WESTSIDE — Lest anyone think a four-lane highway connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border has not been in the works for a long, long time, the following article was found in the Thursday, Dec. 13, 1934, issue of the Gentry Journal Advance:
4-Lane Military Road Contemplated to Run from Canada to Gulf
Road representatives from five states, meeting in Joplin Monday afternoon, adopted resolutions calling upon President Roosevelt, congress and the legislatures of the five states to join in building a four-lane transcontinental highway from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico.
Use of federal funds on the project, along the line of federal work relief, with each state providing the necessary right of way through the state, was urged.
It would be a military, industrial and social traffic artery, with a tentative route which would follow highway 71 through Missouri suggested, but with definite routing to be left to the federal government, probably the war department.
The meeting was sponsored by the Highway No. 8 Association of Texas, which is advocating the construction of the transcontinental route from Duluth, Minn., to Port Arthur, Tex.
The five states represented were Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas. Speakers representing road groups in those states pledged their active support of the movement, and many letters and telegrams from persons unable to attend were received, pledging their assistance.
The giant highway, as tentatively proposed, would follow the general route of roads already hard-surfaced through the five states, but it would avoid thickly populated centers, skirting them for the reason that it would be such a wide road that it could not pass down the main thoroughfares of the cities.
It was pointed out by the speakers, as well as in resolutions, that the tentatively proposed routing of such a roadway would tap and connect the iron, paper, wheat, corn, coal, timber, lead and zinc, oil, cotton and meat producing centers of the nation, and that it would serve a great industrial purpose, both in time of war and in time of peace.
The tentative routing, which necessarily would be subject to change should government engineers consider it, would be from Duluth to St. Paul, to Des Moines, to Excelsior Springs, to Kansas City, and along highway 71 through Joplin to Rogers, Fayetteville and Fort Smith, Ark., and to Texarkana, Marshall, Center, Beaumont and Port Arthur, Tex.
Of course, things didn't work out quite as expected. The north-south superhighway connecting Duluth, Minn., to the Gulf of Mexico (not completed until some 40 years later), took a turn southwest at Kansas City, passing through Kansas and Oklahoma and then south to Laredo, Texas. Other Interstate System highways connect the road to the Gulf at major Texas ports. But the route connecting northwest Arkansas to the Canadian border and the Gulf is, after 80-plus years, finally getting closer to completion with work being done in both northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri to help make the original highway route through Arkansas much closer to reality.
General News on 04/05/2017