One of several murals along the historic, mostly two-lane, U.S. Route 66 in Cuba, Missouri, depicting battles between Union and Confederate forces in the U.S. Civil War of the 1860s, when Missouri was officially a noncombattant border state that nonetheless saw fierce fighting. Cuba is named after the island of Cuba in 1857 for reasons that are murky today. What is clear is that Cuba is Missouri's unchallenged "mural city," thanks to its reverence for the historic "Mother Road" — U.S. highway 66, the old two-lane road that ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Cuba and Missouri, to the Pacific Ocean in California. Photo by Carol Highsmith, 2021.