Boots Motel owners to host open house on Friday, Saturday, Sunday

The public will get a chance to look inside a Route 66 icon and see what it looks like now, before it is restored.

Deborah Harvey, Decatur, Ga., and Pricilla Bledsaw, Decatur, Ill., finalized the purchase of Carthage’s Boots Motel in August. Now they want to give residents a chance to see the place before the restoration so they can appreciate what it will look like after it is restored.

“So many people that we talked to in Carthage, as we were talking them about this project, said, well I’ve never seen the inside of the Boots,” Harvey said. “We thought, well, let’s just fix that. Plus I know that people are going to expect things to happen quickly and the Boots is a mess, it’s going to take a while. I’d like people to see where we’re starting so that they can appreciate the finished product when it finally arrives.”

Part of the open house will be special “tunnel tours” of a tunnel that leads from the basement of the motel.

The motel will be open from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Harvey said the open house is a free event, although they will accept donations if people want to contribute to restoring the motel.

“Pricilla and I will both be there all weekend and we’ll be available to talk about the project,” Harvey said. “It’s a pretty informal event.”

The 14 rooms of the Boots Motel have been used as low-income housing in the years before the sisters purchased it.

Harvey said they plan to rent the rooms in the building along the alley between Garrison Avenue and McGregor Street as professional office space and use the proceeds from those rentals to restore the rooms in the front building for travelers along Route 66.

Harvey is a historic preservation consultant and Bledsaw owned an operated a jewelry store at for several years. The two vacationed on Route 66 several years ago and had talked about buying an old motel on the Mother Road and operating it after they retire.

Harvey found out the Boots was for sale after the Society for Commercial Archeology put the old motel on its list of 10 most endangered roadside attractions in America earlier this year.

She has a master’s degree in historic preservation and has worked as a consultant with the National Park Service, helping them restore historic buildings and repurpose them.

The public will get a chance to look inside a Route 66 icon and see what it looks like now, before it is restored.

Deborah Harvey, Decatur, Ga., and Pricilla Bledsaw, Decatur, Ill., finalized the purchase of Carthage’s Boots Motel in August. Now they want to give residents a chance to see the place before the restoration so they can appreciate what it will look like after it is restored.

“So many people that we talked to in Carthage, as we were talking them about this project, said, well I’ve never seen the inside of the Boots,” Harvey said. “We thought, well, let’s just fix that. Plus I know that people are going to expect things to happen quickly and the Boots is a mess, it’s going to take a while. I’d like people to see where we’re starting so that they can appreciate the finished product when it finally arrives.”

Part of the open house will be special “tunnel tours” of a tunnel that leads from the basement of the motel.

The motel will be open from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Harvey said the open house is a free event, although they will accept donations if people want to contribute to restoring the motel.

“Pricilla and I will both be there all weekend and we’ll be available to talk about the project,” Harvey said. “It’s a pretty informal event.”

The 14 rooms of the Boots Motel have been used as low-income housing in the years before the sisters purchased it.

Harvey said they plan to rent the rooms in the building along the alley between Garrison Avenue and McGregor Street as professional office space and use the proceeds from those rentals to restore the rooms in the front building for travelers along Route 66.

Harvey is a historic preservation consultant and Bledsaw owned an operated a jewelry store at for several years. The two vacationed on Route 66 several years ago and had talked about buying an old motel on the Mother Road and operating it after they retire.

Harvey found out the Boots was for sale after the Society for Commercial Archeology put the old motel on its list of 10 most endangered roadside attractions in America earlier this year.

She has a master’s degree in historic preservation and has worked as a consultant with the National Park Service, helping them restore historic buildings and repurpose them.

Tommy Pike, president of the Route 66 Association of Missouri, said he was glad to see the motel purchased by people who intend to restore it.

“It means there’s an opportunity for it to be saved,” Pike said. “I think Debbie Harvey and her sister purchasing it, she is aware of preservation and what’s involved in it and I believe it has an excellent opportunity to survive now.”
Harvey said they have been working hard to clean the old, wet and musty odors out of the building before the open house.

“We’ve been very diligently cleaning it and trying to make not smell so musty and old,” Harvey said. “It still needs a lot of work but we’ve had a lot of application of elbow grease, especially to the bathrooms, to try to get those as respectable looking as possible. I don’t want people to go away with a disgusting memory of the Boots. I want them to go away thinking, yeah, this is possible and when it’s done, I’ll come back and stay there.”