HIGHWAYS SMOOTH THE WAY FOR TRAVEL

One night in 1940, at a dinner party in Cape Girardeau, guests recalled an automobile trip they made 25 years earlier to St. Louis.

They reminisced that since roads were so much rougher in 1914 than in 1940, the trip took 10 hours of hard driving to cover 170 miles. Also, the road was a circuitous path that hit Ste. Genevieve, Farmington and Desloge.

Did they suspect that their grandchildren would be making the same trip to St. Louis at 70 to 75 mph? Maybe. They had seen a lot of progress already in their day.

Members of the group, made up of the city's movers and shakers, had been among the first to own gasoline-powered automobiles. One, A.J. Vogel, opened the first garage in town.

Those guests were also witnesses to the beginning of paved roads and were probably among the first to motor their way to St. Louis on the new, smoother road.

October 18, 1930, was the first day people traveling from Cape Girardeau to St. Louis drove all the way on concrete pavement.

That day was a long time coming.

Beginning in 1903 a $2 automobile license fee was collected for the county road fund.

Seventeen years later, in 1920, a $60 million "Get Missouri Out of the Mud" bond issue passed.

In 1924, a Jackson businessman described to the Southeast Missourian a day trip he took with his family:

He left at 9 a.m. Taking advantage of the new highways, he drove to Fredericktown, down to Poplar Bluff for lunch, onto Sikeston and back to Jackson, just in time for supper.

Marveling at the speed of his travel, the Jackson man said that a year earlier the 210-mile trip would have taken several days.

In 1925, Cape Girardeau and St. Louis were connected with a paved road, most of it concrete.

Filling the final, six-mile gap between Williams Creek, seven miles west of Cape Girardeau, and the new pavement two miles west of Jackson, further shortened the time between Cape Girardeau and points north.

Last to be finished was a half-mile strip between the eastern city limits of Jackson and the end of a spur near the southern boundary of the city where highway 25 intersects with the new route.

Cape Girardeau's first concrete road, Kingshighway, was three miles leading out of the city to the south.