Travel the OLDEST paved concrete highway in Missouri!

[Music] what's up brody pals it's roman rich good to see you back again so what i have for you today is an old road video you're going to really love it it's going to be really simple old school documentary style not a lot of special effects or anything it's going to be kind of lengthy but i think you'll enjoy it and and the whole reason why i'm doing this is to honor an old acquaintance of mine who just passed recently about two months ago his name was james bond and uh and i'll provide some links to his work here in just a little bit but he was an amazing researcher and if you've ever heard of the website called bridgehunter.com he's one of the men that was in charge of putting that website together and maintaining it so we have a lot to thank him for all his contributions and everything but he was also an avid hiker bridge enthusiast and he also loved old pathways and roads too and so about a year ago james told me hey rich in case you never uh saw this before there's uh the oldest paved section of highway in missouri down in southeast missouri and it's a longer corridor that i've traveled probably a couple hundred times in my life i used to drive this way with my mom going to kentucky and as a kid i do seem to remember seeing some segments of road out the window because when i was a kid we didn't have dvd players and stuff to keep us occupied while traveling so at any rate let's jump right into it before we show you the video though i'm going to kind of give you an overview of the map because i know a lot of you out there are going to want to go see this piece of road and there's also a cool bridge to see as well so let's jump right into it and uh get started okay so this is charleston missouri i'll zoom out a little bit here so you can kind of get an idea where we're at charleston missouri is in the southeast kind of boot hill of missouri near illinois and kentucky and cairo illinois is the route we're going to focus on today this old highway used to go from charleston up to cairo illinois and this is before any of the modern highways we see today like 62 or 57 or any of those this is this is the original path to the area and so then i'll take a visit over here to james's blog site right here and just real quick if you want to look him up here's how you spell his name b-a-u-g-hn he still has a lot of great stuff that you can visit and check out and go research for yourself he was really avid in in trails and roads and bridges and hiking and all sorts of great stuff but uh okay so let's see here drive the oldest concrete highway in missouri now he gives you some great instructions this post here this blog was from 12 years ago 2009 and you'll see if you once you get to the video that things have changed considerably and he goes on to say that this was constructed roughly about a hundred years ago and there's the bridge and let me uh zoom in a little bit here for you all so you see a little better there you go so he's got some maps and stuff like that and uh yeah so get it if you get a chance go check out his blog site it's uh s e missourian.com slash blogs blogs sorry and uh pavement ends you can see it right up here i'll provide links to this in the youtube channel at the end so you can just click on it and go find it alright so back to the maps so james gives us some directions i'm going to provide him here now just keep in mind that this was 12 years ago some of the road names have changed but you're going to leave out of charleston on 62 and this is the path that the old original highway would have taken but it's been since upgraded to modern standards but once you get up to highway jj and i'm going to switch over to satellite view i want you to keep something in mind real quick one of the tips that i'll give you for exploring roads sometimes i'll talk about looking for cemeteries and things like that in this case i want you to pay real close attention to this feature right here you can kind of see an outcropping of the long sweeping turn right here and this this is kind of indicative of what you'd find on the archaic highways they'd have these long sweeping turns because that was the highway you wouldn't have a straight intersection a straight 90 degree turn and you'll see that as we head south so we're going to turn south on jj highway and we're gonna go down a couple miles to one of the first major paved roads now again here we have that long sweeping turn onto farm road 320 right there okay that is our road we're not going to see it yet because unfortunately the highway department down there has paved over the old concrete it just got to be in such bad shape they've paved over it but you do see some pictures on james's site now once we get going east here we're going to come to another long sweeping turn right here you want to go up this direction kind of northeast and you're going to see on google maps that they call it old highway 60. i'm sure it is old highway 60 but before that it was you know i think with 17 is what he calls it or 14. let's see here what does he call it i'm good at finding roads i'm just not great at retaining the information associated with them uh known as 7a and i don't see a highway number associated with unless that was at 7a but we're gonna we're going to keep on the hunt right here so again going up this old highway 60 sweeping up through town it turns into main street and then it turns right again look at these long sweeping turns and then it's going to go this way so at this point main street comes to an intersection of hh and ee we don't really see any long sweeping turns here so it's safe to assume that the road kept going down hh and you'll find out that it does we're going to keep going east and then now you have this long sweeping turn and then look now we've got the concrete maybe we can get a street view we cannot there's no street view there but this is concrete if i took away the labels which i can do maybe let's see here labels now you can see the concrete a little bit better as we head north i'll turn the labels back on just so that you all can follow along a little bit better all right we're on road 307 this would be county road or farm road 307 it's going to go up north and you're going to again have a nice long sweeping turn here and it's going to continue east again and you'll see areas here have been kind of covered with a tar and chip or gravel mixture just to kind of sustain the the road surface and again long sweeping turn going up north with this concrete and you'll see the vegetation start to creep in here and encroach on the concrete there's a reason for that and you're going to find out in the video when we get to it here i just want to show you all the path that uh right here there's a bridge you can just see the faint outlines of the trusses right through here and it's a wood deck bridge here's a body of water and this is a creek so that's why we see more persistent vegetation through these areas because vehicles aren't driving on it as much and this is interesting you'll see right here where the road bed goes up underneath modern 62 which is also a levee and then it peaks back out right through here so you go across the levee acro across 60 62 and just keep going straight and then again we turn into some a mix of asphalt and tar and chip but the concrete's still there underneath it it's just that this road gets more use and so they've got to resurface it regularly to keep it sustainable so again sweeping turn we're going to go to the right down this k road we're going to go up this way and then you'll notice where that kind of comes back over into 62 but then if you keep going straight here again we have the concrete and so here's where we go towards the end this goes to a farm field which i drove through you'll find out just shortly and it stops right here at the river and this this is the confluence point of the mississippi and ohio river right in this area here this is kind of where they all come together you got the ohio river and the mississippi river if you ever cross through here it's just huge it looks like you're going across an ocean but you got kentucky illinois and missouri so that's it for that let's uh let's go ahead and jump right back into the video i hope you enjoy it and thanks for watching so much so far i hope it's been educational now we get to the good stuff old concrete highway predecessor to highway 62 down near wyatt missouri i found this from a friend of mine and fellow bridge enthusiast james bond and supposedly there's a bridge around here someplace but i'm not quite sure exactly where it is allegedly that's the reason why this section of road remains the way it does because a good well a significant portion of it has been paved over with asphalt supposedly this is its original form because of the bridge and its light load limit so trucks and big machinery aren't using that bridge now we're coming into some gravel back to concrete again it's a little bitty steel truss bridge tiny little like pony truss bridge i'd love to see it hopefully it's still in existence looks like the road's gonna turn again over to the left it says road closed ahead on the sign so that probably means that the bridge hopefully the bridge is still there but just closed off we'll find out soon enough because the vegetation starts getting thicker and thicker in the road which means it's not traveled much beyond here this is good cheap fun just going out and exploring in your backyard you never know what you're gonna find i really hope to find that bridge although this is pretty cool too this is pretty innovative for back then this is i think this is the first paved highway in missouri when this was put in i believe it was around 1919 or something like that i believe that's when this was paved and concrete really hard portland cement it's hard to beat that material you don't see it used very often today you know a high concentration of portland cement honestly it's a mixture of stuff now i call it concrete lots of purple swallows out today eating up bugs probably my hand's starting to get tired of holding the camera up apologize for any bobbling uh coming up to another transition up here maybe there's that gradual see there's a couple houses up here a couple nasty bumps looks like it might be coming to an end no bridge visit our bridge old buildings over here uh oh there's a bridge the bridge is there fantastic well it's closed that's okay better to be closed than non-existent if you ask me although i tell you that's not much of a pile of gravel blazer would drive right over that no problem let's go check it out really cool this hasn't been driven on for a long time i don't know what this stuff here is called below me but it's like it it looks like poop and it kind of walk when you walk on it's really squishy too it's like some sort of a fungus or mold or i don't know it's really gross so we've got a wooden deck bridge as james has explained on his blog you can go and find that blog i found it very easily today simply by googling um old concrete highway near charleston missouri that's exactly the google search that i looked at and it brought it up the first result so we've got this old wooden deck bridge and i'm i'm fairly certain the old adventure truck could come across this very easily but out of respect i'm not going to because i want to see this bridge stay here and people start doing stunts like that that's when they start taking these things out so better to be here and closed than uh than not and uh be my like i'd get on here and the wooden deck would collapse and then i'd be out a blazer and i'd be responsible for damaging a bridge i i don't want to be that guy so it still has his tag it's covered with little lichens and it looks like it says missouri highway department bridge number 59 1921 it's a pretty old bridge just a little pony truss yeah probably not a good idea to be crossing this with a vehicle not not a heavy vehicle at least the blazer is not real heavy but it's not light missing some other deck boards over here yep wouldn't take much to crack those old rotten boards here's another sign over here make sure to fall in same thing a little less growth on it you can see the water down below is pretty high supposedly they had about three inches of rain in the last 24 hours so it's a lot of water maybe we can spot some turtles i'm surprised i'm really surprised that there's lack of a more defining barricade here you know like a piece of guard rail or jersey wall or something the little pile of rock doesn't really do much so i don't know if it was me it was a bridge that i was trying to prevent people from getting on i would put a jersey wall or something up there but that's just me i don't i don't see any turtles that water's pretty nasty looks like somebody else made a little makeshift bridge or something over there i don't know why you do that but i don't know what that is exactly somebody's creative attempt at putting some sort of a crossing over there so yeah pretty neat bridge old wood deck i'm pretty happy to see it oh and then you're there you can see the continuation of the highway as it heads i believe east i don't know i can't tell the direction i'm in right now i wasn't paying attention to the map so yeah yep cool bridge it actually looks to be in decent shape i'd say they probably close it because of the condition of the wood deck not that bad of a looking bridge there i know i've crossed worse well that's my adventure today in southern missouri i know you enjoyed this video and i know you're going to do me a favor and you're going to share this video aren't you yes you're going to share this video down there is the section that continues on to the east from the bridge let's go check it out and see if we can find some more it goes underneath modern u.s 62. i thought maybe there might be another bridge possibly up ahead so they kind of just they kind of put gravel and millings and stuff over this concrete i don't know if they sprayed it with oil or anything it doesn't appear that they have but i don't know why maybe they thought this would be better just put a bunch of gravel over top of that concrete road that'll make it better i don't know but that's what they did you can kind of still see the uh i cracks pave over it over here this is asphalt and then it's gone for a little bit and then it's back for a little bit must have been a culvert back there that they removed and replaced so the concrete's still there it's underneath this asphalt and now gravel we're gonna go up ahead a little bit and see if we can find more um i could have swore i saw a bridge on google maps kind of leading to i guess what maybe used to be a ferry or something i'm not really sure there's more online about this i just remember talking to james bond about this whole road some years ago and never got a chance to get down here but i was in the neighborhood and thought i'll check it out but i didn't go back and read through his blog real carefully because i'm kind of pressed for time like always the road goes this way see the sweeping turn goes this way let's see if we can get back up on some cracks yeah there does seem to be cracks that match up with the concrete yeah there's concrete just saw a piece there's concrete underneath this so this is still the road going back towards the east see we're going to probably find a dead end here so we're going to end up with guaranteed now we're going to hit incline so this road should disappear this incline i would think there's still some bumps and stuff i feel like concrete still see it seems like concrete underneath this i don't know now now i'm not so sure there's a gate probably i see no trespassing oh no what do we got over there that's still a section of road over the top of this levee we're gonna switch hands i now this i recognize this you if you look at james bond's blog post he actually has this in the blog post so this doesn't get driven on at all but you can see that it's sustained a lot of damage probably from levee construction or things of that nature who knows what look how straight that line is look off to the left of your screen you can see how straight that road is i mean what an amazing job they did i mean back then they didn't do things just good enough they did things to the best of their ability and i'm trying to drive to my the best of my ability and hold this camera to the best of my ability um and it's pretty rough road so i'm gonna stick the camera out the window it's gonna be a little noisy but i might put some music [Music] there's a culvert up here to the left right it's actually going to drive over but you can see it to the left that's a polar pipe that's the original culvert and we're going to hit woods up here i really think there might be a bridge up here but i'm not sure i might have to get out and take a look there's trails going through the woods as long as the blazer can get through and get back out again i'm i'm off for it go go adventure truck we're going to go into the woods here just get some catching glare on my dashboard still on concrete folks this is still the original highway what i believe according to online resources the oldest paved highway in missouri this is it right here oldest paved highway in missouri there's a structure of some sort right there what is that it's a deer stuff what is that some sort of a tower oh i'm getting into mud [Music] i think that's the end of the road there was no bridge but i think i don't know i'd have to do the research but maybe you could find it i'm in some pretty sloppy mud now i really can't go any further i don't see why i should because i think the concrete ended back up a little bit and the concrete is done but i don't think it goes any further and it turns into some really sloppy mud like i said earlier they had like three inches of rain yesterday look here i mean concrete's there i'm sure i'm not sinking i could see some stone under the tires from the concrete but i don't think it goes any further because there's the river look past that structure that's the river see it flowing so the end of this road may have been a fairy at one time i think that's what james had alluded to in his blog post that this area was a ferry there was a ferry landing where you would get on board a ship with your vehicle and it would take it across over into kentucky so or illinois maybe i'm not sure where i'm at this might be illinois i came off of a ferry to get here from kentucky but i think over there is illinois there's like a big confluence here between illinois missouri and kentucky so not even sure what river that is that might let's see here let's look that is okay that's that is illinois and that is the mississippi river i thought maybe it was the ohio but that's the mississippi river over there and uh so yeah i'm i'm guessing judging by where i'm at on the screen here on uh google maps i cannot drive any further and that road doesn't seem to go off to left or right just stops so i'm guessing this would have been a fairy landing at one time so there you have it the oldest section of paved highway in missouri i don't think it's the oldest remaining i think it was the oldest this first paved highway in missouri still intact you can still drive it you should drive it come on out just don't drive your 18-wheeler on it or something silly like that or something really heavy just drive your car minivan whatever you have on it and enjoy it take pictures share it and share this video while you're at it that would be helpful i always enjoy when people share my videos because i get to help kind of spread history across the world for people to to understand and for entertainment value so all right i'm roman rich as always go your own way make sure you follow me on facebook instagram youtube all that good stuff and uh tell your friends about me thanks a lot drive safe see you down the road all right so it wasn't that great i thought it was a great time getting to go out there and check out that old slab of pavement no it's not route 66 but these old highways are still really cool and they've got lots of history surrounding them and it's cool just to get out there and imagine what things were like 100 years ago when people were were jaunting across the country you know we take a lot of things for granted today just going over 35 miles an hour is a real luxury compared to what people had a hundred years ago and so that's the kind of stuff i think about when i go out there i think about no air conditioning low speeds vehicles that consume lots of oil persistent flat tires just lots of adventures just to travel a few miles across the country it was a real privilege for them to have a paved surface not mud or dirt or something else so i hope you enjoy that and as always make sure you share my videos hit subscribe if you're the first time coming here i love doing these for people i love bringing the world to my subscribers it just thrills me do me a favor and leave a couple comments i love reading your comments too and as always share the videos and be sure to go your own way i'll see you down the road next time [Music] you

Channel: Roamin' Rich

Views: 3,080

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: Q-_Sqe8B7JA

Length: 29min 2sec (1742 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021