In Bates County, "Electric City" Is A Business Model, Not Just A Nickname

Friday night on Route 71 outside Butler, you can tell the season by the headlights. They line up off the highway shoulder starting around 5:30, trucks with mud flaps and trailer hitches nosing toward the gate at Electric City Speedway. By 7, the stands are half full and the air smells like fried food and hot rubber. Weekly racing runs from spring through fall here, and this year the calendar builds toward something bigger: the West Central Missouri Championship, three nights of racing October 15 through 17.

The track wasn't always called Electric City Speedway. For years it ran as Butler Motor Speedway, and before that, Old 71 Speedway. Somewhere along the way, whoever owns the marquee decided the town's oldest nickname was worth borrowing. That decision turns out to say more about Bates County than the racing schedule does.

The name comes from a specific Tuesday in 1881

Butler earned the nickname honestly. On December 6, 1881, the lights went on downtown, making Butler the first city west of the Mississippi River with electric power. St. Louis followed not long after. The man behind it, Captain F.J. Tygard, had visited the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition a few years earlier, came home with the idea, and formed the Brush Electric Light and Power Company with the city's backing. He became mayor shortly after, which tells you something about how a small town rewards someone who makes a promise and keeps it. Butler still runs one of the oldest continuously operated municipal electric utilities in the country.

That's not trivia you pull out at dinner and forget. It's the reason a dirt track forty years old and a downtown revitalization group founded in 2016 both chose to put "Electric City" on their letterhead instead of something generic. Electric City Downtown, the nonprofit behind the Main Street-style push to restore Butler's historic square, picked the name deliberately. When a town's calling card is "we did this ourselves, first, before anyone bigger got around to it," that's the kind of thing worth building a brand around twice.

What "self-built" looks like on a Saturday morning

Walk the square on a Saturday and the pattern holds. Butler's historic district still runs on its original brick streets, laid down when the town rebuilt itself after a Civil War-era fire destroyed the first courthouse and most of the surrounding business block. The current Bates County Courthouse has quilt-pattern tile floors, and a short walk from there sits the Bates County Museum, which holds artifacts going back to before the war. None of it was handed to Butler by a state program or an outside developer. It got rebuilt because the people already here decided it should be.

The eating and drinking follow the same local logic. Steiner's Restaurant & Bar and Koehn Bakery anchor two ends of the square's food scene, Tu Casa Mexican Bar & Grill covers the town's Mexican food, and smaller spots like That's It The Coup, Champs Chicken, and Jay's Shack fill in the rest. None of these are chains that corporate real estate picked for a strip mall. They're the businesses that decided Butler's square was worth staking a storefront on.

If you want to stretch the day, the Battle of Island Mound State Historic Site sits about eight miles southwest, on the old Toothman farm where the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry, the first Black regiment to fight in the Civil War, saw combat in 1862. Missouri turned the ground into a state historic site in 2012. It's a heavier stop than the square, but it's part of the same instinct: this county tends to hold onto its own story rather than wait for someone else to tell it.

Here's how the weekend actually breaks down if you're planning around it:

The same instinct shows up on the balance sheet

The clearest recent proof that this pattern isn't nostalgia showed up this spring, and it wasn't at the track or the square. Hertzog Meat Co., a family-owned Missouri meat processor already operating in Butler, announced an expansion called Hertzog South: a new retail and further-processing facility that added 22 jobs and gave the company room for expanded protein processing, a retail meat market, and new value-added product lines. The grand opening ran April 24, with a ribbon cutting followed by a community cookout.

Butler's mayor, Jim Henry, put the significance plainly:

"Hertzog is a homegrown Bates County company, and we're glad to see them growing right here in Butler."

Jim Hertzog framed the expansion the same way, describing it as a chance to keep building something for the community while creating more opportunities for local farmers. The project qualified for the state's Missouri Works program, which ties tax incentives to job creation, but the decision to expand in place rather than relocate to a bigger metro area was Hertzog's own. A company with 22 new jobs to create had options. It chose Butler again.

That's the thread running under everything else in this piece. The speedway didn't have to rename itself after a 145-year-old electrical achievement. The Main Street nonprofit didn't have to either. Hertzog didn't have to expand in a town of roughly 4,200 people when larger labor markets sat an hour away in either direction. Each of those decisions got made independently, by people with no obligation to reference each other, and they all landed on the same conclusion: Bates County's advantage is that it builds its own momentum instead of waiting for someone else to bring it in.

Where the county sends its overflow energy

That same self-sufficiency shows up in how the towns around Butler split up the calendar instead of competing for the same crowd. Rich Hill, a short drive south, keeps its own identity built around the Old World Mennonite Village and Store. Adrian, north of Butler, has Frontier Village. Neither town tries to be Butler's downtown twice. Butler also sits close enough to Truman Lake and the Lake of the Ozarks region to serve as a jumping-off point for weekend trips further out, which is part of why the chamber calls the city a gateway rather than a destination in its own right. Every piece of the county seems to know its job.

None of this is the kind of thing that shows up if you're scrolling listings from three states away. It's the kind of detail you only notice if you've spent enough Friday nights at the track, enough Saturday mornings on the square, and enough time paying attention to which local businesses are betting on themselves. Bates County has been telling you what it values since 1881. It just took a dirt track and a meat processor in 2026 to prove the message still holds.

If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live somewhere like Butler, from the historic square to the surrounding acreage, Dez Poole has spent years working this exact stretch of Linn County and Bates County ground. Schedule a free consultation when you're ready to talk through what a move here would really look like.