match the historical significance of Red Cedar Inn, but Pacific-area road-trippers looking for a sit-down lunch generally find acceptable casual options. For more notable dining, Eureka (15 minutes east toward St. Louis) and St. Louis itself (35 minutes east) offer substantially more choice.

For Route 66 road-trippers continuing west, the natural next major Missouri Route 66 dining stop is Missouri Hick BBQ in Cuba (35 miles west) — a long-running barbecue restaurant on the historic Route 66 alignment that has effectively inherited the roadhouse-and-Mother-Road dining role that Red Cedar Inn occupied for nearly seven decades. The pairing of Red Cedar Inn (closed, photographed from outside, 1934 founding) with Missouri Hick BBQ (open, full meal, contemporary continuation of the tradition) is one of the better one-day Missouri Route 66 dining-heritage itineraries.