roads and their builders

8/13/2019 Roads and Their Builders

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The Bootheelers build their own 6They set out to do the job a n d did i t

en to match the needs Page 61In those early days in Missouri both were big

Men mules and machines . . . Page 66They all contributed to building the highw ays

Made in St. Louis . . . . Page 70Back when many famous cars bore the tag

There ought to be a law . . Page 73nd there were many as cars and highways kept a-coming

Where they walked roads followed . Page 8With the early highway engineers came change

The end is not yet . . . Page 85A brief look back a long look ahead

Interstate . . . . Page 86It works from sea to shining sea

Takeover . . . . . . Page 95The system grows - by 12 00 0 miles

The builders . . . . . . . Page 102They ue made modern-era highway history

C RT Page 109It carries cash for counties and cities

The city Page 115What happens when a highway comes to town?

Not mo nu ments but means Page 120A glance down t h e roa d that lies ahead

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State istorical Society o f Mis

Butterf ield s Overla nd Mail coach leaues Tipton for the 2,800-mile to San Francisco, carry ing letters at twenty cents an ounce passengers for 100 each - in gold, please.



he first layerH i s t o r i e s , wrote Sir Francis Bacon, make men wise.This, of course, is true only if men pay attention to these

histories and learn from them. Fortunately for Missourians, thispragmatic view of history has been applied to building the state'shighway system.

Each lesson learned from one experience has been applied, inmost instances, to the state's next stage o f highway development.

t has been a building on of layers, with each layer improving andstrengthened by the one before it.

For this telling, we have peeled back Missouri's highwayhistory in three arbitrary layers. This first layer, then, is the basecourse. We call it The First 200 Years.

I t covers roughly the period from the early 1700's when whitemen started pushing into Missouri's back country, to 1900 whenthat newfangled contraption, the automobile, clattered loudly intothe scene.

This is a thick l a y e r - especially in time . It also is animportant one because .from here emerged the dim, sometimesmeandering forms which were the ancestors of Missouri's highways.

This first layer also is rich in the romance and adventure offrontier life, a hard life leavened by ;he spirit of people who wereinsistently pushing back their horizons. And roads were one oftheir pushing-back tools.

The second layer covers almost the first half of theTwentieth Century, from the fading strains o f the Gay Nineties tothe end of World War II.

The third one picks up the threads of history after the waras Missourians and people ll over the world turned from theclearcut urgencies of battle to the perplexing problems of peace,including the massive task o f updating the nation's highways. Thislayer carries the Missouri story through another roadbuildingera to the present.

With these layers laid on each other, we hope, if not to makemen wise, at least to inform Missourians about the modernhighway system they have wrought.

And we hope that it makes them proud o f their accomplishments and aware o f the need for their continued support for itsfuture progress.

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The irst Highway Makers

issouri's first highwa ys were its manyrivers. But the first venturesome white

men, pushing back from these waterways,soon found they needed overland routes.A ready-made system was there for them. This

consisted of the ancient Indian trails, worn smoothby the red man's moccasined feet and his horses,and the natural paths, stamped through fo rests andacross the prairies by the hooves of buffalo anddeer herds and other animals.

The white man s settlement of Missouri did notget up steam until the early 1700's. But in 1542,when DeSoto recorded the first setting down ofthe white man's foot in this land, many of theIndian trails were there.

After marching along Crowley's Ridge in the

St. Francis basin , DeSoto and his goldhuntingfellow Spaniards crossed a wandering bend of the

Nine Indian trails penetrated into a lmost every area o f earlyMissouri. They included the trail from the Osage villages tothe Missouri River, the hunting trail {rom the villages to theVerdigris and ed Rivers and its return trail to St. Louis,hunting trails {rom the villages to the White iver regionand the return trail to Boonville, the Shawnee or old

Indian Trail, the St. Louis-Natchitoches Trail the Sacs'and Foxes' trail to the villages o f the Osages and theVincennes-Natchitoches Trail.

old Mississippi river channel from what s nowScott county. From there DeSoto sent two of his

men, Hernando DeSilvera and Pedro Moreno, andsome helpers forty leagues north to LaSaline forsalt. With this penetration of the Missouri wilderness to present Ste. Genevieve county, DeSoto lefthis name on one of the state' s earliest known trails,a trail that has left its mark on the present highwaysystem.

The DeSoto trail, however, was only one ofmany that the Indians made in Missouri. And whenthe white men arrived in the region to stay, theseIndian trails were the only inland travel routes inUpper Louisiana west of the Mississippi.

Most of the tribes in the region came fromSioux-speaking stock. These included the Otoes,

the Iowas, the Osages, Missouris, Quapaws, Kansasand others. Th eir chief rival s were the Sauk, Foxand Illinois tribes up in the northeast part of thestate. These tribes belonged to the Algonquinfamily, the largest North American Indian group.

These two large groups were chronic feuders.and splinter groups also often shifted allegiancesand alliances.

Although some of these tribes were fair toON T INUE

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Harper's Weekly

In the early 1700 s plodding pack trains loadedwith lead or miners supplies made t he Indian trailthe first road developed by white men in theMissouri territory.

The

Three notchoad

t played a pivotal partin opening the southeast region·west of the Mississippi River

T he red man engineered it. The white manand his strings of pack horses made it thefirst honest-to-goodness road in Missouri.

And lead paved it.Paved is used here figuratively, of course,

because the road wasn't paved in the modem sense(or any other sense, for that matter . The road washardly a road, either, but it played a pivotal part inthe opening of the southeast region west of theMississippi.

Before 1763 France claimed this whole Louisiana territory on both sides of the Mississippi river.They had established settlements on the east bankat Kaskaskia, St. Phillips, Cahokia, Prairie duRocher and Fort Chartres. But they had not movedwest across the river despite the repeated reportssince 1700 of rich mineral deposits in the region.

O TI NUE

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Capitol painting by Beminghaus

T R NOTCH

Miners lead and suppliesquickly n1ade it a road

But the Company of the West, afte r 1718 sentPhillip Renault from France to work the mines.Armed with three grants of land from officials atFort Chartres, Renau lt crossed the river and put hismen to work. One of the grants cove red twoleagues of ground a t Mine La Motte.

By 1725 Renault had built a furnace and wasgouging out fifteen hundred pounds of lead a day.

The company ran afoul of financia l rocks andby 1731 the grants revert ed to the French Crownand Renault headed for the illinois country beforereturning to France in 1744 .

A well-beaten Indian trail led from Mine LaMotte to the Mississippi s west bank across fromFort Chartres . In the mines early day s the lead washauled to the river and boated across. But Ste.Genevieve, thirty miles northeast of Mine LaMotte, sprouted on the west bank near the rivercrossing and by 1735 i t was a permanent settle-

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The lead mines opened by the French continuto produ ce un der Spanish rule. By 1795 more300 000 pounds o{ lead were shipped in a{rom Ste. Genevieve.

ment. With the heavy traffic in lead, miners andtheir provisions moving over the trail, it quicbecame a trace and a road. Three Notch Road,was called, because the route was marked by thnotches in trees along the way.

T he se mines helped supply the French wlead throughout their regime which end

in 1762 when France ceded the territory bsecret treaty to Spain, although the Spaniards d

not take possession until1770.In the last quarter of the century, St. Loustarted to outstrip Ste. Genevieve as the focal poon the Mississippi. But until then this first setment n Missouri continued to be the warehofor lead and the storehouse for miners supplies.

And the pack trains continued to plod overold Indian trail from the mines to the river back again until the pendulum of history swupriver, leaving little t race of this first road Missouri.



The

King sighway

This ancient trailof many languages

linked Spanishposts together or

military safety and

commerce and trade

DeSoto and his goldhunting Spaniards left hisname on an old Indian trail that became animportant overland link between early settlements

n 1770 when the Spaniards took over controlof Upper Louisiana on the Mississippi s westside, the country was still sparsely settled,

mostly a haven for fur trappers and traders withfew people looking for settlin' down land.

St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve were the onlypermanent settlements - and they hardly rankedas metropolitan areas.

Even twenty-nine years later when . CharlesDehault Delassus, Spanish lieutenant-governor ofUpper Louisiana, ordered the first census, is

Bu r e au of Public Roads

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KING S HIGHWAY

'No stump shall exceedtwelve inches in height

souri's total population was only 6,028. Ste.Genevieve in 1799, with a population of 945 ,outstripped St. Louis by 24 inh ab itants. St. Charlesranked third with 875 a nd New Madrid was fourthwith a population of 782.

At first, the Spaniards showe d li t t le desire topromote settl em ent but they soon changed theiroutlook, wanting settle rs to che ck t he Englishcoming in from Canada . Th ey lured sett lers (lik e

Missouri St a t e Museum

IVhite men made a trail a trace with trauel on foot orhorseback and a road when th y started rollin g theirwheels oue r

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th e prestigious Boones) with liberal inducementssuch as tax -free land , including mineral land s Andthey encourag ed miners to settle the country andwork the min es.

These policies worked. By 1804 more than halof the popul ation of the te rritory lived south ofthe St. Loui s dist r ict . Ne w Madrid, founded byColonel Geor ge Morgan , became a perman entsett lement about 1785 and a Spanish post in 1789.And in 1793 Louis Lorimer's settlement at CapeGirard eau was made an indepe nd ent Spanish post

These isol ate d posts, however, could not guarantee military safety nor facilitate co mmer ce andtrade in the country . Something was needed to tiethese posts together and to link outlying sett leme nts with them.

By1776 th

e Spanish commandant at St.

Louiswan ted a land connection between the tradingposts of St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve. To encourage regul ar in te rcourse between t he se two posts,he wanted a ferry over the Meram ec river . J eanBapt iste Gom ac he , in return for a grant of landstarted t he ferry near the mouth of t he Meramecabout seve n teen miles south of St. Loui s.remain ed in operation for the rest of the century.

he n , at the other end of the string oSpanish posts, a t race was in the makin g

Soon after New Madrid was es t abli sh ed a trace wamarked out leadi ng north to ward St. Loui s. Igenerally foll owed t he old Indi an trail whichDeSoto had traveled 200 years earlier. An d it musnot have be en much improved over DeSo to 's t imebecause when Mo ses Austin traveled from St. Louisto Ste. Genevieve in 1797 to check out miningpro spects he crossed the Mississippi river andjourneyed dow n the east side .

But the swelling tide of settlement was makingroads an inevitable probl e m of t he government. In1806, only three years afte r the United Statesbough t t he Louisiana Territory from Napoleon for$15 million, the first te rri to rial road law wapass ed . This l aw provided for the establishment ofdi st rict roads, with eac h d istrict em power ed t

have roads surveye d , marked out, made and repair ed by order of the district's court of quartersessions.

Two years later, on June 30, 1808, Territ orialGov ern or Meriwether Lewis signed a law providingfor the fir st specific road in the te rritory. Thisroad , or road s, as the law read, was to b e laidout from the to wn of St. Loui s to the town oSte. Gene vieve, from thence to the to wn of CapeGirard eau, and th en ce to the town of NewMadrid .



n November, 1808 another act provided forthe opening of the roads as one road from St.

ouis to New Madrid. The Road was to passthrough four districts and each district was to payfor its part.

Commissioners appointed by the governor laidout the route along the general line of the oldSpanish trace, which had mainly followed theancient Indian trail through the area. Plat and fieldnotes made in 1808 for the Cape Girardeau distric tstated, This road follows the Shawanae (sic) trailthe whole distance Without any deviation fromCape Girardeau to the Indian town.

In January, 1814 the General Assembly ofMissouri Territory passed another law declaring all

county roads laid out by order of court andaccording to law to be public roads. And jurisdiction was switched from the district's court ofquarter sessions to the county's court of commonpleas.

One section of this law describes the standardsfor the roads:

' 'All public roads laid out as now in use, orwhich shall hereafter be laid out, shall be cleared ofall trees and brush at least twenty feet wide, and

such limbs of trees as may incommode horsemenor carriages, shall be cut away and no stump shallexceed twelve inches in height.

So the old Indian trail grew up, pushed by thewhite man's military and economic needs. In St e .Genevieve and St. Louis, where the French influence was strong, the road was called La RueRoyale. In New Madrid, it was El Camjno Real.In English these became The Royal Road, TheKing's Trace, or The King's Highway.

Despite its grandiose names, the road was achallenge to all who traveled it. Marked by stumpsand mudholes, it was often impassable to wagonsand carriages and was hardly less arduous than atrip upstream by flatboat. Although called a road,

Valle House, built in 1772,sat by tile side o tile oldKing s Highway in Ste. Gene·vieve. It was built by DonFrancesco Valle II, tire fourthCivil and Military Cornman·dant o f Ste. Genevieve from1 796 to 1804.

i t was actually a wide pathway cleared- to somedegree- of brush and timber. Sometimes travelersmade the mudholes passable by filling them withrocks or logs. More often a new path was choppedout of th e woods, or the trip was cancelled untilthe holes dried up.

But the path -roa d filled the white settlers'needs - for that moment in Missouri history. t

would change more - as the needs of the peoplewho traveled it changed.

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M l s s o ~ r itnte Mu seum

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y 182 seWers were pushing into the wooded ho f southwestern Missouri, assuring the white muse o that end o the Osages anci ent trail from Verdigris to St. Louis.



Tl is impressive tribe developed most main trailsin South Missouri but one w s mainer than all

The Trail of the sages

T he sober, impressive Osages controlled mostof Missouri south o f the Missouri river sothey developed most of the main trails in

he region. And because they would rather travel aew miles farther to use a beaten path, they madeewer trails but better defined ones.

The first French explorers in Missouri territoryound the Osages living near the mouth of the

Osage river. But sometime before 1718 one groupmoved upriver to near the Osage river headwaters.These were the Great Osages, or Ps-he'tsi, thecampers on the mountains. The rest of the tribe,long with their cousins, moved westward up the

Missouri river and set up a village in the Missouriiver bottoms in what is now Saline county. These

were the Little Osage, or U-tsehta, campers in theowlands.

Two Great Osage villages lay on Osage headwaters in present Bates and Vernon counties. Fromere the Osages walked or rode out along three

well-worn trails. One headed northwest toward theMissouri river; its destination apparently switchedwith the westward tide of white set t lement- and

s chance for trading. s the Boonslick countrypened up, the trail's northern terminus probably

was Franklin. Lewis and Clark on their way westmentioned that the Osages crossed the river atArrow Rock.

One hunting trail led from the Great OsageVillages southeast toward hunting grounds onWhite river . Here they camped, surrounded byprings, in the vicinity of present Springfield. Fromhere branch trails led off down the White rivereeder streams. In 1818 Henry Schoolcraft in his

famous journal referred to the Osage trail downSwan creek as a horsepath beaten by the Osagesin their hunting expeditions along the WhiteRiver.

From these White river hunts the Osagesretraced their trail to the Ozark plateau where thetrails branched toward a market. In early days thismarket was St. Louis so they used the Verdigris-St.Louis trail. Later the market probably was Franklin or Boonville.

nother trail - also for hun t ing- led southwest, mostly in present Kansas and Okla

homa, to hunting grounds on the Verdigris, theArkansas, the Red and the Canadian rivers.

Their return trail was the longest and bestknown of the Osage trails. From their huntinggrounds, the Osages hea ded northe ast for St. Louisto trade with the white man. The route roughlyfollowed the highlands between the Missouri andMississippi rivers, crossing the Gasconade river onits headwaters near present Waynesville in Pulaskicounty.

One historian reported the trail was scarcelyobstructed by hills, which leaves litt le doubt as toits general location because no other routesthrough this country could match that description.

All of the Osages probably used this trail inearly trading at St. Louis. Later the ArkansasOsages made good use of it in their trade agreement with the Chouteau family of St. Louis. But itremained primarily an Indian trail until the earlynineteenth century because the white settlers hadnot pushed extensively into the area south of the

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OS GES

The Southwest country ~ a s gittin on

Division of Commerce o.nd lndust .rio l De v elopme n t

h e Meramec Iron Worksestablished in 1826 used theOsage Trail for hattling in sup-plies and freighting the smeltediron out.

Missouri river and west of the Mississippi.In the early 1800's, however, they started

pushing up the valleys of the Merame c, theGasconade and the Osage rivers, lured by therumors of rich minerals, furs, the valley land andtimbe r along the Missouri, the Gasconade andOsage rivers. Discovery of iron ore along theMeramec near present St. James anchored thewhite man's use of the center of this old Indi antrail.

About 1828 Thomas Jame s, along with SamuelMassey and more than one hundred laborers,started e r e ~ i n gthe Meramec Iron Works. By 1837wagonloa ds of iron were rolling to many parts ofthe state, with much of it freighted overland to St.Louis. And supplies for the mines came back thesame way.

Six years before that, in 1831, two postofficeswere operating in the area - one at Piney, aboutten miles southwest of present Rolla, and one a tMeramec. So the white man's needs were solidify-

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ing his use of the old Indian trail and making i t aroad.

h e other end of the old trail was goingthrough the same evolution as settlers

penetrated into south west Missouri along the WhiteRiver. Legal comp li catio ns, however, slowed thedevelopment of the area.

The U.S. Government had granted reservationsin the area to the D elawares in 1818 and to theKickapoos in 1819. Th ey started moving in forpermanent occupancy in about 1822 - and, ofcourse, found themselves in a hassle with the whitesettlers.

The government finally upheld the Indians'rights and th e white settlers moved out, some tothe already established settlement s on the Meramecand Gasconade h eadwaters. But for the Kickapoosand Delawares the victory was only a delayingaction. In 1832 they ceded their claims to theUnited States and many of the early white settlersreturned to make their homes there.

These settlers, like others elsewhere in Mis-

souri, came from everyw here. As the frontieiadvanced they moved with it, like old SquireEzekiel Hagan. He had moved from Virginia towestern Carolina and then to Tennessee , and whenland hunters came in with good news fromArkansas and Missouri, he planned to git on.

T his southwest region was gittin' on, too.Greene county was organized in 1833 and

by 1835 a land o f f ~ c ewas opened in Springfield,on its way to becoming the most important townin the region. A state road was authorized from St.Louis to Springfield, with the authorization coming n sections. The first legislation was ap p rovedFebruary 6, 1837. By then immigrants into theregion were flocking over it and its niche in thehistory of Missouri highways- past, present andfuture - was carved clear ly.

Early settlers had called it the Osage trail orthe Indian trail. Later it was called the Kickapoo trail. But the white man's stamp was markedindelibly on it when it became known as the oldSpringfield road or the St. Louis-Springfieldroad.

Progressing through various names and numbers, it became the fabled U.S. Route 66 of storyand song. And today, in the latest stage of itsevolution as Interstate Route 44, i t serves thewhite man's needs as i t once did the Indian.



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State istorical Society o f Missouri

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y wagon, on foot andon

horseback, the set-tlers streamed westwardinto - and through -Missouri along theBoones' route to thesalt licks country

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The influx of settlers soon1nade a road out of the oldtrace leading to the West

hen Daniel Boone moved his family intoMissouri from Kentucky he set in motion a series of events which were to

stamp Missouri forever with the Boone name andwhich were to open up the first early road notbased on an Indian trail.

The Boone family, during the Spanish regime,settled in the Femme Osage region about twentymiles west of St. Charles. Then in 1806 DanielMorgan Boone and a brother traveled west to

There was

plenty of room

in the Boons Lick

Country and they

headed for it

wagons and four-wheeled carriages and 55 twowheeled carriages and carts passed near St. Charlesbound for the Boonslick country . One writer saidhe had counted a hundred wagons a day passingthrough St. Charles at times.

Asa Morgan, in an advertisement in the Octo·ber 26, 1816 Missouri Gazette, reported from

Howard County (commonly called Boons-LickSettlement):

''Missouri and Illinois present an interestingspectacle at this time. A stranger to witness thescene would imagine that Virginia, Kentucky,Tennessee and the Carolinas had made an agreement to introduce us s soon as poss ible to thebosom of the American family. Every ferry on theriver is daily 0ccupied n passing families, carriages,wagons, negroes, carts, etc. - respectable people,apparently able to purchase large tracts of land .

While Daniel Boonesettled down in hisson's home in easternMissouri, the tide o fsettlers pushed on west-ward, many in coachesas the land became

ciuilized.

Division o f Commerce and Industrial Development

present Howard county to make salt . No Boonessettled a t the salt licks but their reports kicked offa stream of immigration and the region becameknown as the Boonslick country . Five years later,in 1811, Henry Marie Brackenridge on his voyageup the Missouri river found seventy-five familiesalong the river's north bank within a radius of fouror five miles.

Indian troubles during the war with Great

Britain (1812-1814)stemmed part

ofthe

tide ofimmigration into the Boonslick country until1815. Then p_ace treaties with various Indiantribes at Portage des Sioux were made and settlersagain poured into the area.

In three years the thirty families of whitesabove Cote Sans Dessein had jumped to more thaneight hundred families. And Franklin, the westernedge of the frontier, was growing faster than anysettlement on the Missouri. By 1819 the MissouriIntelligencer reported that during October, 271

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Come on, we have millions of acres to occupy,provisions are cheap and in abundance.

Morgan just happened to have a few acreshimself; in fact, a deed of Morgan's to a tract ofland from a Frenchman, Joseph Marie, dated 1800,is the first authentic record of settlement inHoward county . Boons-Lick Settlement, that is.

At any rate, the people kept coming.To help the travelers along the road the

Missouri Intelligencer in1835

published a highwaymileage log - which would a t least help themfigure how far out of their way they had strayed.

According to the log, it was 116 miles from St .Charles to Columbia via Fulton. Th a t was choppedup like this:

From St. Charles to M'Connell's - 9 miles; toAlexander 's- 5 miles; to May 's - 10 miles; toPringle's - 6 miles; to Taylor 's- 5 miles; toPendleton's - 10 miles; to Boyd 's - 2 miles; toWidow Kabler ' s - 1 4 mile; to J o n e s ' - 4 1h'miles; to



Ruby s - 3 miles; to Lewis town - 3 1h miles; toMonroe s - 8 miles; to McMurtree's- 10 miles; toGrant 4 miles; to Fulton - 12 miles; toMillersburgh- 12 miles; to Vivan 's- 2 miles; toParker s - 5 miles; to Columbia- 5 miles.

T his influx of settlers soon made a roadout of the o ld Boonslick trace, leading

west out of St. Charles. And as it became a road itslocation stirre d up a bit of controversy, an earlyindication of how much sto re people put in havinga road run nearby.

One petition filed in 1816 asked for a countyroad from St. Charles toward the Boon slic k settlements to the Howard county line. Another laterpetition state d that the old Boonslick road, neverdeclared a county road, carried the real trave l and

always had and that the new road was empty.More petitions piled on petitions as each

county tried to officially locate the road. Farmersled the disagreements, wanting to tap the tide oftravel for their produ cts.

Trav elers along the road complained, too,because they all too easily lost their way. The olddirection, Yo u can't miss it didn't apply to the

road because many forks led of f it and there wereonly two finger boards between St. Louis an d theBoonslick country. The complaints also stated thatthe forks leading off to the sett lements usuallywere more beaten than the direct route andfrequently led weary travelers many miles out oftheir way.

As Missouri entered statehood the controversystill festered in St. Charles over which of threeroutes would be the official Boonslick road acrossthe county. Finally in January, 1827 a generalstate law automatically made the Boonsli ck road a

state road. And in Augu st of that year NathanBoone was appointed to survey the route. It 'sdoubtful that he did, however, because in t hefollowing February the county court appointedProspect K. Robbins to make the survey.

At its easternend the

road was laidout

as TheRoad to St. Charles because it opened up awestward trail from Lacled e's and Chouteau's littletrading post of St. Lou is. Some historians calledthe St. Charles road the eastern end of the SantaFe and Oregon t ra i ls - and with some reason. InSt. Louis forty wagon build ers and numerous otherplants made equipment for these westward-movingpioneers.

n 1837 the St. Louis and St. Charles Turnpike company was incorporated. The incor

poration act stated that the road should be a t leasteighty feet wide with a t least twenty-four feet of it

macadamized. And the company could erect threetoll gates when the road was co mpleted withcharges not to excee d: For each man and horse, 61/ i

cents; for each loose horse, 4 cents; for eachfour-horse wagon and team, 30 cents; for eachtwo-horse wagon and team, 25 cents; for each gigand h orse, 20 cents; for each pleasure carriage, 30cents; for each head of cattle, 2 cents; and for eachshuep, hog or other animal, 1 cent.

But it was 1865 before the company gotaround to reporting that the entire road betweenSt. Louis and the Missouri river opposite St.Charles had been constructed of rock. Thus, itcame to be called the St. Charles Rock Road.

Farther west the road could boast of few suchimprovements. Even the man on horseback attimes had difficulty mudding through. As onetraveler said, If the mud does not get quite overyour boot tops when you sit in the saddle, theycall it a middling-good road.

But the Boonslick, the first non-Indian basedroad, was the first east-west highway across Mis-souri; it was the trunk from which branched thegreat trails leading to the Far West. It was the kindof road which carrie d men described by Isaac vanBibb er Jr., a relative of the Boon es, when heappealed at Loutre Lick for volunteers to head outalong the Boon slick road to the Ro c ky Mountains:

Who will join in the march to the RockyMountains with me? he asked, a sort of highpressure, doubl e cylinder, go-it-ahead, forty-wildcats-tearin' sort of a fell er? Wake up , ye sleepyhead s . . . Git out of this brick kiln . . . thesemortali ty turners and murder mills, where th e yrend er all the lard out of a feller until he is too leanto sweat. Git out of this warming-pan, ye hollyhocks, and go oi.tt to the West wh ere you may beseen.

There were a lot of those people on theBoonslick road in those days.

Pag e 2



On the move by land wate

State istorical Soci ty o f Mi ss ouri

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State Historical Soci e ty of Missouri

; T . D . M : ' . A U L : J : F F

arriage ManufacturerCORNER OF TWENTY-FIRST ST. AND FRANKLIN AVENUE,

DEI'OT NO. 33 THIRD sr., BET . Pl.'IE AND Clill>:\UT,

U I . N T L O U ISKeeps eolll tantly on hAnd, aocl m a k ~ ~to nnlrr,

Rockaways, Buggies and Traveling Wagons,OF EVERY DESCRIPTION.

REPAIRING DONE AT THE SHORTEST NOTICE .State Historical Society of Misso uri

T ~ H , - . C _ , B . T U ~ D : : : C a & & E f tW. O bW ::. = = . , - - -LUXURY ON WHF,.ELS.

Walt ror the W ag ~ m W C 11 all Take a Bide."Gnl Balu"'f lmani m i t ~ w h l ~meauRct·Bonom,Bart·PuPril:cl

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n the 1800 s peopl e wereon the moue into andthrough Missouri in almostevery conce ivable kind oftransportation . By waterthey came, in luxury steam-boat s and rough keelboats .

Overland they came, byfoot and by coveredwagons buggies, stage-coaches, and carts. Andsome tried to move on west{rom Missouri in the leg-endary windwagon withsails hoisted to the prairiebreezes.

Page 23



State Historical Society of Missouri

y the

ide ofthe oad

here three skeins of history came together

State Historical Society of Missouri

Stagecoach travel could be c ro w d ed and bone-wearying - on long trips

age 24

n the 1830 s, when the stagecoach driverwhoaed his team to a stop at the Cross Keystavern, three important facets of early Missouri

history came together at one time and place.These three facets were the colorful stagecoach

with its load of cramped passengers and mail, thedusty (or muddy) road from which the driver

reined his team past the big sign with the crossedkeys, and the tavern. These three entries inMissouri s historical index combine d to mark anera romantic and adventurous in its rough-hewncolor, unique in its contribution to the growth of ayoung nation flexing its muscles and warm in itssocial overtones.

Early emigrants into and through Missouri rodehorseback along the widening trails or walkedalongside teams o f oxen pulling wagons loadedwith all they owned. But later emigrants, with



fewer goods, and mo re money wanted to get there

faster than a plodding ox or mul e team coul d makeit. Th is fluid frontier did not want for entrep reneurs so stagecoac h service soon was offered.

The Missouri Intelligencer in April 27, 1819reported the prospective opening of such anoverland stage routed from St. Louis to Franklin.

"Suc h an undertaking," it sa id, "would, nodoubt liberally remunerate the enterprising andmeritorious individuals engaged and be of immensebenefit to the pub lic, who wou ld doubtless pre ferhis to any other mod e of traveling . . . "

By 1823 the St . Loui s and Franklin Stage"was advertising in the lntelligencer thr ee-day servce between t he two towns - for $10.50. That

ncluded " ferriage" at St. Charles ac ross the Misouri River. A passenger cou ld carry fourteenpound s of b ag gag e- o r 150 pounds of extrabaggage for the price of another fare. But allbaggage was carried at the risque o f th e owner .However, "Careful and attentive drivers have beenprovided, and the accommodation of passengerswill be particularly attended to.

A s stagecoac h travel increased , the roadsidetaverns cropped up, also to attend to the

ccommodation of passe ngers" as well as to o therot-so-well-heeled travelers along t he Boonslick

Road and other roads leading into the westering

Missouri frontier. Tha t accommodat ion includedosto ffices, which usually cons isted of a box or aesk pigeonhole, with the tavern keeper as post

master.Missouri's ma il service - officia lly, that is

tarted shortly after the U.S. bought the LouisianaTerritory in 1803. The first official postofficeswere established in St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve and

t. Charles. But no one knows exactly wh en.But by 1805 President Jefferson had appointed

Rufus Easton as first postmaster at St . Lou is withn office in a sm all r oom in a stone building onhe southwest co m er of Third and Elm str eets."

Easton became a del egate to Congress from the

Missouri Territory in 1814. By tha t time therewere eight post offices in the territory and 219miles of post roads. But settle rs away from t he

vers and main roa ds had to depe nd on tr a velersnd explorers for their mail "service." Th e senofficial mail carriers often toted letters adressed to "Somewhere in the Boon e's Lick couny." And they often read the l etters \vith a true

rontier disregard for the privacy of the mails.There was no spirit of the mail must go

hrough. " And what it often had to go through wasad weather, impassable road s and the hands o fresponsib le - and irrepressibl e - frontie rsmen

doubling as post riders and stagecoach drivers. And

tavemke epers doubling as postmasters.

J ames Jones, who built th e Cross Keys tavernat Jonesburg, became its first postmaster in

1838. T he postoffice was a walnut desk in thecenter room of the thr ee-room tave rn made ofhewn logs with a clapb oard cove ring. Here thepo st maste r received his postage - from five totwenty-five cents for each let ter - relayed by thestagecoac h driv ers. There were no postage stamps;Post master Jones jo tted down h is postage chargesin account books, some of wh ich - yellowed andcarrying seve ral hundr ed dollars of uncollected

charges - were passed down years late r to members of the family.These roadside taverns served Missou ri and its

travelers in ot her ways , too. As Floyd Shoemaker,the longtime and prominent Missouri historian ,wrote:

I n the Missouri tavern the pioneer settler andthe wandering strange r were first welco med to oursoil. In this early wayside inn business was transacted , religion preached , duels decided, politics dis-cussed and frequently settled, towns founded,courts conve ned, and hospitality dispense d. I tserved as home and mart, court and forum . I t wasthe product of a pioneer co mmunity , peopled by

an honest, fearless, hospitab le folk. Conditionsproduced it that will never return . . .

Missouri was born a state in a tavern, theMisso uri in St. Louis. In the same tave rn , thestate's first legislature met and Alexander McNairwas inaugurated as the state's first governor there.And in it the state 's first U.S. senators, Barton andBenton , were electe d .

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CONT INUED

age5



I

I

SI E

he Missouri tavern 'sel ved as home

T averns, in addition to a lot of othergoings-on, featured a whole lot of plain

preaching. In fact, the combination of tavernkeeping and preaching was fairly common. TheRev. Andrew Monroe, for instance, one of the

state's first prohibitionists and a Methodist minister, operated a tavern near present Danville.But the Reverend, stopping at another tavern

(Kenner's near Paudingville), had to take a backseat at blessing time . Kenner asked his own blessingat mealtime, concluding: And for all these blessings we thank Thee, 0 Lord. Amen . Kick thatblamed dog out from under the table.

Dogs might have to be kicked out from underthe tables but those tavern tables usually wereloaded with good frontier food. And the price was

age 26

Taverns along wit h handling mail competed with other in refreshment - food and l iqu id and the mmethods o frontier news·spreading.

reasonable, if not downright cheap, even for tdays.

William Rice's tavern on the Boonslick

in Montgomery county featured probablystate's first European plan tavern menu. Dinneconsisting of corn bread and common fixin's twenty-five cents; wheat bread and chickenin's were thirty-seven and one-half cents -three bits, in the frontier vernacular. Both kindfixin's cost five i t s or sixty-two and one-cents.

The westward flow of Missouri settlers -the ones pushing even farther on - pulledroads westward with them. And following alo



t court and forum

came the stagecoaches, with passengers and mailsacks rattling, and the taverns with good food andtalk Or at least both in good quantities.

Any grumbling about the fix in's carried anelement of danger. John Groves, the first

tavern keeper in Chillicothe, kicked a food grumbler out the door one day with this explanation:

The blam ed sk unk insulted my boarders and Iwon't stan d for it. My boarders eat my fare andlike it; and when a man makes fun of my grub, it'sthe same as saying they haven't sense enough toknow good grub from bad. I'm bound to protectmy boarders.

As the roads and stage and mail coaches - andthe accompanying taverns- were pulled westward,the horizons of these enterprising frontiersmenwidened.

During the 1830's and 1840's the rapidlyexpanding settlements demanded better an d moremail facilities , and numerous post road s were laidout in Missouri. In 1850 George Smith, thefounder of Sedalia, had a contract with the U.S.government for operating passenger and mailcoaches over 483 miles of Misso uri stage lines. And

State Historical Society o f Misso ri

Fording rivers at night could be an exciting experience andevidence o the need for bridges

in 1850 Sam Woodson started a monthly stage runfrom Independence to Salt Lake - along with amail contract for a regular, dependable income.

In the same year, on July 1 , the first mailstagecoach between Independence and Santa F erolled out on its first trip to the Southwest overthe famous trail first marked out by Pedro Vial in1792 and re-blazed by William Becknell in 1821and 1822. The stage was operated by Waldo, Halland Company under contract with th e U.S. government. t ran once a month until 1857 when itstarted semi-monthly runs. Then came weeklyservice in 1858, tri-weekly in 1866 and dailyservice in 1868.

T he Santa Fe and other famous trails whichoriginated .in Missouri combined with rail

roads to lead the ever-onward pioneers to the FarWest. And they pulled the stage and mail coacheswith them.

After a long and bitter fight to esta blish maildelivery to California a co mpany headed by JohnButterfield in 1857 won the contract, backed upby a 600,000 annual appropriation by Congress.Butterfield' s line, with more than 100 Concord

ONTINUED

Page 7



I ..I

SIDE

rom Missouri the coaches rolled w s t

The mo n thl y stage for Salt Lake City, run y Sam Woodsonby 1850, leaues Independence on its long trip thatsomet im es induced what some writers dubb ed stagecraziness.

coaches, a tho u sand horses and 500 mules and 7 50men, stretche d from Memphis and St. Louis in theeast to San Franci sco in the west. Mail andpassengers rode from St. Louis to Tipton on thenewly-laid Pacific Railroad. There they transferred to stage coaches which swung on a great arcthrough Springfield to meet the Memphis stage atLi ttle Rock, and from there on th rough Preston,Texas to San Francisco. The distance - nearly2,800 miles.

ag e 28

Postage rate was 20 cents an ounce for leand passengers' fare was 100 in gold.

John Hockaday, in 1858 join ed the stageco

entrepreneurs with a line from St. Joseph toarmy posts in Utah. And n April, 1860 the PExpress kicked up its heels in a brief but coloepisode.

s the westward rush stre tc hed the stagemail coac h line s and the road s over which ttraveled and the taverns where they stopped,historical triplets left n Missouri started a newan era which would lead to new forms for theand new contributions to the developmentMissouri.

. . . . . . . . ................................ . . . . . .



: ~

. . . ;, ,. .. .. , , eM ¥ ~ ~ r , 1

, • ·

Bureau of Public Road s

Planks beat the mud but weather and use soon madethem worse than the rocky road to Dublin, s oneIrishman put it.

a n c i n ~

o al a n l ~

Road

T he young folks figured it was a fittin' timefor dancin .

Their elders, most of them prominent citizensof Columbia and Boone county, had been plaguedfor six years by troublesome delays - legal, engi

neering and personal. Now the long-awaited Providence plank road was completed. All ten miles ofit. That included the mile and a half stretch of rockand gravel south out of Columbia toward Providence on the river. (The rock and gravel had beenlegalized that year for plank roads by theGeneral Assembly , just in time for the dedication.)

Now i t was July, 1855 and a crowd wasgathered a t the road's cove red bridge over Hinksoncreek south of Columbia to see - and hear - theofficial opening . No self-respecting road could be

ONTINUED

Page 29



:

PL NK

ooden roads loolied l i l ie a godse

opened without oratory and the Providence plank

road was no exception.The crowd gathered in the cool shade of thewooden bridge to hear speeches by Colonel WilliamSwitzler, Major James Rollins and Robert Todd.Then the Rev. Nathan Hall offered a prayer. Withthe speechifying over, the young people took overthe celebration with a dance on the bridge.Whereupon, one participa nt recalled, the dignifiedPresbyterian minister put on his stovepipe hat,picked up his cane and allowed as how it was timefor him to leave. And leave he did.

age 3

For most Missourians of the mid-1800's

opening of a piank road was a time for dancMissouri roadbuilding had broken out in a cacoony of swishing crosscut saws, biting axes, fatimber and buzzing saw mills as a plank road mswept the state.

Starting in 1849, and running about eight ythrough the administrations o f Governors AuKing and Sterling Price , Missourians appeintent on lacing the state with corduroy roaAnd with some logic, considering the situationthe time.



t ~ t t oH istorica l Socie t y o r Misso u ri

at irst

This o ld sk etch d epi cuth e Par is to Hannibalplan k ro ad west o f Hannibal , along with th erailroad which was tohelp sea l iu doom. Thethirt ee n-mile road co s t

23 0 0 per mil e butthr ee miles o f it wasgraue l Li ke mo s t o f th eo th er plank road s o fth e craze p eri od itwas mo rt gaged h ea uily,

so ld and finall y alm os tgiueT away as succeeding i nuestors lo s tmo11ey.

T he idea of wooden roads looked like agodsend - and a cheap and convenient

one, at that. The state was blessed with tim ber .And it was a simple matte r to set up a waterpowered sawmill on a creek bank.

Then, as the promoters envisioned the undertaking, it was a simple matter to construct the roadas the law required, so as to form an even,smooth, hard surface.

The roads we re sim ilar to the plank sidewalksalong t he st reets of t h ese Missouri frontier towns .T hree oak sills were lai d lengt h wise wi th the roa d ,

an d the plan s two an d a half inch es t hic kwere laid ac ross t he s ills. Most of the ro ad s wereeigh t t o twe lve feet wid e, runn ing down the ce nte ro f a fi fty-foot, cle ared ri gh t o f w ay .

Co rpor a t io ns bui lt th ese road s - or p lann ed tobu ild them - un d er char ters gran te d by spe cial actso f the General Asse mbl y. Befo re t he mania r an it sco urse, forty-nin e co mp an ies had b een ch arte red .Seve nteen roa ds ac t u ally were buil t; all w ere to llroa ds exce pt o ne .

The plan ned loca tio ns o f th ese ro ads show ho wth e se t tlers were pu shin g bac k into th e in te riorfro m th e rivers . ll co mpani es exc ep t one plann edto build r oad s leadin g fro m t o wn s on the Misso urior th e Mississippi riv ers . The ex cep t ion was th eVersaill es p lan k road , wh ich was to r un f ro mVersai lles t o th e Pacif ic railroad.

Th e mo st famo u s o f these wooden roads - andthe lon gest in th e U ni t ed S t a t e s - was th e Ste.Ge nevieve, lr on Mounta in an d Pilo t Kn o b r oad.Com plete d in 185 3 , t he 42- mil e ro ad co nn ectedSte. Ge nevieve and Ir on Moun tain by way o fFarmingto n . Hea vy wagon loads o f iron ore andfar m prod ucts c reaked over t and thr oug h itsfive to ll ga tes - un til 18 5 7 when th e Ir on Mountai n r ailr oa d so unde d i ts dea t h kn elL

T he Glasgo w and H un tsv ille ro ad also h ad alive ly if sh ort life . Cap tain Ale xan der

Denn y, wh o lived near Roanoke, rec alled thefou r-h orse stage t ha t clattere d o ver i t daily alongwi th w agons loade d wi th co rn , hay , to b acc o an dwh ea t. And h e lon g remembe red th e sou n d o fh orses t rott in g o n th e planks o n a cold ni gh t w henth ey co uld b e he ard fo r a mil e a way.

Most of th ese p lank roa ds carr ied mo re highh op es th an fr eigh t. In i ts 1856 cata log t he U n iversity of Missouri d ecla red , The Unive rsity is eas ilyaccess ibl e by riv er duri ng t he greater part of t heye ar. At th e landin g at Pro vidence, c arria ges willalways be in readiness to co n vey p asse n gers toCo lu mb ia. To th is point a p lan k road is co mplete d .

But the Providence road, like most of t he otherp lank roads, fe ll on ba d days from t he start . Aweek afte r th e yo u ng folks danced on t he H inksonbr idge a ma n tr ied to lead a cow ac ross it. ButBossy became f righ tened and bo lte d th rough thebannisters, car rying the man - an d b annisterswith her into th e creek below . T he man was un hurtbut the cow was k illed. And the company paid fo rher.

Later, heavy rains washed away three smallbridges. Then the winter's freezing and thawingjacked up repair costs. And its woes m ounted fromthere, mirro ring t h e difficulties that plagued mostof the ot h er plank roads and eve n tually draggedthem d own .

Costs of th e roads usual ly were mo re t hanONT NU E

Page 31



State istorical Society o f Mis so uri

age 3

. · ·. ·,

·



P N

rfhey whetted n ppetite for better roads

expected, receipts were less and operating expenseswere higher. The contract price, for instance, onthe thirteen miles of the Hannibal-Paris road was$2300 per mile . On the Providence road s was$30,000 for ten miles.

F inally, despite loans from stockholders, theProvidence road company could not pay on

its note. The deed of trust was foreclosed inAugust 1857 and Milton Matthews and otherstockholders bought i t for $8700 - two years andone month after the timbers of Hinkson creekbridge shook to the dancing feet of Boone county

:t-11 ' ·? · , • •

State Hlstorleal f . J · ·;Society of Missouri .. · if·_

young folks. The owners, trying to fend off

impending disaster, kept the road open.But it and most of the other plank roads weredoomed. The planks either sank into the mud torot away or curled up like oaken pork rinds,making the ride, s Thomas Gentry of Columbiadescribed it, like a ship riding the ocean waves .

Laying a plank road was a fast way to get out 1

th e mud But it a lso was a fast way to financialdisaster to most investors

Hastened by the coming of the railroads andstage lines and then the Civil War, the passing ofthe plank roads came swiftly.

The Providence road owners, for instance,finally cut tolls in half to try to save theirinvestment . But it was too late. In desperation theysold i t at auction to two enterprising Boonecountians fo r $400. Tollhouses and lots were soldto other parties for $400. So the dance -launchedplank road which cost $30,000 plus another$5,000 for extras brought $800 across theauction block .

Then in 1865 the Boone County Court moved

to take over the road and in March, 1866 the

owners surrendered all of their rights to the court.This was the last record concerning any plank roadin Missouri.

The plank road mania w s dead. On firstjudgment it had been a failure - an expensivefailure for many individuals associated with it.

But time was to prove that plank roads werenot a complete failure; they whetted the public'sappetite for bette r roads, an appet ite which was tohunger again after the bloom wore off the railroadboom.

age



Eads Bridge was a revolutionar y un d ertaking, a maruelo engineer ing and aesthetic e ce llence, and it tamed tileMississippi Riuer a t St . Louis .

The ~ f i n s texpression oPa ge 4



Capitol painting by Nuderschcr

a c i v i l i z t i o n ~

Early settlers eede<l

hri lgcs to tame rivers

and C 11quer fro11tiers

ridge, someone said, is the finest expression of a civilization.

Th at's a pretty sad commentary on the status

of Missouri's frontie r as a c ivilized society. But,then, people weren't flocking westward across theMississippi in the early 1800's to find civilization;they were looking for land and a chance to buildon it . Civilization? That cou ld come later.

So when a river cut th eir westward march theycrossed it - perhaps by uncivilized methods, butthey crossed it. They forded it, swam it, floateddown it and soggily went on their way. hen

settlements coagulated along these streams and thenecessity for repeated crossings arose, these pioneers put their practical minds to the task ofdevising dry methods of crossing these waters.

Ferries offered a quick and cheap - and

usually dry - method. Jean Baptiste Gomache in1776, the year that the Constitutional Conventiondelegates hammered out a Declaration of Independence in a hot Philad elphia summer, co n-



XPR SSION

rugal sett lers balliecl at bridge taxes

cocted a Missouri frontier declaration of independence. At least it was such for travelers cross in g theMeramec river on the Indi an tr i l betwe en St.Louis and Ste. Genevieve. His declaration was aferry ac ro ss t he river south of St. Lou is, t he firstoffi cially record ed - an d ordered - ferry in s-

souri te rritor y .Gamache swapped his promised ferry opera-

Heavy timbers in the early wooden brid ges o Miss o uri gaueway to s tee l in the late 1800 s.

age 6

tion for 1056 arpents of land. With that kind ofacreage measu re m ents varied with locales but anarpent wa s usually slightly more than an acre) hedidn t need to worry about th e ferry paying off .The Indians, in fact, displayed a marke d umvillingness t o pay the toll . Hostil e, you might call them .So much so t hat Gomache close d down for a whileuntil t he free-riders cooled off.



Gamache 's type of ferry - probabl y justboats - h as been lost in an t iqu ity. But so metwenty years later, in 1797, Captain James Pi ggottgot fancy an d lashed several pirogues to geth er. He

mounted a woo den platform on them and char gedtwo dollars to carry a ho r se and driver across th eMississippi at St. Louis . That two-dollar to ll wou ldseem to indicate that the frontier was becomingcivilized fast

M ny other ferries sp rang up as more settlerspushed into Missouri to stay . On sma ller

st reams the se were usually boa ts, rowed or poledback and forth. Many of those ear ly river-tam ersbequeathed their nam es to roads a nd highway s oftoday , like LeMay Ferry ro ad (a boat rid e linkacross the Meramec on th e King's Highw ay) andHall's Ferry road (named for a ro ofless flatboat

arrangement, propelled at first by a horse-driventread mill across t he Missouri in St. Louis county ).

But brid ges had to come if man wer e tocon qu er Missouri's river s and in the early 1800 'scame the first legis lat ion about bridges. In 1814the General Assembly of Missouri Territory passeda new publi c roads law whi ch declared:

" All brid ges or causeways made or to bemade over sma ll wat er courses, and cau seways,ove r swamp s or low land s shall b e made and keptin repair by the hand s su bject to work on the road swhere the same may be necessary, and the materi ·als wherewith the sa me shall b e made, may betaken fr o m an y land the mo st co nvenient to suc hca use ways or bridges, and shaJI be laid ac ross theroa d, and be at least twelve fee t lo ng, well se cu red,and made fast, and covered wit h earth.

Th at was hardly a co mprehensive br id ge lawbut it was enoug h to start on. One of the firstmajor bridge buildin g job s ho w eve r , was a militaryproject. With the U.S. Army 's Yellows tone Expedi·tion h eadquar te red at Council Bluffs on the upperMissou ri , the military forces needed a road fromth e Boon slick cou ntry for moving up suppliesduring the winter when river traffic was iced in.

On September 2 , 1819 Lieutenant Gabri elFields ro lled o ut of Council Bluff s with thirty menand a six-horse wagon to cut th e road and bridgethe st reams. Fi elds ' detachm ent reac hed th e to wnof Chariton forty-se ven day s late r and report ed theroad compl eted and all st reams (about sixty)bridg ed exce pt the larger ones suc h as the Plat te,th e Nodaway, the Nishnabotna and the Grand.

On hi s return Field s tested the road and brid gesby taking ba ck o ne hundred and t wenty -seven milkcows and seve n h un d red stock hogs. Or , at least,the Missouri lnte lligencer at Franklin reported thathe starte d out with that many animals.

ONTINU E

Rickety stilts

pont o on bridg e

ut it works



The covered bridges were a haven for birds and lovers andthe subject o spooky stories

XPH SSION

By the century s close few

wooden ones were being built

Y 1816 Moses Austin's town of Herculaneum had established itself as the lead depot

for that mining region. With the mining traffic abridge was needed over Joachim creek so theGeneral Assembly in 1828 granted toll bridgeprivileges there. The tolls, however, seemed a bitstiff to encourage its u s ~ cents for a person,horse or mule; 2 cents per head of cattle; 1 centper sheep or hog; 50 cents per wagon and team; 25

cents for cart and team; 75 cents for a ridingcarriage with four wheels and team; and 37% centsfor a riding carriage with two wheels and a team.

During the 1840's and 1850's legislative grantsof toll bridge privileges increased rapidly in allsections of the state except southwest Missouri andthe Ozark highlands. But few were built.

These frugal - and not overly wealthy - is-

souri settlers did not want substantia l bridges ifthey meant substantial taxes or tolls. And bridge

Page 38

companies wouldn't invest their money until population and trade offered reasonable assurance of aprofit.

In the 1850's, however, counties started building some hardy wooden bridges and in the nextdecade a county bridge tax was tacked permanently onto the county tax list. Also in this decade theuse of iron and steel bridges reached the Midwest.In 1868 a steel bridge was built across the GrandRiver in Livings ton county at a cost of $37,000.Two similar ones were erected during 1871 and bythe close of the century few wooden bridges werebeing built.

T he Missouri frontier and its settlers - andtheir bridges - perhaps couldn't be classed

as highly civilized. But these sometimes rambunc

tious pioneers recognized three powers to bebridled, or at least reckoned with. These werelightning, the ol' Mississippi and them blanketyblank Yankees. Sooner or lat er, they figured out away to handle all three of them.

The Mississippi, its bank squatters declared,was a contrarious varmint which couldn't becaged.

But the Eads bridge caged t and raised thestatus of the frontier civilization a peg or two in

the process.The Eads, the world's first steel-truss bridge,

became the undisputed king of Missouri bridges inthe pre-Tw entieth Century period. The brainchild

of Captain James Eads, it illustrates the capacity ofa beautiful bridge to outshine its namesake andbecome a monument to itself .

Work on the bridge across the Mississippistarted in 1867. Engineers questioned its longspans ( 530 feet in the center with two 502-footside spans) and the use of steel. And ferryoperators fo ught it as ridiculous competition.

Working in compressed air, and with littleknowledge of its effects, 119 men developedcaisson disease and fourteen of them died. But

Eads persevered and, on July 4, 1874, the graceful,6,200-foot bridge was dedicated after costingabout $10 million.

Few (some people say no) bridges built inMissouri after the Eads rivalled it for beauty andimaginative concept . But they were functional andfit frontier needs.

And as a recent television specia l report onbridges said in a burst of rare electronic wordcraft:

Modern man is surrounded by great achievements that don't work very wel l - cities, theUnited Nations, plumbing.

Bridges work.



State Historical Society o issouri

They broughtthe need forroads andfor ro d laws

For many travelers the r o ugh roads o Missouri carriedthem throu gh th e slate to the jumpin' off places likeWestport seeth ing with western fever.

ONTINUED

ge 39



L WS

By 1810 the population

had almost doubled

to about 20 000 people

T e Frenchmen and Spaniards who tookturns governing Upper Louisiana for theircountries were little concerned with law

making - especially laws about roads which, forthe most part , st ill were narrow Indian trails .

The Frenchmen were mainly interested in fursand mines. Coming from the acknowledged worldcapital of rt and sophisticated culture, theysurp risingly exhibited an unmatched diplomaticfinesse in getting along with the so-called savageIndians. In fact, i the French bad been ab le tohandle the English with the skill and success thatmarked their Indian relations they would have wonthe New World hand s down.

Under the Spanis h officials after 1770 the lawsand customs of Paris remained in vogue. Spanishwas the official language and Spanish ti t les weresubstituted for the French. But many Frenchmenwere appointed to offices and French, the nativelanguage of the inhabitants, was spoken widely.The Spanish r egime was repected for its wellselected officials and impartial law enforcementbut its new laws mainly concerned the acquisitionof lands and regulation of inheritances.

When the Americans bought the whole hunk ofreal estate it was put under the Territory ofIndiana. But in 1805 Congress set up the Loui sianaDistrict with its own government. PresidentThomas Jefferson appointed a governor, a secretary and a legislature, composed of the governo rand three judges. General James Wilkinson was thefirst governor but his administration aroused theire of the rough frontiersmen and in 1807 he wasreplaced by Meriwether Lewis , only one yearreturned from his expedition with Clark to thePacific ocean.

During the Spanish rule no great need for roadsexisted; the lead mines were linked to the river andthe four military posts strung along the westernbank were tied - if loosely - together with the l

Page 4

Tile first legislature meeting at St.Cllarles [aced many pr ob lems in cludin gtile growing need [or road s



.

Camino Real. Transportation had been mainly onthe rivers so there was no hue and cry for betterroads.

ut the need was coming. In 1803 thepopulation of what was to become Missouri

territory was about 10,000 people. When theLouisiana Purchase was signed and the UnitedStates assumed control of the territory, the settlersrushed into Missouri and many new towns sprangup.

y 1810 the population had almost doubledand these new settlements - inland from St. Louisand the Mississippi and Missouri rivers - wereneeding and pressing for better roads.

The first general road law was passed in 1806,the year before Lewis was named governor . Thislaw allowed twelve or more freeholders topetition the district court of quarter sessions

praying for the establishment of a public road, to

run from a certain place, to a certain place thereinspecified.The court then would appoint three discreet

and disinterested householders as commissionersand a surveyor to lay out the road . The law alsoprovided for right of way damages, setting up roaddistricts and appointment of overseers.

This first step, a public road system, restedthen on a fragile network of district roads, underthe jurisdiction of the court of quarter sessions.

Two years later, on June 30, 1808, TerritoryGovernor Lewis signed an act ordering the layingout of roads from the town of St. Louis to thetown of Ste. Genevieve, from thence to the town

of Cape Girardeau, and thence to the town of NewMadrid. Thus the old El Camino Real, or King'sHighway, became the first legally designated roadwest of the Mississippi.

Three proper persons, one of whom shall be apractical surveyor, were charged with laying outthe road on the nearest and best ground and todesignate it by plain and distinguishable marks.

t was laid out so expeditiously that by March1809 a map of it was made. This route could becalled a territorial road because it was ordered by aterritorial law but it actually was a district road inthat districts had to pay for the mileage throughthem.

In Missouri's territorial per iod- 1804 to1821 - road making, along with other governmentadministrative functions - was pulled back andforth like a tug-of-war game. From 1805 to 1812the court of quarter sessions administered theaffairs of a district or county; from 1812 to 1815the responsiblity was shifted to the court ofcommon pleas; from 1815 to 1816 it was vested ina county court; from 1816 to 1820, in a circuitcourt; and after 1820 it was switched back to a

Capitol painting by MWer ONTINUED

age4



L WS

' c m e through there

hut thought that the

pl ce ·was a grog shop

county court.

• •

In 1814 the territorial road laws were rewritten. All ro ads established by any court weredeclared public roads. But road dev elopm entwas slow. By 1834 only sixteen state roads

(w hich meant only th at the state d etermined therou te of the roads) had been opened, all bylegis lative action, which would indicate that thereweren't tw e lve or more freeholders inter este denough to petition for a road. In the 17 years thatfollowed more than 400 roads were authorized bylegis lation ordering new roads or declar ing certaincounty roads to be state roads. But the financialburden of building and maintaining them rested onthe counties.

This put th e tax sque eze on the older countiesbecause many of them had several local roads bythe n and they generally were a higher type. Bu t thenewer, frontier counties had few roads, ne ede d

few and had little difficulty in getting at leastprimitive roads as they were needed .

T he General Assembly trie d t alleviate theprob lem by passing relief-giving special

legislation to individual counties. But this produced such a floo d of legislation that the generallaw of 1835 was disregarded and finally r ep e aled in1837.

The 1835 road law , however, inc luded a specia lact of interest. It was to establish a state roadfrom the City of St. Louis to the City of Jefferson,by the way of Manchester and Union .

Samuel Farley of St. Loui s county, NathanRichardson of Franklin county an d Samue l Abbottof Gasconade county were named commiss ionersto survey and mark the road. They were to cho o sea surveyor and two chain carriers - and coul d paythe surveyor $2 a day and the chain carrie rs 75cen ts a day.

An 1837 amendment required that threedisinterested freeholders investigate the ro u t e -

age 4

B y mid century theCity o f Jefferson w s

a building around tilestately capitol atop abluff along the MissouriRiuer. nd road s wereneed ed to connect thecapital city with otherpar ts o the growingstate

St.ate Historical So c:iety of M

and approv e or disapprove it. Th en a commis son ewas to open a road at least 30 feet wide, with aleast 15 feet of it being cleared of all stumps, trees,grubs and other obstructions.

The state did get its hands on some roadmoney during the period but its help to the

counties was slight. The money came from theRoad an d Canal Fund, commo nly called the Th r ePercent Fund because its source was th ree percentof the sales of public lands in the state.

M ssouri's early legisla tive progress- i

roads and other matters - should beviewed against the background of the era and th



meri who lived it.A transplanted Virginian, writing to his brothe r

back home, described the Missouri legislators of1837:

You must picture every kind of mortal fromthe serene old statesman to the most rough-hewnbackwoodsman; with now and then a pert littledandy; there are some more ordinary looking menthan any in your vicinity - a tribute indeed to theland of my adoption.

Though we have some very ordinary men,w have also some very smart or rather talentedmen.

He topped off his legislative picture with ananecdote about a Mr. Wilson, a member of the

House, who came to Jefferson City and offered hiscredentials to the Senate. When informed of hismistake, he answered, Damn, I came throughthere but thought it was a grog shop.

But these inhabitants of a grog shop laid thelegalistic foundations for the state, including roads.And the lack of dramatic progress in roadbuildingcould not be blamed entirely on them.

The Civil War and the coming of the railroadscombined to stymie the little progress being madeon roads. The railroad dominated long distancetravel and roads became a carrier of local travel andfeeders to the nearest railroad. Good roads mustwait until the passing of the Iron Horse - and thecoming of the Tin Lizzie.

Page 4



Page



The ears etween

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age 6



A sort of journ y

n 1883 a St. Louisan named J.D.P. Lewis builta self-propelled vehicle, the city's first. Itcould clatter along at speeds of seven to eight

miles per hour, to the open-mouthed amazementof the Mow1d City's residents and the wild-eyedterror of their horses.

That same year, in Sedalia, a group called theMissouri State Roads ImprovemenL Associationheld its first annual convention. Governor WilliamJoel Stone addressed the group, telling its membersthai roads are the products of age anddevelopment.

That s the way it was from the beginning ofMissouri's revolution of the roads. And a revolution it was. Between this century s dawning and itsmost terrible war, Missouri's highway systemunderwent a mighty social, economic and geographic upheaval. It was triggered unawares by aman of genius from Michigan who reversed afood-processing technique he had observed inUlinois. The man was Henry Ford. With hisassembly line and its rapidly multiplying spawn, heprofoundly changed the mobility, the manners andeven the morals of Missourians and all otherAmericans.

The cars came. And Missourians of unborrowed

vision approachedthe

herculean task of buildingroads, streets and highways for them.The cars came. First in a trickle they came,

then n a steady stream, n a constantly swellingtorrent by the last years of the 1930 s . As theycame, the job of providing the highw ay systemthey required got big and demanding fast .

But the job was started. The building of ahighway system was begun. Its creation was not adiscrete event.. t was a continuing process. A sortof a journey.

This s the story of that journey.

g 7



It smootlted

thi gs o v i ~

11 early

Missottri roads

W hat pulled Mis sour i out of the mud?Why, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with Missouri roadbuilding

hi story knows that it was the passage of the twomultimillion dollar bond issues of the Twenties. Or

t he Ce n tennial Road Law.Well, maybeBut a quarter of a century before the Twenties

roar ed in, a North Missouri man and the ma-chine he built made substantial contributions,indeed, to the laudable cause of lifting Missouriansout of the mire.

The man was D. Ward King of Maitland in HoltCounty. His machine's efficacy was exceeded onlyby its si m p li city - and the eagerness with whichhighway boosters embrace d it. The machine was asplit log drag which he invented, built and demonstrated with the zeal of a missionary to interested individuals and good roads groups inside

Missouri - and out.King devised his drag in 1894. t was a simp le

rig, ch eap to make and easy to operate. But itwork ed . And the word that it worked got aroundfast. Nobody la bored any harder at spreading thegood news than the inventor himself:

Mr. King, write Gary and Robbin s in theirROAD HISTORY OF MISSOURI , was a c rusaderand when he was not using his split log drag he wasmaking speeches about it or writing articles for thepapers about it. In later years he even carried whatbecame officially designated in 1908 as ' the Missouri idea' to othe r states, by means of chautauquaengagements.

Evangelistic fervor of that sort makes thingshappen . . . particularly when it's enlisted in thecause of somet hin g t h at works as well as did D.Ward King's s plit log drag.

The State Board of Agriculture h eld a goodroads conve ntion in Chillicothe in 1906. Severalthousand good roads advocates from all overMissouri attended . They worked long and deJjberated hard over the problems of roadbuilding andmaintenance, and at the end of i t a they put a

g 8

he marvelou

their conclusions into only five resolu ti o ns. One

them said this:We strongly endorse the drag as the moeffective and practical method of maintaining dirroads, and would suggest that some law be enactedwher eby its mo r e general employment for thpurpose may be e ff ected.

King and hi s drag were becoming some whcelebrated.

In 1907 the State Board of Agriculture calleanother good roads co nv e ntion. This one was hel



Maitland drag

in Jefferson City, and t brought together asdelegates about 150 of Missouri s leading goodroads enthusiasts of the day. And they elected astheir president D. Ward King of Maitland.

Maybe King and his drag aren t among thebiggest factors in Missouri s 20th Century highwayhistory. But i their place isn t of prime importance, i t is by no means insignificant either. Andtheir right to it is se cure.

Until the Twenties roadbu.ilding and roadmaintenance in Missouri were primarily local prob-

lems. And there was neither money enough norsentiment enough to hard surface many miles ofMissouri roads.

The roads Missourians drove over were mostlydirt - or mud or dust, depending on the season .They were mostly bad, too - until the arrival onthe scene of D. Ward King and his split log drag.And i they didn t lift Missourians out of the mud ,they a t least smoothed it over.

That was no small achievement, come to thinkof it.

age 9



Fro n passions po·wers;fro n conflict compromise;from men a model road law

hen free people govern themselves well,

they do it largely by a ju st and prudentbalancing of all the special interests involved. That's how government happens in a freesociety. That 's why so many hymns of praise aresung to the gentle art of compromise.

Only comp romi se isn't a gentle art. And whenit comes, it comes as a disappointment to thecontending factions whose passions and powershave cr eated the sit u ation which brings it intobeing.

In the summer of 1921 passions and powersa-plenty focused on Missouri's capital city - andthe passage of what was called the Centennial RoadLaw. t was a long hot summer

Important parts of the hi gh political dramawhich was played out in Jefferson City during thatsumme r of 1921 had t heir beginnings a decadeearlier, and more. Both Governor Joseph WingateFolk and Governor Herbert Spencer Had le y badbeen much interested in the po ssibility of buildinga cro ss-state highway which would link St. Louisand Kansas City.

Th r ee possible ro u tes across the state had beensuggested by · Curtis Hill, then State HighwayEngineer. In 1911 Governor Hadley appointed acommittee from the State Board of Agriculture tostudy the comparative feasibilities of the threeroutes. The members of this comm ittee toured

each of the three, along with the governor, thelieutenant-governor and others.n August of 1911 a me et ing was held in

Jefferson City to select the route which was tobecome known as the Old Trails Road. Missourihistorian H B. Di ckey has described that meetingand its aftermath:

T he hearing was long to be remembered as ared letter day in J effe rson City. For seven excitinghours over 1,600 persons sat in stifli ng heat, under

age 5

he lon



summ r

n ti t t t W ~

®

I

With the 1920 road bond money providing a meatybone o contention urban and rural legislatorswrangled long before they wrought Missouri s cele·brated Centenn ial Road Law.

Page 51



HOT SUMM R

A solid decade of interest ledt a legislative sho ·w·do vn in 21

the spell of Missouri oratory, while the proponentsof the various routes pleaded their cause

At noon the next day , August 3, the StateBoard of Agriculture announced the selection ofthe Central Route from St. Loui s to New Florence.The Board met again August 17, 1911, and afterhearing a report by Curtis Hill, State HighwayEngineer, designated the Central Route as theCross-State Highway. Engineer Hill made a furtherreport to the Board, September 29, 1911, settingout the progress made and stating that road bondissues in Lexington, Columbia, and Fulton hadcarried to the extent of $330,000.

There wer en' t enough co mmun it ies like Lexington , Columbia and Fulton along the proposed

age 5

Missourians chug ged and clattered in t o the Turbulent Teenswith flags flying and in a traveling mood They had somecars They were going to have more They wanted betterroads a n d soon

route, and the road wasn't built. Its buildingdepended on the passage of road bonds in communities ll the way across the state, the form ationof special road distric ts and the h elp of countycourts in every county through which it was to

pass. This high degr ee of cooperation among thepeople and the local agencies o f government wasn'tattained. Probably it wasn't attainable in 1911 andthe years immediately thereafter, given the factthat, in those years, roadbuilding was mainly localand county business.

Bu t someth ing big was stirring here . Th e factthat a cross-state highway had b een p r o p o ~andhad gained signif icant support whetted the desireof ll Missourians - especially the re sidents of St.



Louis , Kansas City and the other populationcenters through the state's midsection- for betterhighways. That sharpened desire was to cast a giantshadow, a shadow which would fall starkly acrossthe deliberations of the 51st General Assembly inthe history-making summer of 1921.

The people who lived in the cities of Missourididn't feel the same way about highway mat ters in1911 as did the people who lived in the state'ssmaller communities and on its farms. The differences between their points of view would becomethe lines of demarcation along which the bitterbattle of the summer of 1921 would be fought.

With the enactment of the Hawes Law in 1917,the General Assembly gave Missouri its firstmodern highway legislation and shifted the primary responsibility for roadbuilding from the counties to the state. In 1919 the legislatu re's passage ofthe Morgan-McCullough amendments greatly increased both the scope of roadbuilding efforts inMissouri and the extent of the state's participationin them. n his book MISSOURI AND THEMISSOURIANS, Floyd C Shoemaker describes thesituation:

The plans completed by 1920 were ambitious,but work moved slowly and it became apparentthat revenue was insufficient. Therefore, the votersof Missouri were urged to support a bond issue of$60,000,000 in the election of 1920.

Helping in the urging were personnel of theMissouri State Highway ·Department. In ROADHISTORY OF MISSOURI, Theodore Gary and

HenryP

Robbins wrote:A thorough campaign of education was carried on. State Superintendent Malang issued severalbulletins and made effective speeches in fifty ofthe counties in which there were road bondcampaigns. The entire department personnel rendered great service in carrying the $60,000,000bond issue.

T e citizens of Missouri were ready to authorize the expenditure of o ~ big moneyby the ir fledgling State Highway Depart

ment. The bond issue won a comfortab le victory,carrying in 61 of the state's 114 counties and the

Cityof St.

Louis .Now there was money enough to implementthe ambitious Hawes Law and Morgan-McCulloughplans. How would the money be spent, and whatwould be the climate in which the legislaturewould decide? Gary and Robbins set t he stage:

The great state bond victory had arousedgreater expectations. The Fifty-first General As-

sembly was to be notable It was soon seen thatthe road question was too big to be tied up withthe multitudinous duties of the regular session. So

road legislation was postponed to a second extraordinary session, called for the heat of midsummer.

re was destined to get hot than theweather. The people of St. Louis, KansasCity and the state's other large communi

ties wanted one set of things and badly. Th e peopleof the state's small towns and farming areas wantedanother set of things and just as badly.

The duly elected representatives of the twogroups were obliged to resolve the differencesbetween them, if possible. Urban and rural legis la-

tors were on a collision course. And Jefferson Citywas going to be the scene of the crash. Once again,the building under the big dome was to become abattle ground. Some law was about to be made.

Much of the work for the 1920 bond issue,though by no means all of it, had been done byresidents of the state's urban areas. These urbanbond issue advocates had thought they wereworking for a statewide road system, and when thebond issue was secured, they expected to get one.They assumed that any state syste m built wouldstart with a St. Louis to Kansas City cross-statehighway .

The memory of the cross-state highway whichhad been proposed but no t constructe d in theHadley administration was fresh in their minds.The time t o get started with the building of thathighway, they felt, was at hand. Naturally enough,their wishes shaped the thinking and the action inthe State Senate, the body in which urban causestraditionally got their most friendly receptions.

In the upper chamber, Senator Ralph of St.Louis County authored a measure which provid edfor continuous, connected, hard-surface stateroads. The Ralph Bill sailed through the Senate.

But the House was in no mood for the sort ofroads the Senate sought. Peacock lanes , Housemembers called them. And they wanted none ofthem. The entire Ralph Bill was thrown out, andthe House substituted a measure of its own.

Gary and Robbin s said about the House'ssubstitute bill and the thinking behind it:

I t was virtually a town to town designation.Each member of the House knew his own county,its towns and roads. He had the advantage of fieldsurveys. Connections with neighboring countieswere arranged among neighboring members. Scantconsideration was shown the Senate highway s.The House, overwhelmingly rural, talked farm tomarket roads . Some members did not believe thatany roads except dirt road s could be built inMissouri. But for the conditions of Federal aid andthe necessity for final concurrence by the Senate,many members would have disposed of the funds

CONTINUED

Page 5



HOT SUMMER

ouse Speaker· O Fallon

breaks a fot·tnidablelegislative Jog-jatn

in the old-fashioned way, by distribution amongthe counties. The 4,000 road overseers would havefound a way to spend the money.

While the metropolitan press heaped imprecations on the hea ds of the House dirt roaders and

mud daubers, the substitute House measure wassent back to the Senate. Without delay, the upperchamber threw out the whole of the Houseproposal and put back the Ralph Bill sentencefor sentence, word for word, comma for comma.

Stalemate.Senate·House Conferenc e Committee was

formed. The conferees, remarked Shoemakerdrily, were truly representative. They wrestlednight and day, with no sign of agreement.

Tim e pass ed. Tempers shortened. Mutual recriminations increased. Nothing came out of theConference Committee. It stayed hot.

Many members of the legislature assumed thatthe deadlock in the Conferenc e Committeecouldn't be broken and began making preparationsto leave Jefferson City . Some actually left.

But even as these pe ssimist ic legislat o rs weregoing out of the capital city, good roads advocatesby the scores were streaming into it. They came towatch, to lobby for their specific causes, toencourage their legislative friends, to put pressureon their legislative foes.

On e of the lawmakers who seems to haveassumed that there was no way out of thelegislative impasse whi ch had developed was Represe ntative D. L. Bales of Shannon County, one ofthe Senate-House conferees. He suggested a gentleman's agreement between Senate and House mem

bers: Each body would pass the other's bill andboth bills would be referred to the people in thegeneral election of 1922. The proposal found nogeneral support. The responsibility fo r formulatingsome sort of highway l egislation acceptable both inthe cities and in the country remained with theGeneral Assembly.

age 5

What was needed was a member of one howhose devotion to the cause of good roads forwas so obvious that proposals made by him cobe accepted by m em bers of the other bouse , a mwho could protect his own group's special interand real ize while he was doing so that other grobad legitimate special interests, too. As the specsession ground frustratingly on - active butprodu ctive - suc h a man emerged.

He was the Speaker of the House, Sam O'Flon of Holt County. Largely be cau se ofinfluence exerted by him, the House finally agrto a pair of provisions which seemed to favor

interests of the city-dwellers. Both were writ te nO'Fallon.The first authorized the Highway Commissio

to designate as higher type than clayboungravel about 1,500 miles of roads connecting tprincipal population centers of the state. Tsecond earmarked a third of the bond mon

------------------



The big roads bottle in theMissouri General Assemblywas between country andci ty . . between thosewho wanted many roadslike the one at left andthose who wanted fewerroads like the one at right .I t sometimes seemedthey d never get together .But they did. And whenthey did, they made a lawAnd some history.

pro ceeds, and $6 ,000 a mile from th e ot h ertwo- third s, for u se on t hese hard surfa ce roa d s.

Th e legis lative log-jam was broken . Th e urba ninterests w h ich dominated in th e Senate were t oget their p eacoc k lane s, and th e mud daub erswho domina te d in the Ho use had given th epr oposal th eir reluctant asse n t . Wearily, waril y,mostly fe e lin g th at th ey had fail ed in what th ey setout to do, th e me mbe rs of t h e Misso uri Gen era lAssem bly h eaved a co llectiv e s igh an d sett led downto wr it in g the res t of the Centennia l Ro a d L aw.

In MISSO URI - MOTHER OF T HE WEST ,the law wh ich finally w as e n acte d and the attitud esof the men who m ade it were s ummar ized like t h is:

the law i tse lf w as a las t -day com p romi seto en d wh a t see med to be a ho p eless dea d loc k andne ither memb e rs of th e Hou se and Se n ate w h ofin ally vo ted for it no r the go vern or wh o ap pr ovedit fe lt t h at it was sati sfactory. Nearly a ll t he me nwho had led in th e bon d camp aign were gri evo usly

disappoin te d . Road ex p ert s d ec lared it 'a mi se rablemess.' t was fr ee ly p red ic ted that it was impo ssibleof exec ution.

T hat ' s t h e way it was in t h e City of J eff e rso nand the State o f Missouri in th e s ummer o f 1921.That was t he mood whi ch gr eete d t he creation byt he Gen eral A ssemb ly o f Misso uri' s Cen tenn ia lRoad Law, no w wid ely agree d to be amon g th emost enli ghtened and mo st important single piecesof hi ghway legislation ev er en acted by a sta t elegis lat u re.

Sp ecia l group s have specia l interests. And th eyfight fo r th em. But fre e peo ple c an govern t hemselves well by a ju st and p ru d ent balan ci n g o f a llthe sp ec ial in te rests involv ed .

It 's n o t a th eory, it 's a fac t . Missourian s pr ovedit wh en in h eat and in ang er , n pride and n

se lf-seeking , th ey w orked a n d worrie d th roug h onebot summe r at a p ro blem t hey all s h ared until theyh amme red o ut their Cen te nni al R oad Law.

Page 55



BO T EELERS

' I suppose tall ed to ev ry od

counties in Missouri. So give us our due.Our road boosters - and we had a lot o f

them - launched a campaign for a county roadbond issue . The amount of the issue was small,because our assessed valuation was low. Theamount was 250,000. I was for it. Pretty soon thecampaign warmed up. e had lots of speakers to

go to every little schoolhouse, and everywhere inthe towns where voters could be got to listen. Thecrowds were good and everybody wanted roads;the speakers were well received until question timecame, and then some old mossback was sure to askhow could he be sure he d get his road built if hevoted for them bonds. This embarrassing questioncame up invariably. Something had to be doneabout it.

The campaign committee went into a huddleand decided to publish a map that would showwhat roads would be built. Road costs were boundto be high. e had n o road materia l except a fewstone axes and arrowheads that the Indians be

queathed us. The question was whether to publisha map showing how many roads our little bondissue would actually build, and of course lose thebond issue vote, or have the map show the roadsthat ought to be built and make out that theywould be built, and so carry the vote.

The committee men were all honest men but,at this moment, only in so far as honesty was thebest policy fo r the purpose in hand, which was tocarry the road bond vote. Over my protest thecommittee made the practical, and as it turned out,the wise decision. They went all the way andprinted a map of the county with very nearly all

age 8

the roads graveled. Nobody could ask troublesomequestions any more, because every road of anconsequence was to be graveled. A little figuringof course, showed that no more than a third of athose roads could possibly be improved from thproceeds o f the little bond issue. I called this to thcommittee's attention but they said Mississipp

County folks hadn t ever learned to figure the cosof anything, so why expect them to figure the cosof roads - a matter which they knew absolutelynothing about . The boys were rig ht. The map madeverybody happy and the bond vote went ovewith a bang.

However, on account of the map, I withdrewfrom the committee and took no further part ithe campaign. There was no falling out. I wantedroad as passionately as anybody and was certain toget one, map or no map, but some odd quirk in mymake-up would not allow me to promise whatcould not deliver. I said nothing against the bonissue and I voted for i t along with the rest. But

had misgivings, and everybody knew it, whicturned out to be fortunate when later I delibe rately set out to tear up that map, and persuade thepeople to spend all o f that bond money and twicas much more besides on just two roads - onsplitting the county from east to west, and theother from north to south.

t is a long story and I can tell only a little of ibut I want to te ll enough to prove that sometimesin special c ircumstances and when time permitspeople can exercise sound judgment based on merfacts and figures, with no trimmings and nopropaganda. I know it amounts to a treasonou

ti11gs. a11



•

y I l l l

repudiation of the "American way of Life" at thismoment to suggest that plain facts, rather thanpropaganda, make-believe and falsification, may berelied on to make people do what they ought todo. I am merely saying that in the matter of ourfirst road building Mississippi County people didact with regard to unadorned facts.

Fortunately, on account of war and postwarreadjustments, we couldn't spend our bond moneyfor a year or more. By this time I had got myfarming more or less organized so I could take timeoff. I suppose I talked to everybody in the county,mainly in schoolhouse and courthouse meetings,and I kept articles and comments going in theweekly paper. Very early I got the CharlestonChamber of Commerce behind me, including aUthe go-getters who had put over the bond issue andhad printed the promising ma p - over myprotest.

We had voted bonds to spread gravel on all the

roads on that map, and such was the enthusiasm ofthe moment that almost everybody felt like theroads were practically built on the day they votedthe bonds. They had a fine feeling of weLl-being, ofprogress, and of vast accomplishment. The setupwas perfect for a total waste of the bond money.

After a suitable cooling-off period and aftermaking sure of substantial support I proposedpublicly that we forget the map, and spend allour money and twice as much more besides on justtwo roads, and that we build them of concreteinstead of gravel. Concrete roads then were almostbrand new, I had seen one in Indiana and one inMichigan. Nobody else in the county had ever seen

•

one and few, I believe, had ever heard of such athing . I t was quite a shock

My argument was as follows: I f we spent allour money on these two roads and i f the new StateHighway Board, and the Federal Bureau of PublicRoads, approved them, then we would have our

money matched fifty-fifty with federal funds. Notonly that, but if and when we voted a state gas tax(it was being talked about) then the MissouriHighway Department would take over our tworoads as a part of the State Road System, andwould refund to us every dollar we had spent onthem. Whereupon we could go ahead and fill out

our map. I cited a number of states that hadenacted refund laws that provided for takingover rqads and refunding to the counties the valueof the state of such roads at the time they weremade a part of the State System. I said thatMissouri woul undoubtedly enact a similar law, i f

and when we voted a state gas tax; and that wemust build only of concrete in order to be sure toget par value; that is, the exact amount we hadspent. I f we spread gravel it probably would besunk in the mud and we would get no refund at all.

All this was somewhat complicated, and partlyspeculative. It required a lot of explaining. Beyondquestion it was the hardest job of my life. Later onwhen I ran for Congress I put in not one tenth ofthe time and energy on my campaign that Iexpended to overcome the magic o f the road bond

map.I'd like to report that no important opposition

developed. Quite the contrary. The leader of theONTINUED

l t l l S g l l \•

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en

t match

the

nee s Dmen make history, or does history make

men? The question is of interest to scholars.It probably wasn t of much interest to the

men who fashioned Missouri s highway system.Probably few of them even considered it a questionworth thinking about .

t isn t that the men who created Missouri shighway system despised theory . Men who despisetheory don t built things as big and complex s

highway · systems. They can t . But the theory thathistory makes men is remarkable for its passivity.And passivity wasn t a characteristic mu ch inev idence among the men who were Missouri

highway-builders in the first four decades of thiscentury. Those men were big dreamers and bigdoers. They figured a lot and sweated a lot. Theypushed and shoved. They were activists, in the bestsense of that much-abused word.

They were a widely differing lot, the men whosaw Missouri s need for a state system of roads . . .and matched it. But the few giants chosen here asrepresentative of them all held some things incommon: The vision to perceive that Missourineeded a state system of roads. The conviction thatsuch a system could be built. The courage whichgave that conviction meaning. The willingness topay the price the courage cost . The ability to make

the paying count for something.The men who built Missouri s highway systemknew it had to happen. Knowing that, they made ithappen. They were the sort of men about whomhistory gets writ ten .

f Missouri at the century s tum was notlacking in highway needs, it was not lacking eitherin men to match them. And all Missourians arericher now because i t was so. ·

Page 6



enator Harry Hawes

H rry Hawes loved Missouri. During his lifehe worked for his state many years - as astate representative, a member of Congress

and s a United States senator.But his name lives on in Missouri history on a

law which established the official beginning offederal aid in Missouri highway building .

On July 11, 1916 President Woodrow Wilsonsigned the Federal Aid Act. It opened up a sourceof revenue for all states by providing that theUnited States should aid the states in constructing

rural post roads.Under Hawes leadership, Missouri enacted anew road law in 1917. The law created a bi-partisan state highway board of four members andbrought all road laws up to date. But mostimportant, the Hawes Law accepted federal aid andput Missouri in a partnership that has developedthe country's h ighways to their modem level.

enator J G Morgann Missouri highway development Morgan goeswith McCullough like Rodgers and Hart in

show business because the law which bearstheir name marked a majo r milestone in the statehighway history.

T his law increased state highway system mileage, provided for state aid up to 1200 per mile,alloted 25 per mile per year for dragging roadsconnecting county seats.

Under the Hawes Law, the Department couldnot initiate road work but depended on countiesand road districts to match federal aid. TheMcCullough-Morgan Law placed more authority inthe hands of the Highway Board and called forsurveying two roads through each county .

This meant more work - and expans ion - forthe Department. And it led to the establishment ofwhat is now the district concept to provideadministration on a local level.

O TI N U E

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en to m tch

the needs

lexander W raham

Page 64

They tell a story over in Montgomery Countyabout Dr. Robert Graham, who came toMissouri in 1816 and settled on a tract o

land he bought from Daniel Mo rgan Boone, son othe legendary Dan I.

They say Dr. Graham used to like to stand on big ro ck well up toward the summit of Mineola Hiland look out over the Loutre Creek bottoms to thhills beyond. The place is called Graham's Rock.Th e view from there extends fo r miles . Andeverything Dr. Graham could see from the rockbelonged to him. Or so the story goes .

A century after the redoubtable doctor put hifamily's name all over Montgomery County,

greatrgrandson of his added still more Ju ster to iand spread its fame statewide .Th e great-grandson was Alexander W Graham

Boss, he was called. As state highway engineerfrom 1917 to 1922, Boss was one of the menchiefly responsible for the start made on thetremendous amount of new hi ghway constructionprovided for in the Hawes Law and the MorganM c l ~ u l l o u g hamendments to it. The enactment otho ;e Jaws triggered a building program whosesco,l)e and complexity were without precedent inMissouri's highway history to that point. To startth at pr ogram on a sound basis, the leadership ofspecial sort of man was urgently needed. Th ere was

Boss.Somebody said that gen ius is the infinite

capacity for taking pains. Graham had that, andmuch more besides. He gave generously of all thathe had in the cause of good roads for Missouri. Astickler for accuracy, a bearcat for detail and aglutton for work, the man called Boss broughtto his job the highest standards of personalrectitude and prof essional integrity.

Graham and his wo rk fashioned the mold inwhich many Missouri highway engineers since histime were cast. The numbe rs of those men arelegion now. And the re are giants among them. Bu tof all the names enro lled on Missouri's highway

scroll of honor, none looms bigger than that oBoss Graham.

He was one of the first. And he was one of thebest.



Theodore ary

T his native Ohioan left an enduring mark onMissouri and its highways through his service as first chairman o f the State Highway

Commission.In 1921 Governor Arthur Hyde appointed

Gary chairman of the State Highway Commissionwhere he served until he resigned in November,1926.

This period covered the Commission during itsfirst five years of existence while the Department

was in the process of formation and during theinitial period of road progress under the CentennialRoad Law of 1921.

Missouri owes an especial debt to TheodoreGary, wrote Floyd Shoemaker n MISSOURIAND MISSOURIANS, for the efficient, straightforward manner in which he directed the affairs ofthe State Highway Commission.

John Malangurage, vision, good judgment and hard

work. These are the qualities that earnedJohn Malang the right to be called the

Father of the Good Roads Movement in is-

aouri.The McCullough-Morgan Law of 1919 provided

for the appointment of a state superintendent ofhighways who also would be ex-off icio secretary ofthe Highway Board .

The choice was easy J o h n Malang.Malang started his highway work in 1914 as

superintendent of the Joplin Special Road District.Here he built the first concrete road on the statesystem. Federal Aid Project No. 2, it was called,and it ran from Webb City to the Kansas line.

Later it would become part of the highwaycalled the Kickapoo Trace, the Wire Road - andRoute 66 and Interstate Route 44.

He rose rapidly to leadership n good roadsmovements, all the way insisting on an equitableand balanced road financing and constructionprogram.

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Mechanization was a spotty and a sometime thing during t he years when Missouri s earlyroads were built. Often in those days, the motive forces were brute strength and thestrength o brutes. It was a matter o muscle .

age



Comin g fast, a Missouri motori st o fthe 30s passes a Highway Depart-ment asphalt distributor.

This is the w y

it used to e

on Missouri s highways

ONTINUED

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M e ~n l i i l s ~a d tn chitles

Building and maintaining roads is a vastly compli·cated process. But at one stage or another in thework, one thing always is involved moving dirt.

Quarrying operations are more sophisticated todaythan they were in the Twenties. Then as now, though,one o the prime objects was to make little ones o fbig ones.

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From its smokestack up front to

the Casey Jones position o itsdriver s seat, this 193 s striper isstrangely reminiscent of one othe big steam locomotives o f thesame era



Tim e w a s, w ay back w hen,w hen many of th e nati on 'smost famous car s w ere

ade n

St ouis

How high the Moon? Not so high inprice, uery high in prestige. In the1920s as today, St. Louis was oneo f the nation's leading auto manufacturing centers. And in tire '20s,tile Moon was one o f the bigreasons why.

Page 70

T he storied St. Louis World's Fair gaue the world thot dog and the ice cream cone in 1903. Two yealater a St. Louisan named C H Laessig gaue th

world its first service station for cars, pumping gaso lithrough a garden hose.

By then other car makers had followed J.D.P. Lewihorse less carriage on t ·o the scene. And befo re the 1900

were uery far along, St. Louis had become one o tpremier car p roducing centers o the nation.

From here sh one tile fabled Moon. From here came allhe Dorris, the Ruxton and the Windsor. And there werstill others. About two dozen.

Most o the St. Louis-built cars o the Teens anTwenties haue chugged and clattered their way into themists o f memory. But their emergence and their passing lea co lorful trail along Missouri h ighway h istory, a trailre-traue/ed here by Harry N D Fisher in tire ST. LOUICOMMERCE magazine.



ST . LOUIS

Then as now, St. Louis w s on of the

nation s car capitals

he ad engine . In 1907 his new four-cylinder car wasdriven all t h e way to DeSoto, M o . - 47 miles- inhigh gear, an unheard-of accomplishment.

John C Higdon built St. Louis's first lightair-cool ed engine in 1907. It had one spee dforward with chain- to-rear wheels drive. In all,Higdon built 980 car s here.

While these St. Louis firsts are interesting,no account of early St. Louis-made cars would be

complete without mentioning Ford and Chevrolet,which were being built here befo re World ai

and still are today.

9 9 DORR I S

927 G R D N ER

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And some tribute must be paid two St. Louisauto manufacturers, Moon Moto r Co. and GaidneMotor Co., whose fine cais were as well known inthe 1920's as Ford s , Chevrolets and Plymouths artoday.

The Moon company, founded in 1907 byJo seph W Moon, had its factory at Main andCornelia streets and turned out cars with squarera d iato rs like the Rolls-Royce. The firm made the

six-cylinde r Moon and an eight-cy lind er companioncar appro pri at e ly called the Diana . I t also as

sem bled two luxury autos, the famous WindsorWhite Prince Pha et o n and later the front whee

drive , English-styled Rux to n .Mo on got into financial and legal difficulties

and by Novemb er, 1930, was in receivership.Eventually, the Moon company's real ty was sold tothe Cupples Co. o r the making of matches.

Gardner Motor Co . was established by RussellE. Gardne r Sr . in 1919, afte r he sold his franchisefor th e manufacture of Chevrolets to GeneralMotors Corp. His factory at First and Rutgerstreets made more than 100,000 autos in the

d eca de it flourished. The firm becam e a victim othe depression and folded in 1930, bu t not beforeits Gard ner Griffin sy mbol had beco me one othe best known auto embl ems in America .

1929 RU XTON



here

ought to hea l w

Traffic accident8 weren t the only troubles plaguingMissouri motorists in this century s early years. Therewere others, too. Missourians thought there were legalremedies (or many o them. They sought thoseremedies, and they found them.

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Missouri near the beginning o f the motor age: Thecars we re coming and the kind o f roads they neededto travel on didn t ex ist. Somet h ing had to be done.Something was

andmark le g isl t ion lays a firm found tion

fo r th e r ev olution o f the roads

I n 1903, the year that the storied Wrightbrothers got off the ground at Kitty Hawk, 640automo biles were flying around Missouri.

Some of them were going so fast that Missouriansdeemed i t proper to enact the state's first speedlimit law. It stated, among othe r things, that noautomobile was to be driven on the public highways of Missouri at speeds in excess o f nine milesper hour.

By 1940 the speeds at which cars were movingover Missouri highways had changed so d rasticallythat the ph rase mil e a minute sounded oldfangled and a little quaint. And in that year, the

vehicles registered in Missouri totaled more than921,000.

What happened on Missouri's system o f highways during the first four decades of the 20thCentury? A revolution. How can a revolution bech ronicled? There are many ways. One of the mostpopular is to explain it in terms of legislation, to

Page 74

tell what happens when people, vexed by enougproblems, say There ought to be a law so thath ere get to be some .

There are difficulties implicit in this kindstory-telling. One of the big ones s the fact thalaws are simultaneously the results of some conditions and the creators of others, simultaneouslyeffects and causes. But where there s no orderlstructure of laws within which to do publibusiness, there is like ly to be little public businessdone at all. So, much of the spectacular storyMissouri's revolution of the roads can be told breference to the series of legislative enactments b

means of which the people of Missouri, actingthrough their General Assembly, laid the firmfoundations on which has been built the Missourihighway system of today.

Here is the outline of that story, the story othe results achieved by people who believed Therought to be a law.


http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/roads-and-their-builders 77/124l

19 3 The state's first speed limit law fixesthe top speed for cars at nine miles per hour. Itprovides also that before an automobile can attempt to pass any vehicle, carriage or wagon drawnby animals, its operator must sound a bell or

whistle and if necessary, stop his car so the driverof the other vehicle can alight before his animalsbecome frightened and run away.

An annual license fee for the operation ofmotor vehicles in the state is fixed at $2. Proceedsfrom it are paid into the counties' general roadfunds.

19 5 The General Assembly taxes privaterailroad cars operating in Missouri. Proceeds areapportioned to the counties, which give them totheir townships for use in the construction andrepair of public roads and streets.

19 6The Sta te Board of Agriculturespearheads a movement seeking state participation

in road matters. Meetings are held across the state.Governor Joseph Wingate Folk calls a good roadsconvention in Chillicothe. Thousands attend.

19 7 Missouri newspapers and good roadsgroups increase the popular demand for statelegislation. The threat is voiced that unless better

roads are provi ded, free rural mail delivery servicemay be discontinued. Governor Folk calls for roadlegis lation in his message to the 44th GeneralAssembly.

The Legislature creates the office of StateHighway Engineer and makes him responsible tothe Board of Agriculture, which becomes in effectthe state's first highway commission. Curtis ill isnamed to the newly created post. But the initiativein matters concerning highways still rests with thecounties. Under the terms of the law, Mr. Hill cando little but advise county officials, help them inplanning and act as a public relations man for goodroads.

Another law creates a State Road Fund, madepossible by a federal appropriation of about$500,000 in payment of a Civil War claim. Themoney is distributed among the counties, with nocounty to receive more than 5 percent of the total.The funds are to be used for construction orimprovements, not to purchase right of way .

Another law provides fo r state compensationto counties for dragging public roads. The rates ofstate pay to the counties are not to exceed $10 permile on United States mail routes and $5 per mileon other roads.

An annual appropriation of $6,000 is established with which to pay the State HighwayEngineer's $2,400 yearly salary and all otherexpenses of his office.

.Other laws increase the speed limit to 15 milesper hour outside the cities and require that allmotor vehicles and drivers be registered. The feesare set at $5 and $2 respectively . Each driver is

required to wear a numbered badge upon hisclothing in a conspicuous place at all times whiledriving.

1913 The 47th General Assembly createsa State Highway Department. It eliminates theoffice of State Highway Engineer and relieves theAgriculture Department of its responsibilities in

highway affairs . A State Highway Commissioner isprovided for, and his salary is fixed at $3,000 ayear. His duties are largely advisory and of a publicrelations nature.

Registration fees which vary with the horsepower ratings of the vehicles involved are introduced.

County and state authorities, acting together,are empowered to designate selected inter-countyseat highways as state roads. These are to beinspected annually by the State Highway Commissioner, and the State Highway Department is

authorized to furnish tools for use in their construction.

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he need is urgentthe ways are found

I 9 Congress passes the Federal High-way Act. It makes f ederal appropriations to thestates on the basis of their areas, popu.lation s andpostal road mileages. The states are required tomatch the federal fund s provided and to follow theconstruction and maintenan ce specifications set bythe Bureau of Publi c Road s of the United StatesDepartment of Agriculture.

I 9 I 7 The Haw es Law gives Missouri'sassent to the Federal Highway Act , and th emodem era in Missouri highway building begins.The law is named after State Representativ e HarryB Hawes, under whose leadership it is enacted.Later, Mr Hawes is to be come a member of theCongress and a United States Senator from Mis-souri.

The Haw es Law creates a biparti san fourmember State Highway Board, which is empowered to appoint a State Highway Engineer. TheEngineer and the Board are required to select and

designate not less than 3,500 miles of statero ads. These are to be distributed among theseveral count ies in proportion to their re spectiveareas, populations and mileages of county roads.They are to be uniformly marked, and their rightsof way are to be a minimum of 40 feet wide.

The law creates a state road fund. It is builtfrom vehicle registration fees, co rporation regi stration fees, federal money paid to the state und er theterms of the Highway Act of 1916 and frommiscellaneous other sources. Out of the state roadfund are paid the administrat ive expenses of theHighway Department, the sum necessary to ma t chthe federal app ropriation, $400,000 biennially to

underwrite state payments of $15 a mile fordraggin g and otherwise improving inter·county seathighways, and another $400,0 00 with which tohelp counties, townships and road districts inconstruct ing roads and bridges.

The Hawes Law provides the impetus for atremendous spurt n Missouri roadbuilding . ln

1917 alone, 122 projects are approved under its

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terms, and 43 count1es put 61 projects underco ntra ct . By year's end, more than 11,400 miles ointer-county seat roads are dragged and othenviseimproved.

9 9 The Morgan-McCullough Act attaches extensive amendments to the Haw es Law. Istates that there shall b e expended by the State

Highway Board on state roads in eac h countytotaling approximately 6,000 miles the sum o$1,200 per mile without cost to the cou nty anout of funds allocated from the federal governmentand suc h state road funds as are available.

Under the te rms of the act, the total cost of al

---- ---- ------------------



surveys and plans cannot exceed an average of$100 a mile. This survey and plans cost s to beincluded in the 1,200-a-mile figure allocated fo rconstruction. The act authorizes the counties toaward contracts for all construction.

s a result of the passage of the Morgan-McCullough Act, each county in the state is guaranteed at least two state roads including not less than50 miles on which state and federal funds are to beexpended. No county is to receive more than onesuch road until all counties have been providedwith one.

To meet costs of the new roadbuilding notprovided for by the Morgan-McCullough Act, the

counties find it necessary to vote bonds. Thesecounty bond campaigns begin in the last half of1919, and the State Highway Department participates in many of them .

192 Not all of the county road bondcampaigns are successful, and it becomes apparentthat road revenues are going to be insufficient tocarry out the plans made under the Hawes Law andthe Morgan-McCullough Act.

Under the leadership of State Highway Superintendent John A. Malang, the Highway Department assumes the leadership in a state-wide educational and fund-raising effort to Get Missouri Out

ONT NUE

Much o the early roadbuilding done in Missouri in the Twentieth Century was an uphill battle The mudw s deep nd the ruts ran all the way to the top o the hill

Page 77



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Multimillion dollar bond issues

fuel a tremendous surge forwardin Missouri highway building

of the Mud . Passage is sought for a constitutionalamendment which will authorize the sale of $60million in state roa d bonds.

Th e constitutional amendment is ap p roved. t

provides that all motor vehicle registration feesco llecte d n th e state will stand ap p ro p riatedwi thout legislative action for and to the paymentof the principal on the bond s (Nine months afterap proval of this am endment , the adoption ofanother constitutional amendment authorizes theuse of motor vehicle fees to pay interest on thebonds.)

92 In Missouri's lOOth year of statehood, the General Assembly passes the CentennialRoad Law. The law shifts the focu s of Mi ss ourihighway building from the local to the state level.It is to remain fundamentally unchanged from thetime of its passage to the outbreak of World War II,

and i t is the rock-solid found at ion on whi ch thewhole of Missouri's modern highway system isdestined to stand.

It provides for a bipartisan Stat e HighwayCommission, a Secretary, a Chief Engin eer, a ChiefCounsel, and such assistant engineers and otheremployees as the Commission may deem necessary . It gives the Commission comprehensive anddiscreti onary powers to locate , design, construct,and maintain a state highway syste m. Thesystem is to include about 6,000 miles of secondary road s and about 1,500 miles of primary roads.Construction of the syste m is to be started in allcoun ties as nearly at the same time as possible, and

is to be carried on si mult aneously in all theco u nti es. Each county in the system is apportioned$6,0 00 a mile.

To provide for the construction and maintenance of the state highway system, the CentennialRoad Law empowers the Stat e Highway Commission to make the rule s gove rning its own organization, to compile highway statistics, to prepare

age 8

plans and make estimates, to let all contracts , tprescribe uniform highway markings, and to puchase or lease land. The law states that thCommission shall have supervision of highwayand bridges which are constructed, improved, andmaintained in whole or in part by the aid of stamoneys, and of highways constructed in whole oin part by the aid of mo n eys appropriated by thUnited States government, so far as such supervsion is consistent with the acts of Congress relatinthereto.''

922 An amendement to th e MissouCon sti tution allows money collected from registration fees in excess of that required for paying roabond interest and principal to be used for highwamaintenance and co nstruction.

924 · Th e initiative petition is us ed to puonto the ballo t proposals that a licen se of twcents per gallon be levied upon fuels used in motvehicles upon the public roads of this state; ththe annual motor registration fee s be increased bfifty per cent ; and that the un sold portionsthe sixty m l l ~ o ndollars in road bonds should bsold prior to the times previously authorized bylaw.

The three proposals are grouped on the ballas Proposition Number 5 Th e State HighwaDepartment campaigns hard for Proposition 5,do the state's various good road s ass ocia tions . Thvoters approve of the proposition by a margin o

mo r e than two to one.

928 Another amendment to the StatConstitution autho rizes the issuance of $75 milliomor e in ro ad bonds. Th e amendment also providefor the improving and maintaining of the primarand secondary roads already in existence n th



state, and for the constructing and maintaining ofnew roads and bridges including traffic reliefroads near the state's metropolitan areas, supplementary and connecting roads, and roads andbridges in State Parks.

The Constitutional Amendment enacted in1928 makes it unlawful for any state official or

agency to divert highway revenues to other-thanhighway purposes. Missouri becomes the first statein the nation thus to protect and earmark itshighway revenues.

9:3] The Missouri State Highway Patrolis created to police the highways constructe d andmaintained by the Commission; to regulate themovement of traffic thereon; to enforce thereonthe laws o f the state relating to the operation anduse of vehicles on the highways; to enforce and

prevent thereon the violation of the laws relatingto the size, weight and speed of commercial motorvehicles and all laws designed to protect and

safeguard the highways constructed and maintained by the Commission. Members o f the State

Highway Patrol are authorized to arrest anyoneviolating any law in their presence or . . . anyfugitive from justice or any felony violation, andto make investigations concerning any crime ofany nature.

93 It becomes unlawful for any person of Missouri to drive any motor vehicle on anyhighway of the state without either an operator'sor a chauffeur's license.

The mists over the building o f Missouri highwayswere clearing. s they did they revealed a mainte·nonce problem. and one that was to grow .

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Missouri s pioneerhighw y engineers

They measured the extent o f t1ae need They mapped a way out o f tile morass

Page 8

Where theyany wer e the pioneers in Missouri's Twentieth Century r evo lution of the roadsThere were the businessmen who saw th

economic needs for roads. There were the fannerwho saw the need for breaking the mucky stranglehold of mud which bound them to the farm loTh ere were the politicians who heard the voices othe voters.

And there were the men who came to builthese roads for the people.

Man and need met in Missouri - and none othe three ever was the same again. As JameJenkins Jr. described it:

' 'And then one bright day a man came over thhill wearing a flannel shirt, faded khaki pants, ana don't -give-a- damn hat with the brim pushed back.On his shoulder he carried the key to change-transit .

Missourians generally welcomed these men intheir d - g d hats. But not alwaysbecause change has oppon ents.

Rex Whitton, former Missouri Chief Engineerand later federal highway administrator, remembers the unwelcom e sight of the business end ofshotgun. The farmer on the other end wanted ntruck with the likes of the pioneers in Whitton' s survey party.

And B. H Piepmeier, an ear lier day chieengineer, recalls an encounter with a Missourfarm e r who made his point without a shotgun:

' ' I got stuck in a mud hole n ear a large farmho u se on the Jefferson City-Fulton road and wentto this farm house fo r help , Piepmeier said.can't recall the farmer's name but I well recall hetold me, I f you are the highway engineer fromJ efferson City, you get out the best way yocan.'

It 's true about proph ets sometimes . Sometimethey really are without honor in their own country. Mostly, that doesn't stop them from beinproph ets. Mostly, i t doesn't even slow them down

Neither Mr. Whitton nor Mr. Piepmeier wastoppe d or slowed down. And neither was the reof the hardy and far-sighted breed they typify.

They were the engin eers of the fledglinMissouri Highway Departm ent. Th ey started out achainmen. Or rodmen. Or laborers. There were



walked roads followedonly a few of them. Only a very few. But they hada big dream. And they had the bone and muscleand mind and heart to fashion from i t some roadsfor Missourians to travel on. Dirt roads at first .Then roads of chat and gravel. Then narrow slabsof asphalt and concrete . Then slabs that weren t sonarrow.

They walked all over Missouri these pioneerhighway engineers. And where they walked roadsfollowed them. And things weren t the same afterthat. Not for any of us. Not ever again .

They carried a k y to change - a transit. Using it th yunlocked a better future {or all Missourians.

Before thei r coming this great state wasfragmented . Missouri was many different placesMissourians were many different peoples. And theblessings of our diversity were not unmixed. e

knew each other, but not as neighbors. e communicated with each other, but slowly and expensively so only rarely. e trusted each other, butmostly in the way people trust strangers.

All of that was yesterday. The highway engineers helped to make it yesterday by buildingroads into tomorrow.

Page 8



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The odern ears

'>.- .. .

F · -: ,; ' . . • .

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he en s not yetISSOURI MOVES. Mostly on roads. Th at sthe way it was in the state s earliestbegitmings. That s the way i t is today .

That s the way it has been throughout Missourihistory.

World War Two ended Missouri s first revolution of the roads - and triggered its second . Theconflict s awful fires lit the ne ed for a whole newsystem of highways. The conflict s massive marshaling o f resources and energies gave that newsystem its first jmpetus on the long , hard journeyfrom dream to deed.

The new system of highways was the one calledInterstate. Missourians were the first roadbuildersin the nation to start on its co nstruction . Missourians have been among the leaders in the doing ofthe massive roadbuilding tasks i t imposes. Andduring the years in which they tackled the massiveInterstate, Missourians added a whopping 12,000miles of Supplementary roads to their state ssystem of highways - among other things .

This book attempts to tell something of how itll happened, from the post-war Forties down to

the present .But the present is not t he end . The end is not

yet.Prodigious amounts o f roadbuilding have been

done n Missouri since the wilderness days of the1700s. They have not been enough. Missouri shighway system has grown very fast and come veryfar since thos e wilderness days. The demandsimposed on it by a soaring population and aneffervescent economy have grown even faster andcome even further. How well those demands arem e t - now and in the years ahead - will determ in ein critical measure the adequacy of Missouri sresponses to the bright and exciting challenges ofits future.

Because Missouri moves. Mostly on roads .

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age

Telephoto tricke ry makes thesegrades on 1·44 look steep . They not. The picture is illusory



w o decades of prescient planning

formed Interstate s firm foundationn August 2, 1956, Missouri became thefirst state in the nation to let contrac ts forwork on the newly authorized Interstate

system. A few weeks later, work was started onone of those projects, and Missouri became thefir st state in the nation to begin Interstate systemconstruction.

The three history-making contracts awarded atthe August 2 meeting included one on what was tobecome I-44 in Laclede County and two on whatwas to become I 7 0 one in the City of St. Louisand the other in St. Charles County . It was on theSt. Charles County project that actual constructionfirst was begun, and that work marked the beginning nationwide of the mammouth Interstateconstruction job - incomparably the biggest in allof history.

Rex M Whitton, who was Chief Engineer ofthe Missouri State Highway Department and President of the American Association of State Highway Officials when the Interstate constructionprogram began in 1956, said this recently aboutthe fast start Missouri was able to make on its shareof the Interstate work:

We could see all through 1954 and 1955 thatCongressional interest in some kind of comprehensive and adequately financed Interstate programwas building steadily . When no legislation authorizing such a program was enacted by the 1955session of the Congress, we felt pretty sure that theauthorizing legislation would come in 1956. We

tried to be ready in case it did. When it came in1956, we had all our preliminary work for our firstthree Interstate contracts taken care of and wewere ready to award the contracts themselves veryfast.

That's how Interstate s ta r ted- in Missouri.But that wasn't the start of the Interstate story.That story had its beginnings about twenty yearsearl ie r-

Thomas H ( Chief ) MacDonald, long-timehead of the federal government's Bureau of PublicRoads, was the sort of man around whom legendsgrow . The stories about this giant among early-dayroadbuilders are legion. One of them concernssomething President Franklin D . Roosevelt is supposed to have said to MacDonald back in the1930s.

The way the story goes , President Roosev eltcalled Ma cDonald into his office one day, drewthree East-West and three North-Sou th lines on a

map of the United States , and handed the map toThe Chief with th e comment This is your

Interstate system.

The story may be apocryphal. That it e xists atall indicates that the Interstate system as we knowit today is the product of foresight and planning

which go back many years. The date of PresidentRoosevelt's much-quoted comment to MacDona ld - if i t was made - isn't known. But in1938, the Congress ordered the Bureau of PublicRoads to investigate the practicability of buildingsix coast-to-coast and border-to-border highways,and of operating them as a self-sustaining toll roadssystem.

The study Congress ordered was made by theBureau with help from t he highway departments ofthe several states. The study's findings were reported to the congress in 1939, and were printedby the Government Printing Office in that year inan interesting little book called Toll Roads andFree Roads.

The report's main conclusions were that thebuilding of the system of toll roads was notfeasible, but that about 26,700 miles of inter-regional highways should be built, with the federalgovernment paying more than 50 percent of thecost - the share which it had usually paid to thattime.

Along the way to those conclusions, TollRoads and Free Roads said some remarkable

things, and said them in a manner which made itsauthors look like prescient highway builders, indeed. Consider the following few excerpts from thebook:

. . . all traffic lanes of the proposed roadswould be 12 feet wide.

Where the expected traffic volume justifiesthe construction of more than two traffic lanes,four lanes built in pairs, the pairs separated by aparkway strip at least 20 feet wide in suburbanareas and 40 feet wide in rural areas , would be

age 9



w o r l d w r n delayed the system s construction;

but dreams die hard, so the planning continued

provided."O n the road s as planned there would be no

intersection s at grade. At no poin t would a driverencounter another vehicle cros sing his path; and atno point, except at the specially designed accesses,would he encount er another vehicle entering theroadway."

R a i l road grade crossings woul d beavoided . . .

All interse ct ing highways of importan cewould be carr ied over or under the p roposedroad s.

In view of t he predominant national importance of such a system, the Federal Governmentcould reasonably contribute to its construction in aproportion materially larger than that in which it

contributes under the Federal Highway Act, butthe administration should remain under . . . theBur ea u of Public Roads and the several Statehighway departments."

It is easy enough to see the essentials of theInterstate system as we know it today in theseextraordinarily far-sighted proposals mad e in 1939.Th eir historical im p ortance in the Interstate storywould be hard to over-estimate. But their immediate practical importance was not d estined tobe great.

age 9

In his letter of transmittal which accompthe report embodied in Toll Roads and

Roads," Pre s ident Roosevelt recommend ereport for the consideration of the Congresbasis for needed action to solve our hiproblems."

But no general so lution s to the couhighway problems involving construct iondestined to be started in the fateful year of 1or for many a weary year thereafter. In 193scourge of general war swept across Europe.years later, that scourge was visited on the U

States, and Americans turned their vast energand their abundant skills and resources fromcongenia l tasks of building to the terrible tasdestru ct ion.

The nation's very existence was being thened. The nation's response to the threattotal - and left neither money, materials,manpower free for the construction of a cohensive new highway system.

Obviously, no Interstate system could bwhile World War II was going on. t doefollow that no Interstate system could be plannwhile the war was in progress. One coul d , anwas. Wars end. And dreams die hard. And thwho had caught the vision of what an Inte



\Vide leuel medians broad shoulders whose colorcontrasts with th e road surface and ntle grades allare characteristics o Interstate euerywhere.

system could mean to the American people did not

intend to allow that vision to become one of thewar's first American casualties. They knew, theseimaginative and farsighted highway builder s, thatthe Republic's highway inadequacies- exacerbated by however many years of inattention tothem the war was destined to impose -w o u ld haveto be contended with again once the shootingstopped . Accordingly, they started to write another chapter of the Interstate story within a fewshort months after the country's J; ntry into WorldWar II.

On April 14, 1941, President Roosevelt appointed a National Interregional Highway Committee to investigate the need for a limited system of

national highways to improve the facilities nowavailable for interregional transportation, and toadvise the Federal Works Administrator as to thedesirable character of such improvement, and thepossibility of utilizing some of the manpower andindustrial capacity expected to be available a t theend of the war.

One of the members of the prestigious sevenman group named by Mr. Roosevelt was theredoubtable Chief MacDonald. Another was St.Louis' nationally renowned city planner, HarlandBartholomew.

For three years, the group appointed by thePresident - assisted by the personnel of the Bureauof Public Roads and the highway departments ofthe several s ta te s - investigated the big problem ithad been asked to look into. n 1944, it made itsrecommendations to the President and the Congress in a booklet called simp ly InterregionalHighways. Those recommendations called for thecontruction of a national system of rural andurban highways totaling approximately 34,000miles and interconnecting the principal geographic

regions of the country.A quarter of a century afte r its publication,In terregiona l Highway s continues to make fasci

nating reading. The farsightedness of its authorscan be demonstrated by the quoting of just a fewexcerpts from the booklet. Consider these:

The system of interregional highways proposed . . . connects as many as possible of thelarger cities and metropolitan areas . . . For thisreason, although in miles it represents scarcely over1 percent of the entire highway and street system,it will probably serve not less than 20 percent ofthe total st re et and highway traffic.

The recommended system connects dire ctly

all cities of 300,000 or more 59 of the 62 citiesof population between 100,000 and 300,00082 of the 107 cities of population between 50,000and 100,000.

' 'All rural sections of · the system shall bedesigned for safe travel by passenger vehicles ata speed of not less than 75 miles per hour, and bytrucks and tractor combinations a t a speed of notless than 60 miles per hour in flat topography. Inmore difficult terrain the speed for whi ch thehighway is designed may be reduced; but in no caseto less than 55 miles per hour for passengervehicles and 35 miles for trucks and tractorcombinations

All urban sections of the system shall bedesigned for safe travel by passenger vehicles a ta speed of not less than 50 miles per hour, and bytrucks and tractor combinations at a speed of notless than 35 miles per hour.

' 'All rural sections of the system expected tocarry an average daily traffic of 15,000 or morevehicles shall provide three . . . lanes for trafficmoving in each direction . . . and the lanes fortraffic moving in opposite directions shall beseparated by a median strip at least 15 feet wide.

' 'All rural sections of the system expected to

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The Interstate plan was sound from the ginning-

but money to implement it didn t come easily

carry an average daily traffic of 3,000 but less than15,000 vehicles shall provide at least two lanes fortraffic moving in each direction . . . and the lanesfor traffic moving in opposite directions shall beseparated by a median strip at least 15 feet wide.

There shall be no crossing of railways atgrade . . .

' 'All rural sections of the system s hall beestablished as limited-access highways . . .

On all rural sections of the system expectedto carry an average daily traffic of 5,000 or morevehicles th e re shall be no crossings of otherhighway s at grade . . .

Francis C. Turner, a rec ent director of theUnited States Bureau of Public Roads, has described Toll Roads and Free Roads and

Interregional Highways as being landmark reports. Their chief significance, he says, was in

making it clear that the most urgent highwayneeds were not only improvement of the principal

routes connecting the larger centers of population,but relief from growing urban congestio n on mainroutes approaching and running through cities.

In the Teens and the Twenties, the probl emsconfronting the nation's highway builders werelargely rural in nature. Rex M Whitton, who servedwith distinction first as Chief Engineer of theMissouri State Highway Department and later asFederal Highway Administrator, has pu t the matterthis way: In the early days of the federal-aidhighway program, the objectives were fairly simple .Within the limits of available funds , the engineeringgoal was to provide smooth riding surfa ces on theshortest distance between control points for the

new motor vehicles, and to try to connect thesections o f roadway at the state lines. The chiefso cial responsibility of the highway engineer was tos e e when feasible- that the barn was not left onone side of the road and the farmhouse on theother.

By the Thirties, ll this was changing. Thecity-dwelle r was emerging as the typical American,and his emergence was bringing with it a wholenew set of problems for the highway builders towrestle with. During this ce ntury' s fir st two dec-

age 9

ades, the planning and building efforts of tnation's highway builders were oriented chieflythe countryside. By the end of the 1930s, thorientation of those planning and building efforthad shifted to the cities. The problems of tcity-dwe ll er had by then become dominanthighway planning and highway building, and TolRoads and Free Roads, Interr egional Highways,and the Interstate system whose creation theforeshadowed were manifestations of that fact.

The concepts embodied in the Interstate prgram were not new when that program was begunin the Mid-Fifties. Many of them went back th rdecades. Some of them went back much furtherthan that. All of them were remarkably sound animaginative. From its earliest beginnings, the Intestate plan was a good one.

But planning a highway system intelligently isone thi ng and getting that highw ay system costructed is quite anothe r . And the main impedi

ment b etween a good plan and its successfuexecution often is m o n ey - or more specificallythe lack o f it. So it was to b e with the Interstateprogram.

In 1944, Congress called for the creation of40,000 mile Interstate system bu t provided nfunds for use in that system's construction . In thyears immediately follo ·wing the end of World WII, numerous modifications of the 19 44 proposwere devised by Congress. They were the re su ltsan almost continuous round of conferences andiscussions among representatives of the highwadepartments of the several states, the Bur eauPublic Roads, and the Department of Defense. A

ofthem

were likethe 1944

proposal inon

central ly important respect. All of them lacked thn ecessary funding.

No special funds were provided for the Intestate system until 1952, when Congress authorizedthe expenditure of $25 million in each of the fiscyears of 1954 and 1955. The federal governmenwas to share the costs with the states in accordancwith the traditional fifty-fifty formula.

In 1954, Congress authorized significantlgreater expenditures for construction of an Inte



state sys tem- 175 million in each of the fiscalyears of 1956 and 1957, of which 60 percent wasto be supplied by the federal government.

In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhowerappointed a five-man committee of distinguishedlaymen and highway professionals and charged itwith the responsibility of putting together acomprehensive Interstate program. Lucius Clay

Quo vadis motorist s? Intersta te signing make s it easy todecide It s big bold. bright readable - even at high speeds.

the former Military Governor of Germany whothen headed Continental Can Company wasnamed Chairman of the group; Francis C Turnerof the Bureau of Public Roads was named as itsSecretary.

The report of the Clay Committee formea thebasis for the Interstate proposal the Administrationtried to get through the 1955 session of Congress.

Page 93



he thing works

magnificently

t wasn't enacted- chiefly because of t he numberand intensity of the disagreements which developed over the question of financing.

But Inte rstate legislation of a comprehensivekind came into being at last when Congress passedthe Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. t autho r-ized t he construction of 41,000 miles of In terstatehighway, established the shares of the cost at 90percent fo r the federal government and 10 percentfor the states, provided a total of 25 billion infederal fun ds for use on the Interstat e system from1957 throu gh 1969, and established the HighwayTrust Fund as a re pository fo r the federal moniesto be used on the Interstate program .

The creation of the Highway Trust Fundestablis hed - fo r t he first time in the nation'shistory - a d irect link between federal excise taxeson highway users and federal aid for highways.Into it went the federal taxes earmarked forInterstate use; out of it came the Interst ate federalaid funds for payment to t he several states .

The original cost es t imate for building theInterstate system, included in the Federal-AidHighway Act of 1956, was 27.6 bil l ion- ofwhich 2 5 billion was the federal share. Theoriginal tim e estimate indicated that the systemcould be constructed by 1969. But rapidly incr easing construct ion costs, a steady inflationary trendin the overall economy, and improvements to theInterstate system which have been added as const r uction has gone along have signifi cantly changedtho se costs and construct ion-time predictions.

By 1960, Congress had raised it s cost estimatefor the Interstate job to 41 billion and had movedthe target comp leti on date back to 1972. In 1966,the cost estimate was moved to 46.8 billion andthe estimated completion date to 1975 . By 1968,the cost estimate had ri sen to 56.5 billion and theestimated completion date had gone to an un specified time well past 1975.

Missouri's portion of the Interstate system nowis about 61 percent co mplete. By the beginning of1969, more than 700 miles of Missouri's1147-mile share of the Interstate system were at ornear Interstate standards and serving taffic. Another 80 miles were under contract and expectedto be completed to full Interstate standards and inoperation by the end of that year.

The Interstate mileage allocated to Missouri inthe St. Louis and Kansas City metropolitan areashas been largely completed, and is significantly

age 9

easing traffic congestion in the state's two largespopulation cente rs. Interstate 70 between St. Louisand Kansas City is complete, and has cut traveltime between the state's two metropolitan areas bya third. The heavily traveled I 44 link between St.Louis and Joplin is four lane divided highway althe way, and js very fast being broug ht up to fullInterstate standards all along its route. The Interstate 29 link between Kansas City and Omaha viaSt. Joseph, the I-35 route betwe en Kansas City andDe s Moines, and the 1-55 connection between StLouis and Memphis via Cape Girardeau, Sikeston,and The Bootheel all are well on their way towardfinal comp letion.

Nationwide, there have been prob lems alongthe way in the construction of the In terstatesystem to this point. But given the immensity an dcomplexity of t he Interstate building task, and thedifficulties extraneous to that task which haveplagu ed the nation's economy durin g t he Interstatebuilding years, the problems have been neither sowidespr ea d no r so severe as might reasonab ly h avebeen expected when the job was started. Andalready i t is clear that in Missouri as elsewhere inthe nation, the ben efits to be derived from theInterstate system will be spectacular, indeed.

When the Interstate system is completed, it wilcomprise only a littl e more than one percent of thenation's roads and streets . But it will carry morethan 20 percent of the nation's total motor vehicletravel. Estimates place the dollar savings which thecompleted Interstate system will yield a t 9 billionannually. At th·at rate, the system's total cost w ll

be recovered in less than seven years after itscomp letion. That fact alone would make theInter state system look like a very sound investment. But there is more. Other estimates indicatethat the completed Interstate system w ll save8,000 lives a year now being lost in trafficaccidents, so much safer will be the Interstatesystem roads than the roads they are replacingWhat is the method by which a price tag can beattached to savings of that sort?

Th e benefits from the part of the Interstatesystem which already has been completed havebeen enjoyed - directly and indirectly - by virtually every Missourian. Those benefits have beentremendous. The additional benefits which wilcome when the Interstate system is comp lete wilnot be felt by Missourians for another few years.But they will be well worth waiting fo r .



FEW YEARS BEFORE the In te rstate program wa s begun inMi ssouri another major long-term effo rt was initiat ed by theState i ghway Department. This e ff or t mark edly l ess dr ama tic was

like the Interstate program n at least one important respect: t wa s o ffundamental and far-reaching significan ce in the creation of a balancedhi ghw ay transportation system for the peop le of Missouri.

I t involved the assumption by th e Depart ment o f r espo nsib ili ty forabout 12 00 0 miles of Missouri Suppl eme ntary r oa ds which pr eviously hadbeen t h e responsibilities of county courts s pec ial roa d di st ricts a nd ot heragencies of Missouri grass- roots government.

The takeove r program as it came to be called was accomplishedmostly between 1952 and 1962. During that de ca de the ta ke ove r programincorporated into the state highway syste m an d upgraded to statestan dard s about 12 000 of the mil es of h ighway serv ing rural and smalltown Missouri.

By doing so it made a qui et revoluti o n in the kind of highwa y transportation available to the Missourians those roads se rved. At theconclusion o f the program the re was a state -maintain ed r oa d within twomil es of more than 95 percent of all family unit s in outstate Mi sso uri andMi sso uri ans had a state highway system wh ose flexibility and ubiquitywere un surp asse d by the highway system of any state in the n at ion.

age 9



upplen entary syst m eeds w r ttrge t

T THE END of World War II, Missouri'ssystem of Supplementary roads includedabout 7,500 miles. And the war's harsh

exigencies had made them badly neglected miles,indeed.

All Missouri highways suffered while the warwas going on because of the continuing shortagesof manpower, machinery, and materials imposedby the war effort's all-but-total demands. Duringthe war years, the highways which received whatlittle attention could be spared were those whichcontributed most directly to the nation's militaryactivities. And not many roads of the Supplementary system of that time ran past military installations and war production facilities.

By war's end, the needs for work on Missouri'ssystem of Supplementary roads were both urgentand very widespread. And the Highway Department was ready to meet them:

As early as 1947, the Department was talkingabout a plan for construction, replacement, andthe addition of approximately 15,000 miles ofall-weather supplementary (farm-to-market) statehighways of various types and standards (to beadded to the existing approximately 8,100 miles ofsuch roads), to bring this total to an estimated23,100 miles. The plan contemplated a ten-yearconstruction period, and carried a cost estimate of80 million dollars.

An intra-Department memorandum of the period outlines some of the thinking and some of themethodology which underlay this early plan:

On December 31, 1945, the Supplementarysystem consisted of 7,662.7 miles of roads, andupon entering the postwar period the State Highway Department deemed it advisable to take stockof the service rendered to rural Missouri by thenumber of miles which had been built in order thatwe might establish a goal to strive for in the future.

We determined that in building additionalroads it was desirable to take highway service inthe rural areas as nearly as possible to all countystores, schools, churches, cemeteries, and farmunits in the respective counties, and that we shouldmake every effort to make this service as uniformas possible in the various counties. We took thevarious county maps with our constructed majorand supplementary system mileage now undermaintenance and ran contours two miles' traveldistance from each road. This left large areas ineach county where the rural units were somedistance from a presently constructed and maintained highway.

We made an intensive study in each county on

how to serve those areas as economically aspossible and with a mileage that with adequatefunds could be realized within a ten year period.

I t was determined that with an additional9,400 miles of roads, service could be rendered inthe various counties to approximately 90% of allthe rural units within a two-mile travel distance.

This study was taken to the various CountyHighway Commissions in the counties which hadCounty Highway Commissions, and in the othercounties to the County Courts, and any suggestionswhich they might offer were given study andconsideration and agreement was reached that thiswould be a very worthwhile program

The goal which we have been striving to reachis one that will leave not more than 10% of therural units more than two miles from a state-maintained road.

Early in 1948, the Highway Commissioncreated a Bureau of Supplementary State Highwaysand Local Roads and selected Fred D. Harris as itschief . The Commission and the Department weremoving up fast on the problem of how best toimprove and extend highway service to ruralMissourians.

But Commission and Departmental planningalone could not solve the problems plaguingMissouri motorists in the early postwar yearsboth on the Supplementary highway system andelsewhere in the state. Vigorous action was needed.A prerequisite to i t was additional money forhighway purposes. And before the state's highwayusers would consent to be taxed more to providethat additional money, they needed to understandMissouri's highway problems and specific plans tosolve them.

Governor Forrest Smith took a big step towardmaking that public understanding possible when,on January 6, 1949, he created the MissouriHighway Advisory Committee. Governor Smithappointed former governor Lloyd C Stark of

Louisiana as chairmanof the

16-man bipartisangroup. It also included a long-time good highwaysadvocate from the State Senate, Senator MichaelKinney of St. Louis.

The Highway Advisory Committee movedquickly to involve Missourians from all walks oflife in its deliberations . Public hearings were held in

Jefferson City in late-January of 1949. At thosehearings, the committee heard the views of representatives of about three dozen Missouri farm,labor, business, civic, and highway user organizations. The members of the committee also established and maintained a close and cordial working

age 9



he program needed money the peop

relationship with personnel of the State HighwayDep ar tment and the members of the Missouri St a teHighw ay Commission.

In mid-March of 1949, t he Highway Adviso ryCommittee presented its r eport to Gove rnor Smith.It was an interesting document, an d it was qu o tedat so me length in the minute s of th e first Highw ayCommission meeting he ld after its releas e. Th eseexce rp ts from those minutes may serve to givesomething of the essential flavo r of the r epo r tpar ticularly as it rela ted to the problems on thestate Supplementary system :

By reason of the limited revenue, increasedcosts, and adverse economic conditions arising out

of the war, we ar e years behind current needs indeveloping local farm-to-market roads, in solvingthe traffic problems of the cities, and in maintaining the main highway syste m.

Turning to a more detailed discussion of thefarm-to-market road s t he report went on:

Fiftee n thousand miles of addit ional ruralroads can be inc orpora ted in the state (farm-tomarket and feeder) system and place under maintenance n four years at the rate of substantially5,000 miles the first year, 4,000 th e second year,4,000 the third year, and 2,000 the fourt h year.Fede ral -aid fu nds and any surplus funds in therural road allocation would be used to bring this

system up to proper standards of co nsturctionduring t he ten -year peri o d. No refu nd s will bemade to cou nties o r other civil subdivisions forroads taken into the state Suppl eme ntary system

Op eration und er this plan sh ould provideear ly maintenance of a large mileage of ru r al road s,bu t little betterment work in the early part of theperiod, parti cu larly in co nn ec t ion with bridgeconstructio n or rec onstruct ion.

The foregoing program should supp ly a totalof about 32,500 miles of stat e road s and wouldaccomplish substantially the resu lt suggeste d byth e Gov ernor

Your Committee re commends t hat the Legi slature in cre ase the state tax on mo to r vehi c le fuel sfrom th e pre sent rate of two cents per gallon tofour cents per gallon pr ovided the State HighwayCommi ssion adopts a policy and program toexpend all fund s so made available su bstantially inacco rdance with the program ou tline d in thisreport.

The State Highway Commission did so - unanimously - ju st a few days after the HighwayAdvisory Committee made its r ep o rt to Governor

Pa ge 98

School s out One o the bigbenefits o the talleouer pro·gram accrued to the state sschoo lchildr en. For some o fthem, the way from home toschool and back again hadbeen hard - euen hazardous.Talleouer changed all tha

once and for all tim e

Smith. The minutes of the Commission's meetingof March 23 and 24 , 1949, include these comments

about t he proposed program to which the Commision was pledging it self and the Highw ay Deparment:

This p lan will provide ear ly maintenance oflar ge numb er of rural roads in the early part of thten-year period, the construction o r reconstructionof which (esp ecia lly those involving bridges) wilnecessarily be deferred until later in the periodSuch construction or re cons tru ction will invo lvthe ex pen di tu re of ap pro x imately $115,000,000the ten -year period u pon th e fede ral-aid Supplementary roads and the lower cost farm-to-markfeeder roads.

Sho rtly befo re its summe r recess in 19 49, t h

Ge neral Assembly pas sed a bill which would havincreased the state's gasoline tax from tw o cents tfour cents a gallon. Even b efore its passage, the bihad becom e popularly known as the Good RoadAct .

The General Assemb ly attac hed no emergencyclau se to the Good Road s Act when it was passedso the measur e did not become law before thpr essu re s to get a referendum on it were successfulIt was put on the ballot for the general election oApril 4 , 1950. Th e pres sures for a refer endum



program some areas of Missouri

recommendations embodied in the report of theJoint Commission on Highway TransportationRates and Use . Governor Smith said, The signingof these bills gives me more pleasure than anyother official act I have performed since I havebeen governor.

The Highway Commission moved immediatelyto s tart work on the long-needed, long-planned-for,often-delayed takeover program. On August 1,

9 5 2 just two days after the legislation makingthe program possible became effective - the Commission took over about 1,500 miles of existingcounty roads for maintenance by stat e forces. Theinitial takeover put some additional road in each ofthe state's 114 counties into the state highwaysystem . The program was under way.

The roads taken over during the program'searly stages became temporary state routes andwere so marked. When the counties, special roaddistricts, and other governmental agencies involvedmade the necessary rights-of-way available to thestate at no cost, the temporary stat e routes becamepermanent parts of the state's Supplementarysystem. In those few instances where such rights-ofway were not provided within a reasonable periodof time, the state refused to take permanentjurisdiction over the roads involved, the temporarystate maintenance on them was ended, and otherroutes were chosen.

The ten-year takeover program begun by theHighway Department in 1952 was completedalmost on time. It ended the fiscal year whichended June 30, 1964. When it was over, the map ofthe Missouri state highway system had been madeover, state-maintained roads had been taken towithin two miles of more than 95 percent of allfamily units in outstate Missouri, and Missouri'sstate highway system had grown to a whopping32,000 miles in size and become the seventh largestn the nation. Some statistics tell the impressive

story :

At the program's inception in 1952, the Highw y Department pledged to spend on it forconstruction alone a total of $78,000,000 . t

actually spent a total of $161,000,000- well o ~ r

twice the amount pledged. There were two chiefreasons for the tremendous amount by whichactual expenditures exceeded estimated expendi-

tures. The first was the dizzying rise in construction costs during the program's twelve year life .The second was the extensive building in theprogram of higher type highways than had originally been planned- an upgrading made necessary bythe steadily increasing demands of Supplementarysystem traffic during the life of the program.

At the beginning of the ten-year takeoverprogram, Missouri had 11,176 miles of highway inits Supplementary system. When the takeoverprogram was finished, this mileage stood at22,584 - and had almost doubled.

When the ten-year takeover program was com

pleted, there were a total of about 117,000 milesof roads, streets, and highways in Missouri, and thestate's highway network offered its users a degreeof flexibility in their highway travel unsurpassed inany state.

One Missouri highway planner defines flexibility as that benefit a motorist enjoys when he'sable to get from here to there, wherever therehappens to be. Missouri motorists- the ones wholive in big cities and the ones who live in smalltowns, the suburbanites and the farmers- enjoythat benefit in spectacular and highly significantdegree. And much of the reason why is traceable tothe takeover program of the 1950s and the early

1960s.In statistical terms, that program aboutdoubled the size of Missouri's Supplementaryhighway system. In social and economic terms, itbrought about a quiet but thoroughgoing revolution in small town and rural Missouri life.

Before the days of the takeover program, someareas of Missouri were remote. Now, there are noremote areas of Missouri left. The last of them w sgone when the takeover program was completed in1964 . Nowadays, all Missourians live close to agood, all-weather, state-maintained road. Morethan 95 percent of them live within two miles ofsuch a road. t goes past their front g a t e - or their

neighbors' place - or it meets the county roadthey live on a mile and an eighth from their feedlo t .

The road starts there for those Missourians .And it runs from there on in to town.

f l retnote areas of Missouri left.

Page 1 1



Smith Sappin«ton

age 1 2

The

uilders

Kirkpatrick altonKinney

N OT ALL ROAD MAKERS are builders orengineers . In Missouri's modern highwayhistory, many people have played important

parts. Here are six of t h e m - a state legislator, twogovernors, a newspaper publisher with long serviceas a state official, an insurance company executiveand a career highway engineer.

Conring from a wide variety of backgroundsand representing often sharply differing points of

view, these Missouri highway leaders of the modemera have made many contributions to the buildingof today's state highway system. But much as theymay have differed among themselves about somethings, they have shared a common bel ief- thebelief that a well-balanced, smoothly functioningstate highway system is essential to the presentwell-being and the future progress of Missouri andits people.

All men make some things happ en. Some menmake many things happ en . These men made a greatmany things happen to the Missouri highwaysystem of the post-World War II era. They havebeen prominent among the movers and shakers of

recent Missouri highway history whose abilities,energies, integrity, and dedication to the publicwelfare have do n e so much t make this state'shighway system one of the nation's be st.

The good of the people, runs one of theinscriptions carved into stone of the State Capitolin Jefferson City, ought to be the supreme law . The inscription chiseled into the Capitol is inLatin. The lives and works of these men translated

t eloquently- into modem-day English, s-

souri-style.

Wlli t ton



TheBuilders

A D Sappington

age 1 4

A le der in

bury nd

productive time

A D. SAPPINGTON of Columbia was member of the State Highway Commission

e from 1954 to 1963. His term of servispanned a great period of high way building-remarkably busy and productive time in Missourimodern h ighway history.

During those years, the Interstate program wabegun in Missouri, the 12,000-rnile takeovepro gram was largely executed, the CART prograof state financial aid to the counties and cities g

under way, such urban freeways as the Mark TwaiExpressway in St. Louis and the Southeast Freeway in Kansas City took shape. A. D. Sappingtoplayed a leade rship role in the making of tCommission decisions which brought about thgreat burst of roadbuilding activity.

But Sappington's labors on behalf of betroads for the people of Missouri didn't start whis accession to a place on the Highway Commission. They go back a lot further than that, at leto 1943, when Sappington was named generacounsel of the MFA Insurance Company.

From that time, he says today, I becamthe company's chief spokesman in t he Gener

Assembly. Our firm always bas been vitallyterested in better roads for Missouri. Our specinterest in the early 1940s was in better ruroads. I went to work on the job of getting some

So effective was his work to be that three shoyears later, in 1946, he was to play a key role the writing of the King Road Law - the landmalegislation which first extended comprehensivestate financial aid for roadbuilding to the countie

n 1950, Governor Forrest Smith chose himserve on a committee of legislators and citizewhose deliberations resu lted in a ten-year roabuilding program. Th e celebrated takeo ver program was a part of it.

For the nine years of his service on tMissouri State Highway Commission, A. D. Sapington spent what he estimates as about a third

ll his working time on highway matters. Threcord he compiled as a commissioner is eloquetestimony to the fact that i t was time well spent

------ --------------



ames C Kirkpatrick

wo gov nwrs

looked to h·z m

for le dership

T WO MISSOURI governors chose James CKirkpatrick to lead statewide informationcampaigns on behalf of proposed increases

in the state gasoline tax .In 1950, Governor Forrest Smith picked him

to head the Missouri Better Roads Committee anad hoc group which worked for the tw o -cen ts-agallon increase voted on that year. The increasegained legislative approval but was rejected in areferendum election forced by its opponents . Thespecial interest beat it, Secretary of State andWindsor eview publisher Kirkpatrick says today - definitely but without rancor .

In 1962, Governor John M Dalton namedKirkpat rick as director of Missourians For Progressthe organization put together to campaign forConstitutional Amendment One. The amendmentsought to make permanent a two-cents-a-gallon gastax hike legislated on a temporary basis six monthsbefore and to initiate a tax sharing formula for thestate the cities and cou nties for roadbuildingpurposes.

It passed by a whopping four-to-one margin.And a t the end of the campaign on its behalfMissourians For Progress still had on hand morethan five percent of the funds it had collected. Thismoney was rebated to contributors on a pro ratabasis . Some did not want their contribut ions back.That money - some thousands of dollars - wasturned over to the Missouri Good Road s andStreets Association and other good roads groups.

So twice since World War II James C Kirkpatrick has enlisted his organizational abilities hisskill and experience as a newspaperman and thehigh esteem in which his fellow Missourians holdhim in the cause of better roads for the people of

this state.The Missouri Good Roads and Streets Associa

tion thanked him for it by awarding him in 1962its coveted Scroll of Honor Award . All otherMissourians ought to thank him for it, too.

age1 5



Theuilders

Governor John alton

age 1 6

He n ~ all the llay

do n the l£n

THE PLURALITY which swept JohnDalton into the Governor s Office in 1was one of the largest ever accorded

Missouri gubernatorial candidate. f ever Missvoters have given an elected official a mandateaction, they gave one to John Dalton when telected him governor. He used it.

From the very beginning of his term of offDalton put ll of his tremendous popularitypresti ge on the line in support of a seriesmeasures he believed would be good for this sand its peopl e. His work on their behalfprodigious. His commitment to them was total.disregard for the personal consequences was cplete. He went all the way down the line for whe thought was right.

One of the measures he fought hard est forthe one known in highway circles simplyAmendment One. This was the Constitutionchange ratified by the people in 1962. I t increathe state gasoline tax from three to five centgallon, and it made available to the citiescounties of Missouri for their use in roadbuildingcontinuing twenty percent of all gas tax revencollected, with the citie s getting fifteen percentthe money so raised and the counties getting f

The good from Amendment One has spreadfar and flowed so de ep that alr ea dy - less thdecad e after its en ac t men t - it is difficult for mMissourians to remember how things were bef.orewent into effect. How things were wasstreetbuilding by Missouri cities was a sometimunder-financed kind of thing, and that roadbuing by Missouri counties was a stop-and-go activitied not to t h e dictates of need but to the upsdowns of money availability in the state s genrevenue fund.

John M. Dalton s name in Missouri s modhighway history is linked indissolubly topassag e of Amendment One. His other contribtions to the welfare of this state and its peowere many and notable. But had he achienoth in g else, hi s rol e in the creation of Ame

ment One alone would have earned him a plachigh hono r and distinction in the highway annof Missouri.



Senator Michael inneyThe identity

~ 1 a sa l l

hut total

M ICHAEL KINNEY S St . Louis City con-stituency first sent him to the MissouriSenate in 1912. He represented it there for

more than half a century. Nobody else has servedcontinuously as a state legislator for so long. Nostate legislator has displayed a keener and moreenduring interest n highway problems and theirsolutions.

When Senator Kinney first went to JeffersonCity, Missouri had no state highway system worthyof the name and no State Highway Department atall. He was n legislative attendance on the system sbeginnings and the Department s birth. He workedfor them, fought for them, nurtured them as theygrew. His years as a Senator were the years o f theircoming of age. He became a fixture on the SenateCommittee on Roads and Highways early n hislegislative life. Soon he had become a fixture as itschairman, too; and he led it during the last threedecades and more of his long and illustrious Senatecareer.

Michael Kinney s years n the Missouri Senatewere coincident with the beginnings, growth, andmaturation of the Missouri state highway system.But his contributions to that system were notmatters of coincidence . They were the products ofhis dedication to the cause of good roads, his depthand breadth of vision, and his great legislative andparliamentary skill. And their number was legion.

Michael Kinney was first a highly respectedlegislator, then an elder statesman, finally aninstitution n the Missouri Senate. And as his careerunfolded, he developed an identity with the causeof good roads that became (despite his significantcontributions in other areas) all but total. Hisdevotion to that cause never wavered. His skilledand tenacious advocacy of that cause never fal-tered. And he has been privileged to see the goodfruits of his life s w o r k - a life s work donefaithfully and well.

Missouri has a highway system all its citizenscan be proud of now. And the contributions ofSenator Michael Kinney helped mightly to createit.

age 1 7



The

Builders

ex M Whitton

age 1 8

The ho rwr

o w t ma tch

EX M WHI TTON'S resignation as fedehighway ad min istrat or in 1966 ended mothan 46 years of service to the highwa

using public . More than 40 of those years wspent as a member of the Missouri State HighwDepartment, which Mr . Whitton joined in 19and th rough whose ranks he climbed to becochief engineer from 1951 through 1960.

Such lan d marks in Misso uri h igh way h istorythe takeover program and the start ofInterstate program were accomplished during htenure as chief engineer. That helps measureman . From 1 961 t h rough 1966, he served Predents Kennedy and Johnson as the nation's tfede ral highway official. That helps measure himtoo.

Even a brief listing of the honors his fellhighway engineers bestowe d on him reads likecatalogue of the highest awards the roadbuildiprofession has to offer one of its ow n : Hreceived the coveted Mac D onald, Bartlett, aCrum awards. He s a past-President of the Amecan Association of State Highway Officials andlong-time member of its executive committee.

He's a past-Chairman of the Highway ResearcBoard and a veteran member of that key groHe's a winner of the International Road Fedetion's Man of the Year Award and a Top TeAward from the American Public Wo rks Assoction . The list could be much extended.

But the honors his profession have broughtRex Whitton have not matched - and couldmatch - the honor Rex Whitton has brought toprofession. The man is a living legend.

If the Missouri State Highway Departmentanimated by a philosophy and a spirit which haguided it to greatness, the life, the personality, athe ach ievements of Rex M Wh it ton are significaparts of the very stuff of which they are made .



MSSOURI S 32,000-mile sta te highway

syst em is one of the nation s larg est . Onlysix are larger- those of Pennsylvania,

Texas , Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, andSouth Carolina .

But Missouri s sta te highway system includesonly about 27 percent of the approximately117,000 miles of roads, streets, and highways

which cover the state of Missouri. T he countycourts of Missouri s 114 counties have jurisdictionover more than twice as many miles of road asthere are in the state system. In 1968 operatingwith state financial aid, t h e county courts hadcontrol of about 69 000 miles of Missouri road.These were the so -called CART miles - th e milesadministered under the terms of the County AidRoad Trust Fund.

The creation of that trust fund , the events

C R Twhich b rought it into being, and themanner in w hich it works to benefit s-

souri motorists are important par ts ofrecent Missouri highway his tory- and ofits futur e .

age 1 9



C RT

T HE IDEA that the state government oughtto help county and city governments finan·cially and otherwise with their roadbuilding

activities is not new in Missouri. But it really is not

very old, ei t her. It goes back fewer than fifty years.The reason it does not go back further is not thatthe co u nties and c ities were not involved inroadbuilding earlier. t is that the state was not.

From today's perspective, it is easy and naturalto assume that the work of building highways isand has been almost exclusively the province of the

state and federal governments. t is not so. Fomuch of Missouri's highway history, the countieand cities have played a major rol e in getting thejob done. Though that ro l is greatly diminished insize an d importance nowadays, the significance iretains is considerable.

Missourians did not begin to seek their stategovernment's participation in highway affairs unti1906. There was no State Highway D epartm enuntil 1913. No state funds were made available forhigh way purposes p r se until 1917.

s recently as 1920, county and local bondcampaigns aimed a t raising money for highway andstreet const ru ction were significant parts of the

Where the C RT rolls road and street

When CART rolled into town i t brought a big cargo ofinancia l help to communities worh ing at solutions to theirown street problems . The mo n ey came from Jefferson Citythe solutions were devised at home .

Page 11

Missouri governmental scene. Not before the enact-ment of the storied Centennial Road Law of 1921did the focus of highway building in Missouri beginto shift from the local and county to the state andfederal governmental levels.

At different times in its history, the state hasextended differing kinds and amounts of aid to itscounties and citie s for roadbuilding work. Sincethe end of World War II the two principal statechrumels for aid to the counties and cities havebeen the King Road Law of 19 46 and the CountyAid Road Trus t Fund, established in 1962.

Using reserves in the state's general revenuefund which had been accumulated during the

wartime years, the King Road Law created aCounty Aid Road Fund of $10,000,000. t pro-vided that the state would apportion from theGeneral Revenue Fund to the seve ral countiescertain money to be used in matching, up to $7 50per mile , equal amounts raised locally for improve-ment of certain county roads, provided that theconstruction has been co mpl eted in accordancewith plans and specifications previously approved.

Neither t he money used to establis h the Coun-ty Aid Road Fund nor the money to be provided itwas generated by highway use taxes. So in a sense,the Highway Department's inte rest in the KingLaw's operation was largely administrative.

As one Department histo rian of the time whowas close to the law's implementation wrote, Theinte rest of the State Highway Commission was tosee that the provisions of the law had beencomplied with before reimbursements were ma deto the local subdivisions.

The law provided for supervision of the countyroadbuilding by the State Highway Commissionand a committee of five county judges to beappointed by the governor.

In 1953 the limit on the amount of state



general revenue money which could be provided tocounties on a matching basis for improving,constructing, and reconstructing county roadswas increased from $750 to $1,000 a mile. In thesame year, state general revenue funds were madeavailable to the counties in an amount not toexceed $50 per mile when matched with localfunds for maintenance purposes.

Thus strengthe ned, the King Road Law continued until 1962 to serve as the state's chiefmeans of providing roadbuilding aid to its countiesand cities. It was a good law, and in the main itserved Missourians well. But there were someproblems in its administration:

progr ss followsSince King Bill funds came from general

revenue sources, they could- and i l i d varygreatly from biennium to biennium. The appropriations which cont rolled them were dependent noton cou nt y and city road and street needs, but onthe state's ove rall financial condition . Apportionments of King Bill money bounced from a low ofabout a million dollars in one year of the law's lifeto a high o almost three and a half million in

another year. Thi s uneven and unpredictable flowof King Bill revenues to the counties made theintelligent and orderly planning of county highwayand city street projects virtually impossible.

Th e rul es governing how King Bill funds couldbe spent were almost as restrictive as the money'sflow to the counties was uneven . Throughout thelaw's life, it was much easier to get King Billmoney for construction purposes than for maintenance purposes.

For the fifteen-year period in which the lawwas operative, about 77 percent of all state moneyspent on co u nty roads went for constructionpurposes, only about 23 percent of it for maintenance work. And this was despite the fact thatsome counties much more needed maintenance ofexisting co unty road s than the construction of newones.

Another restrictive feature of the King Bill wasthis: all funds not spent within the appropriationsperiod were lost for the co u nties involved.Another was that much of the authority abouthow roadbuilding was to be done in the countiesrested not with the counties themselves, but withthe General Assembly.

As appropriations of King Bill money weremade, the legislature earmarked certain funds forconstruction activities in the counties, other fundsfor maintenance work. With that legislative earmarking, no King Bill funds could be transferred

by county authorities from construction uses tomaintenance uses or vice versa.

At least one other characteristic of the KingBill restricted its benefits- it contained formidable amounts of red tape .

Imperfect as it was, though, the King Road

Law operated reasonably wellfor the

fifteen yearsbetween 1947 and 1962. Certainly it was not anideal so luti on to the roadbuilding needs andproblems of Missouri's counties and cities. But justas certainly, it const ituted a well-conceived andmuch-needed first step toward meeting those needsand solving those problems. Before another step inthat direction was to be taken, Missourians weredestined to make a basic alteration in the dominantbody of law under which they governed themselves.

The State Constitution of 1945 gave the StateHighway Commission the authority to expend allstate revenu e derived from highway users . . . in

cludingll

state license fees, and taxes uponmotor

vehicles , trailers . . . and moto r vehicle fuels.On March 3, 1961, in a formal statement to the

members of the General Assembly and the public,the Commission asked for a popular vote whichwould approve sharing this highway user revenue.

The Commission supported an immeiliate increase of two cents a gallon in the state gasolinetax, with no strings attached. Then it stated thatthe people ought to be given the right, by means ofa constitutional amendment, to decide whether ornot one cent of the increase being sought should beturned over the state's cities and counties for theiruse.

Citing needs stud ies and fiscal stuilies byMissouri University researche rs and the Automotive Safety Foundation, recommendations of theInterim L egislat ive Road Study Committee of theMissouri General Assemb ly, and the highway program recommended by Governor John M Dalton,the Highway Commission statement warned that

there must be a swift and steady improvement ofour state highways to save lives, reduce sufferingan d property lo sses, and promote the welfare ,prosperity, and econom ic advancement and development of our state .

The Commission pointed out that more roadbuilding funds were urgently needed for use in St.Louis, Kansas City, and t he state's other cities, andthat th e re still exists a critical need in ruralMissouri for the replacement of many bridgeswhich are too narrow or otherwise inadequate tomeet the incr easing traffic demands.

The Highway Commission said the constitutional amendment should provide for the abolitionof city gasoline taxes and the earmarking for roadand street purposes of any funds received by theco unties and cities from the state . The Commissionstatement also made the points that state nonroad user taxes . . . should not be appropriated orexpende d on the maintenance and construction of

Page



C RTthe state hi ghway system " n c ~ that state roaduser taxes should be the sole source of rev enuefor the construction and maintenance of the statehighway system .

With Governor Dalton supplying strong leadership, the two-cents-a-gallon gas tax increase wasenacted into law by the General Assembly. TheGov ernor signed the bill embodying i t on July 10 ,1961, and it became effective on October 13 ofthat year.

That law stipulated that the increase was toremain in effect for six months only - unless thevoters app roved a constitutional amendment providing that a penny of the increase be allocated tothe state's cit ies and counties . Three-fourths of themoney was to go to the cities and the remainingone-fourth to go to the counties.

Th e proposed amendment was designated as

Amendment One. The campaign for its passage was

well-conceived and energetically pushed. And Highway Departm ent played a major part indi d an d ho group called MissouriansProgress led by Southwestern Bell TelepCompany Pre sident Edwin M Clark of St. Land James C Kirkpatrick, the publisher oWindso r Review an d one of the state's best kn

and best respected weekly newspapermen.On March 6, 1962, the people appAmendment One by a margin of four to onetwo-cents-a-gallon increase n the state gas taxmade permanent. Twenty percent of the state'stax revenues - present and future - weremarked fo r the road and street purposeMissouri's cities and counties, with thegetting fi te.en percent and the counties thmaining five. And a secure financial foundationgenerated and maintained by highway use taxwas secu red for the County Aid Road Trust F

During the fifteen-year life of the King Law , the progress of the CART program had a he sitant, stop-and-go, sometime kind of t

State mon y helps local solutiO

Missourians hove rood and street needs which cannot e

met within the state system. Now and in the years ahead

Page 112

many o these needs can be met by the use o f an effthoroughly road-tested CART



tied to the ups and downs of the state's overalleconomy as they were reflected in its generalrevenue fund. Now, the tether which had tied theCART program to the general revenue fund wasbroken, and CART was ready to roll under its ownpower .

It rolled fast. The new CART program becamepossible with the passage of Amendment One inMarch of 1962. By late May of that year, the StateHighway Commission had formulated and madepublic its policies relative to roadbuilding by thecounties and cities in the new program .

By mid-June, Highway Department personnelhad held a series of ten regional meetings in whichthe new state policies were explained to officials of

ll but one of Missouri s county courts. On June19, Osage County became the first in the state toget a new CART project under way .

The new CART program included one featurebrand new in Missouri highway history- andparticularly attractive to city and county officia.ls.For the first time, cities and counties did not have

h ppento match funds obtained from the state.

A penny a gallon from the new five-cents-agallon gas tax was deposited in the County AidRoad Trust Fund, and was credited to the accountsof the cities and counties. The CART moneyremained in the accounts of the cities and counties

until they spent it. No funds were lost if notspent within a specified time, as had been the caseunder the King Road Law.

And there was more money available to thecities and counties - much more - under theCART p rogram than ever had been available tothem before. During the fifteen King Bill years, thecounties, for example, received for their roads anaverage of less than two million dollars a year.During the first year of the CART program, morethan twice that amount was distributed t thecounties for roadbuilding projects .·

And the rate of state disbursements to thecities and counties has not slowed as the CART

program has gone along. By the end of December,1968, the CART program has funnelled to thecities and counties of Missouri for use on their roadprojects an average of more than $4,600,000 ayear.

Within broad limits, this money has been spentthe way officials of the cities and counties receiving it wanted to spend it. Under the CARTprogram s terms, the State Highway Department isresponsible for seeing that the construction andmaintenance work done with CART funds isaccomplished according to certain standards andprocedures specified by law. But the various

county and local officials involved have full authority in choosing the construction and maintenanceprojects which are undertaken.

There are no stipulations in the CART programthat fixed percentages must be spent on construction and maintenance. A county may spend ll itsCART funds on construction, ll of them onmaintenance, or some of them on both. Thephilosophy of the CART approach is that neitherthe State Highway Department, the General As-

sembly, nor any other group of people knows sowell what a county or city needs in the way ofroad or street construction and maintenance projects as do the officials of that county or that cityitself . And the theory that local roadmakingdecisions ought to be made at the local level wasvindicated very early in the CART program s life:

During the King Bill years, about 77 percent otall state money spent on county roads went forconstruction purposes. During the first 15 monthsof the CART program, approximately 7 4 percentof the money spent went for maintenance projects.

The new CART program sharply decreased theamount of red tape of the King Bill program.Integral to the CART program s administration is

the requirement that every county or city roadproject on which CART funds are spent must beapproved by and accomplished under the directionof the county and city of f icial involved.

There are 114 counties in Missouri, and about400 cities involed in the CART program. But in atypical recent year, there were 850 governmentalagencies of one kind and another involved in road

work in the state of Missouri. Township roadagencies and special road districts abound. But notone of them is involved directly in the CARTprogram s administration. Neither is any otheragency of government except the State HighwayDepartment, the 114 county courts, and the citygovernments. And the CART program is easier toadminister, better organized, and more smoothlyfunctioning because it is so .

The story of the part Missouri s cities andcounties have played in roadbuilding in the statesince World War I does not constitute the biggestchapter in recent Missouri highway history, nor yetthe most exciting. But is is important. And it will

continue to be important in the years aheadespecially to Missouri s rural and small townresidents .

These citizens have roadbuilding and roadmaintenance needs which are not being m t andin a practical sense can not be - by any one of theapproximately 32,000 miles which comprise thestate highway system. Many of these needs alreadyare being met. Many more will continue t be metin the months and the years ahead. And the vehiclebeing used to meet them is not glamorous orsophisticated. t is the simple - but well roadtested and thoroughly workable - CART.

age 3



U H OF MISSOURI S history from World War II to the present has been the story of amass movement- the trek from countryside and hamlet to city and suburb. That t rek startedlong before World War II. But the war did much to quicken its pace, intensify its impact, and make

permanent a continuing process of urbanization as one of the prime facts of contemporary Missouri life.Most Missourians are city-dwellers now. Even more of them will become city-dwellers in the future. And

very few of them are selling their cars when they move to town.In 1965 more than 47 percent of aU the vehicular travel in Missouri went on in the cities of the state.

In that same year, less than 12 percent of all the road, street, and highway mileage in Missouri was locatedin urban areas.

That sort of arithmetic has made and continues to make p rob lems- for the Highway Department, for thother governmental and private agencies and groups involved in urban transpo rtation and planning, andfor Missouri motorists by the hundreds of thousands.

What are some·of the ways in which the Highway Department and other groups have been seeking solutioto the new kinds of traffic problems resulting from the urbanization of Missouri life? And how are thetransportation needs of the city-dwelling and suburban motorists of Missouri being met? The questions arefit subjects for a fat book. Perhaps they can best be dealt with in this brief review by an examination ofsome of the things which have happened on one street in one Missouri city during recent years.

This is the story of Sunshine Street in Springfield .

age 4



The ityT HE STATE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT S

first major project on what now is SunshineStreet in Springfield started in 1929. Spring-

field then was a city of about 57,500, and includedan area of about 15 square miles. t was boundedon the west by Kansas Street, on the north byKearney, on the east by Glenstone, and on thesouth by Sunshine. Only there wasn't any Sunshinein those days. At least there wasn't a continuousstreet called Sunshine running along what then wasthe city s southern edge. W E ( Jack ) Baker, theveteran Maintenance Superintendent in the Department's District 8 office in Springfield, knows . Hewas there. And his memory is sharp and clear.Listen:

' ' I t 's hard to drive along Sunshine now andremember how it looked in those days . Take thisGlenstone in tersec tion we re going through rightnow. It's one of the busiest comers in the statetoday. Know what I remember best about whatwas here in 1930? A riding stable. t stood wherethe Empire Bank building stands noW And it wasright at the edge of some wide open country. A lotof the country along what s now Sunshine waswide open then. There was plenty of pasture landalong here. There were some nice residences hereand there, to o . But the business places were fewand far between . Part of what s now Sunshine hadstreet on it in those days, but a lot of it didn't. Alot of the street we put down along here wentwhere there hadn't been any street before.

Between 1929 and the mid -1930s, the Department paved Sunshine Street from Scenic Drive toGlenstone. The work was done in two sections.The first of them was started in 1929, and pavedSunshine 18 feet wide from Scenic Drive to Fort.The second, started in 1933, paved it 20 feet wide

from Fort to Glenstone. District 8 Surveys andPlans Engineer Max Chalmers, a veteran of 40 yearswith the Highway Department, remembers how itwas:

From National Street west to about Campbell, there were some real nice residences alongSunshine in those days. But the rest of it waspretty much out in the country. In part of thatfirst work we did on Sunshine, we got some helpfrom an outfit called the Eight Mile Special RoadDistrict. It took its name from the fact that it builtroads to a distance of eight miles in all directionsfrom what then was Springfield proper. And it didgood work. Besides what it did on Sunshine, it didsome work on Kearney and some on NorthGlenstone. The Eight Mile Roa d District was prettywell known in the late '20s and the early 30s.

Those early 30s were depression years, youknow. Times were hard and money was scarce. Iremember that on some of those early Sunshinejobs, the going rates were 25 cents an hour forlaborers and 50 cents an hour for concrete finishers.

The Sunshine jobs of those years had animportance for us that went beyond the immediateSpringfield area. West of Glenstone, we designatedthat street as Route 60 AP when we built it. It wasour main route west through Springfield towardRepublic and down toward Billings . East of Glenstone, along the old Sweitzer Road, what we builtwas designated Supplementary Route D. We weretaking land parcels for that job as early as 1929.

These first phases of major State HighwayDepartment construction on Sunshine lasted wellinto the middle-1930s. Jack Baker remembers thatin 1936, the federal government specified that theminimum wage which could be paid to laborers on

age 5



local governments merge and cannot be separated

from each other on any rational basis. Whenvehicles come into a city from other parts of thestate or from other states, they merge with thelocal traffic, and any facilities constructed toaccommodate them will also produce a greatertotal benefit to the traffic which originates withinthe area itself. It is for this re ason that state andfederal enginee rs are having t interest themselvesin urban traffic problems which appear to be localin character.

In 1953, working in close cooperation withlocal and federal authorities, the Highway Department widened the section of Sunshine from ScenicDrive east t Fort Street at a cost of $95, 000. The

improvement wasn 't made befor e it was needed.The traffic pressures on Sunshine - and almosteverywhere else n the Springfield r e weregetting greate r all the time.

Springfield had been a small city before thewar. Now it was beginning to act like a big one. Itspopulation, which had been 61,000 in 1940, hadincreased to only 66,700 in 1950. In the decade ofthe '50s, it was to increase by almost a third. In1960, it stood at about 95,900. Today, less than adecade later, it is 127,000. And Harold Haas,Urban Plann er for the City of Springfield, says that

the population of the Springfield metropolitan area

not only continues to grow, but grows at anaccelerating rate.In 1963, the State Highw ay Department, the

City of Springfield, and the federal Housing an dHom e Finance Agency and U.S. Bureau of PublicRoads published Volume One of what was tobecome a comp reh ensive Springfiel d Transportation Study. Volume Two of the big report waspublished four years later, in 1967. Volume Onewas devoted principally to an inventory of transportation facts and facilities; Volume Two contained future land use and transportation data, plusa recommended street and highway plan. Together,the two parts of the Springfield Transportation

Study form a part of the Springfield Comprehensive Plan , whi ch w s conveyed to the Mayor andCity Council of Springfiel d and the Presiding Judgeand County Court of Greene County in October of1964.

The Springfield Comprehensive Plan - one ofthe first develop ed by any Missouri city - is anambitious and far-ranging piece of city planning,indeed. Volume Two of the TransportationStudy says this about it:

l t represents a distillation of quantitativedata , it sets forth the principals and s,tandards for

age 7



he ity

hile th traffic

keeps o m i n ~

th work

cannot slow

Springfi eld 's physical growth, and seeks a balancedapproach which will assure the viability of privateinvestment in relation to the conti.nuing need for

responsible action in the public sector.n 1965, again working in l o s ~coope rationwith local and federal authorities, the HighwayDepartm ent began a reconstruction of SunshineStreet over most of its course through Springfield - from Scenic Drive on the west to Glenstoneon the east. Total construction cost for the wo rkwas two and a half million dollars. The street waswidened to four lanes, and extensive lighting andsignal installations were made. Max Chalmers remembers how it went:

' 'Everybody was all for us until it b ecameevident that we were going to have to take some ofthe front yards of some of those pretty homes.

Then we had some problems. But notmany,

really.Most people were most cooperative.The records from the office of District Right of

ay Agent Don F. Atkinson bear Chalm ers out: Inall, it was necessary to take 251 tracts of land forthe Sunshine reconstruction. Of that total, 211went to the state via the negotiation ro u te andonly 40 had to be condemned. Consid ering the sortof property which was involved, that's a goodaverage.

In 1966, the Departm ent began revision of the

age 8

Sunshine and Glenstone intersection and reconstruction of Supplementary Route D from Glenstone east. Costs for the two projects totaled

$550,000, of which about $85,000 was spent athe intersection.And that's the way it's been these four decades

past on Sunshine Street in Springfield. In 1929there was no street at all along much of its presentcourse . Today,. it's one of the busiest thoroughfaresin one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas inthe state. The changes have come dizzyingly fast,and prudence would seem to dictate restraint inattempting to predict what the future - even theshort-term future - will bring. But some thingsseem obvious . Or so says Volume Two of the

Springfield Transport atio n Study :The mutual dependence of how-land-is-used

andtraffic circulation is obvious. There is, inSpringfield, a loosely formulated layman's 'law'

which says: the volume of traffic expands to f i l l

the amount of street available to carry it on . Streeimprovements are viewed with a kind of ironicresignation, if not outright disapproval , for toofrequently traffic has been allowed to strangle anarea.

Yet being able to move from place to place igenerally agreed to be of basic importan ce to all

memb ers of the population. How to accom plish



ll along its length, Sunshine says city now. Its intersection witllGlens one (left) is among t e state' s busiest. Hand ome homes grace

its middle stretch (center). nd near its western end, suburbia holdsits pleasant sway (right).

this becomes one of t he crucial issues n urbandevelopment. How the land is used provides the

attraction that draws the traffic, yet convenientaccess may dictate the way certain land is used.Almost a which-comes-first?-the chicken -or-the eggtype of dilemma, the practical assumption must bethat land use and transportation are interdependent and should be considered in terms of totalenvironment. Ecological and engineering solutionsmust be weighted to take account of the wholeproblem . . .

The problems involved in furnishing our explosively expanding cities with the sort of highwaytransportation systems they need - and can usewithout harmful effects on the non-transportation

aspects of city lifea r e

formidable. But so are theknowledge, the energies, and the determination ofthe Missourians who are attacking them. Andperhaps it is proper to give the last word in thematter of whether or not those Missourians can getthe job done to that District 8 Engineer who soimpressed Jack Baker with his interest in thatSunshine Street work back in 1 9 3 6 the justlycelebrated Rex Whitton.

Mr. Whitton has come a long and a verydistinguished way from his involvement with thatSunshine Street work in the middle-1930s. But

his interest in the traffic problems of our cities hasnever diminished. On the contrary, i t seems to be

growing all the time. As recently as 1967, in aKansas City address entitled Traffic In the UrbanAge, he said this:

It is well to keep in mind that transportationcrises are an old, old story in the history ofcities . . . New York was having transportationheadaches in the early part of the 19th Century-before street cars and subways. And one need onlylook at turn-of-the-century photos of Fifth Avenueto see that downtown congestion plagued NewYork before moto r vehicles became common . Yettoday, more people than ever live and work andfind their recrea tion in greater New York . . . Andthroughout the country, the growth of large urbancenters is one of the most signif icant aspects of lifein the latter half of the 20th Century.

So I find it hard to follow the critics ofdespair who bemoan the decadence and decline ofour cities. I see, instead, a tremendous vitality inour cities. f they become choked with traffic, thisis not so much a symptom of illness as it is proofthat the city and its downtown are very muchalive.

Mr. Whitton wasn't talking specifically aboutSunshine Street and Springfield when he said that.

ut they would seem to qualify.

age 9



o t

monumentsbut means

0 UR STORY has no end . For roadbuilding s not an event, but a process. And the process continues.

When the first white men moved into what s now Missouri, they needed better roads than theIndian trails they found. Th ey built them. But they could not close the gap between what was needed andwhat they were able to construct. That gap never has been closed.

From Indian-trail day s to the present, highway needs in Missouri have continued to grow fasterthan the highway systems built to meet them. From tho se early days to these , Missouri s roadbuilders have beenengaged in a never-ending game o f catch -up . The stakes in the game have been high. And the roadbuildershave played i t hard.

The comi ng of the motor age greatly quic kened th e game s pace, but did not change its essentialcharacter. Missouri s roadbuilders fought their way free of the mud and pulled themselves up onto hard surface.Th ey bridged rivers and cut through hills and straightened curves . And as the bu sy and productive yearswent by, they linked cities to towns and farmsteads to both But the numbers of Missourians, their economy and

their dream for the future would not stop expanding.

age 12



The roadbuilders kept right on working: A decade ago and more, the Interstate system was begun. Thework on it was started in Missouri. No construction project like it had been undertaken before in all of humanhistory. In Missouri and everywhere else, the task was awesome. In Missouri and everywhere else, the

roadbuilders were undismayed. The work went forward.Now Missouri s portion o f the Interstate system is well advanced. The thing works - magnificently. t is

not enough. The gap between what is needed and what has been built remains as wide as ever .More roads will be built in Missouri in the years ahead. The y will be better roads than any we have

known before. They will not be enough either.Discouraging? Frustrat ing? A sign of failure? No. A cause for satisfaction. A reason for pride . A vital

sign, like steady breathing or a strong pulse . Because roadbuilding is much more than one of the ornaments of

a civilization; i t is also one of the continuing functions in which a civilization lives and moves and hasits being.

Roadbui lding is primarily a matter not of monuments but of means. It s one of the ways people have of

getting from where they are to where they want to be. In space, of course. But in time too.

And what we move toward through time is our futureo u t

of sight, but rarely out of mind.e

hopeit w l l be better for us and for ll Missourians. e work to make i t so. And as we hope and work, it waits for us -ten miles, twenty miles, a hundred miles down the road.

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roads and their builders

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