Aug. 31, 2026, 12:00 p.m. ET
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Carterville, Mo.
Claire Swatosh came home. Others did not.
That is the simplest way to understand the Heroes Museum, a memorial garden and artifact exhibit this Marine veteran has spent much of the past 30 years building beside Old Route 66.
It is not a roadside attraction, exactly, though travelers from around the world do stop. It is not a private collection, exactly – though the museum is crowded with artifacts he has brought in over the decades: flags, uniforms, firefighting gear, as well as photographs and other keepsakes, which he carefully arranges and displays.
The Heroes Museum is one man’s ongoing answer to an obligation he never quite stopped feeling: “I had a lot of friends that didn’t come home. This is my way of giving back.”
It is, rather, one man’s ongoing answer to an obligation he never quite stopped feeling.
“I spent 21 1/2 years in the Marine Corps,” says Mr. Swatosh, who, well into his eighth decade, is still running a landscaping business. “I had a lot of friends that didn’t come home. This is my way of giving back.”
Along Route 66, America has built thousands of shrines to motion: neon signs and motor courts, old diners and filling stations – places that remember the road as escape. Mr. Swatosh built something slower beside it.
He started the project three decades ago with the idea for a simple memorial pond with a flag. But he kept adding to it. Pathways. Native plants and grasses. A waterfall and gazebo.
“All this rock I’ve hauled in from Arkansas, or eastern Missouri – the glitter rock actually come out of Canada,” Mr. Swatosh says.
He grew up in Iowa and joined the Marine Corps at 17, a young man living on his own and needing something to turn his life around, he says. He had never been far from home until he boarded a plane for San Diego. He stayed almost 22 years, working on the decks of aircraft carriers and then retiring as a gunnery sergeant in 1991.
His service took him through the last years of the Vietnam War and later through the conflict in Lebanon in the 1980s. Along the way, losses accumulated. One still stands out: “a young officer, very, very intelligent.” He pauses, breathes deeply. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
He moved to southwest Missouri in 1993, working for a local explosives factory. After being laid off, he started his landscaping business.
From the start, he wanted to make his property on Route 66 a memorial for veterans. There have been three different versions over the years, and in some ways it’s still not finished.
His memorial dune buggy – which he has slowly built over the past 13 years, using his monthly retirement check to fund the project – is supposed to make people stop, look, and think.
