24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Avilla, MO

Avilla is a rural village in Jasper County, Missouri, founded in 1856, which makes it the fourth-oldest surviving settlement in Jasper County today.

Avilla was platted and laid out for public use on July 23, 1858, by Andrew L. Love and David S. Holman, and it was named after the town of Avilla, Indiana.

The village's post office was established in 1860, with David S. Holman as its first postmaster and first merchant.

Avilla sits on historic U.S. Route 66 — its road was redesignated Missouri Route 96 in 1985 — and the village is often described as one of the 'living ghost towns' of the Mother Road.

During the Civil War, Avilla's Unionist leaders organized a local home guard under Dr. Jaquillian M. Stemmons, and a Union Army garrison was encamped in the town by 1863; its open grassland position made it a refuge for residents of nearby burned-out towns such as Carthage.

After the Civil War, Avilla briefly boomed as wagon trains hauled merchandise and building materials through it from Sedalia, then the nearest railroad shipping point.

Avilla declined after World War II and again when Interstate 44 bypassed Route 66 in the 1960s; a major fire destroyed much of its lumberyard in 1971.

The 1915 Bank of Avilla building later served the community as its post office, a reminder of the village's busier railroad-and-highway era.

The 2020 census counted 103 residents in Avilla, down from 125 in 2010, and the village is part of the Joplin Metropolitan Statistical Area, about ten miles east of the county seat, Carthage.

The entire village covers only about 0.20 square miles, all of it land, surrounded by the prairie and creek bottoms first settled in the 1830s.