Old Stagecoach Stop Museum

Sevier Cooper, a Tennessee-born frontiersman who had moved to Pulaski County in the 1840s, built the Old Stagecoach Stop in 1856 on what was then the major road connecting Springfield, Missouri (about 70 miles southwest) and Rolla (about 30 miles northeast). The road carried stagecoaches, wagon trains, and individual travelers across the Ozarks, and a properly-built inn at the midpoint of the Springfield-Rolla journey was a sound business proposition. Cooper used local timber for the structural logs, local sandstone for the foundation, and brick from a small kiln he set up on the property for the chimneys and fireplaces.

The completed building had two floors: a ground level with a public dining room, kitchen, and Cooper family quarters, and an upstairs sleeping floor with shared rooms for travelers (gender-segregated, as was the era's custom). The stable behind the inn could accommodate the teams that pulled stagecoaches, and there was a small smithy for emergency repairs. At its peak in the late 1850s, the inn served dozens of travelers per week and was one of the most prosperous businesses in the small Waynesville community.

The Civil War changed everything. When Union forces occupied Waynesville in 1862, the inn was commandeered as a field hospital — first for Union wounded, then alternately for Confederate prisoners as the front lines shifted. Cooper himself, a Confederate sympathizer despite his Union neighbors, was briefly imprisoned. The building survived the war with damage including the bullet holes still visible today and bloodstains that were never fully removed from some upstairs floorboards. After the war, the stagecoach business never fully recovered (railroads were taking over by the 1870s), and the building transitioned to use as a private home and boardinghouse for the next century.

Walking through the Old Stagecoach Stop today, the building's age announces itself immediately — uneven floors, low ceilings, narrow doorways, wide-plank pine boards worn smooth by 170 years of foot traffic. The ground floor has been arranged as a series of interpretive rooms: the dining room recreated with period-appropriate plank tables and benches, the kitchen with a working hearth and cast-iron cookware, the parlor with mid-19th-century furniture donated from various Pulaski County families.

Upstairs, the sleeping rooms remain mostly empty of furniture (the original beds are long gone) but include interpretive panels explaining how stagecoach travelers slept — typically two to four to a bed, sharing space with strangers, with the most expensive option being a private bed and the cheaper options including pallets on the floor. The Civil War hospital exhibit is in one of the upstairs rooms with period medical instruments, surgeon's tools, and information about specific soldiers known to have been treated here.

The volunteer docents who staff the museum on open Saturdays are the heart of the visiting experience. Most are longtime Pulaski County residents with deep family connections to local history, and they will share stories about specific individuals who passed through the inn, family connections to the Civil War events, and the slow transformation of the building from working business to historic museum. A typical visit involves spending as much time talking with docents as walking through the rooms.

The Old Stagecoach Stop is open Saturdays from 10am to 3pm during the May-through-October season. Off-season visits can be arranged by calling the Pulaski County Tourism Bureau at 573-774-2411 to schedule an appointment with a docent. Admission is free, donations are accepted in a box near the entrance, and there is no gift shop or formal interpretive center. Plan 30-45 minutes for a typical visit, longer if you want to talk extensively with the docents.

The building is on Lynn Street one block south of the Waynesville courthouse square, with free public parking on the street. There are two steps up to the front entrance and the upstairs is only accessible via a narrow original staircase, so the building is not fully wheelchair-accessible. Restrooms are available in the adjacent visitor center.

For Route 66 travelers, the Old Stagecoach Stop predates the Mother Road by 70 years but sits directly on a route that has been carrying cross-country travelers for over 170 years now. Waynesville's stretch of Route 66 (Historic 66 / Highway Z) passes within two blocks of the building, and the stagecoach-stop-to-motel-court continuum represents 170 years of American road travel history compressed into a single small town. Pair the Old Stagecoach Stop with a visit to Frog Rock west of town and the Pulaski County History Museum on the courthouse square for a complete Waynesville-area itinerary.