BROADWELL - A Route 66 diner-turned-museum in Broadwell was destroyed by fire Monday afternoon, little more than three months shy of the business's 70th birthday.

A neighbor to the building called 911 after spotting smoke about 3:35 p.m., and firefighters saw a thick plume before they arrived.

It took about 45 minutes to contain the flames.

"We came out of Lincoln and it was like, 'Oh, geez, that's going heavy,' " Lincoln Rural Fire Chief Dean Kukuck said of the smoke.

After the fire was out the damage was clear: The middle of the roof collapsed, the front of the store was scorched and the back of the building was a framework of blackened wood. The building's interior and most contents were destroyed, but the fire didn't spread to an attached former filling station.

The cause remained under investigation Monday night.

The restaurant closed in 1991 and owner Ernie Edwards converted the building in 2003 into a museum with a refurbished dining room and artifacts from the restaurant and the route.

He opened the restaurant in 1937, when he was 20 years old.

Kukuck said there was a lot of fire in the back of the building when firefighters arrived, and there was little visibility inside. Part of the ceiling came down on several Lincoln city and rural firefighters as they entered the front of the building, but none was injured, he said.

"It scared them more than anything else," the chief said. "They shouldn't have been in there."

The fire had too large of a head start for firefighters to overcome, the chief said, and two ceilings and multiple layers of siding also hurt firefighters' efforts.

Broadwell residents said they remembered the restaurant for everything from the red barstools to the special sauce on the Pig Hip sandwiches. Robin Ingram, a resident of Broadwell, said she had visited the restaurant and museum for decades, and the business will be missed.

"Really, in Broadwell, that was the only place to go," Ingram said of the place when it still was a restaurant.

Edwards' wife, Frances, said she and her husband were coming home from a trip to Lincoln when they saw the smoke. She said the fire came as a shock because of her husband's plans for the museum during a celebration of his 90th birthday in June.

She said her husband planned to put up a big tent and make Pig Hip sandwiches, which he hasn't made for years. Her husband cooked all the food when the restaurant was open, she said.

Edwards said the celebration will go on without the museum June 9 and 10, when Broadwell marks the village's 150th anniversary.

Firefighters carried damp soot-covered boxes into Edwards' neighboring, undamaged house. The original menu was in one box, singed but intact.

The menu said the restaurant charged 15 cents for a toasted cheeseburger and 5 cents for a cup of coffee.

"I made a fortune with my 5 cent coffee," Ernie Edwards said.

The restaurant became the Pig Hip after two years as the Harbor Inn, a name taken from the ship-themed wallpaper used on the walls. Frances Edwards said it was the cheapest wallpaper available.

Ernie Edwards hoped to start a franchise, and he patented the secret sauce used on his baked ham, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. He's still keeping the secret, and he said he'll take the formula to his grave if there are no buyers.

Ernie Edwards' mother ran the Pig Hip during his three years in the military, he said, and he ran it from when he returned until 1991. Ernie Edwards said he always enjoyed his work at the restaurant, but "54 years of the restaurant business is pretty much all a person could handle," he said.

Ernie Edwards said he hung nine pictures of governors inside the building Monday morning, and he hadn't been inside for at least a month. He sold almost everything from the business in an auction in 1992, but the work on the museum kept him active in recent years.

"It's given me another 15 years on my life," he said.

He said that before the fire, he was trying to decide what to do with the building. He said he didn't think the building had more than liability insurance.

"I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but I knew I had to do something," Ernie Edwards said. "So this made up my mind."