Why the journey

Contributed by Joel Rhodes, MHC Board Member

Joel Rhodes

Something restless, romantic, and yet often intensely pragmatic drives Americans, whether in service to Fredrick Jackson Turner’s pioneer vision of advancing civilization across the great western frontier or modern American Dreams of progress and fulfillment as one’s reward for faithful hard work. We have long been a nation on a journey. Today, in any given year, nearly 50 million, or slightly over sixteen percent of Americans, change residences. And, as always, this mobility offers an excellent barometer of our nation’s constantly shifting demographic and economic conditions as well as the cultural tensions which have accompanied modernization.

In many ways the story of the United States is in essence a story of transportation and in this regard Missouri offers an excellent example. To locate and understand its people simply trace the state’s rivers, railroads, and highways.

Navigable rivers first determined the location of Missouri’s earliest towns. While visionaries in St. Louis and Kansas City seized on their natural advantages of being at the confluence of major rivers to establish each as a major commercial artery of trade, more modest landings along the state’s smaller waterways welcomed rafts, barges and eventually steamboats shipping local products out and introducing eastern goods. In southeast Missouri, for instance, traders doing business with area frontiersmen and Indians chose a rock promontory jutting out into the Mississippi as an easily identifiable landmark for river traffic and thus as early as 1765, French maps clearly show “Cape Girardot.”

At the time of the Civil War, virtually every one of the state’s two dozen largest cities and towns were located along the approximately 2,000 miles of waterways ranging from the Mississippi and Missouri to the Grand, Platte, Ozark, Osage, Pomme de Terre and Meramec Rivers. In each isolated community, river traffic was responsible for local development, commerce, the built environment, and pace for the cycles of political, economic, and social life.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as simultaneous revolutions in power, transportation, productivity, and communication transformed America, the railroads bridged Missouri’s rivers. Within a generation the hidden hand of commercial market capitalism began replacing the traditional local foundations of life just as the iron horse dramatically altered rural notions of time, space, and distance. Railroads were critical to a small town’s survival and during the long, strange trip that is Missouri’s reckless adventures in railroad building those places that secured a vital railroad link – St. Joseph, Joplin, Kirksville, Columbia, Sedalia, Jefferson City, Springfield, Hannibal, and Cape Girardeau – prospered while those that could not often faded into memory. As railroads accelerated the diversification and sophistication of Missouri’s economy, farmers and businessmen produced at unprecedented levels to survive the fierce competition for profit in the national marketplace. By the end of the First World War, St. Louis and Kansas City factories produced nearly $1.5 billion worth of manufactured goods, the value of farm commodities had risen almost ten fold to nearly $953 million, and southwest and southeast Missouri accounted for nearly eighty percent of the nation’s zinc and lead. To cut the forests, lay the track, and dig the mines, Missouri’s population more than doubled to reach over three million in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

In the twentieth century, a system of interstate highways increasingly reinforced Missouri’s pattern of urbanization by consolidating the economic and social dominance of established urban centers and propelling a general redistribution of population within the state. Yet, moreover, the struggle to transform the state’s “patchwork quilt” of dirt and gravel lanes into a modern integrated system of hard surface farm-to-market roads with government money – culminating in the Centennial Road Law of 1921 – spoke as much to commerce and urbanization as it did to a fundamental cultural conflict in the Show Me state’s character: fiercely independent and suspicious of institutions beyond their control, Missourians have long grappled to reconcile their desire for the benefits and conveniences of modern commercial life with an inherent preference for small government and provincial localism.

Woven as it is from a complex tapestry of river, railroads, and highways, Missouri’s journey has never been easy, nor is it complete.

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