Before the summer of 1970, Springfield had never seen anything quite like it. On a warm Thursday morning, July 23, thousands of people lined up outside the new building at the corner of Glenstone Avenue and Battlefield Road.
Inside, 54 stores opened with their lights on and their shelves stocked.
The large parking lot sat on land that had been a quiet 65-acre farm just two years earlier, with scrub brush, Osage orange trees, and a few roadside billboards…