Missouri was the only state granted the privilege of two headquarters locations within the new twelve-unit Federal Reserve System. What led organizers to grant St. Louis and Kansas City such an honor as to preside over two reserve districts, encompassing states across the nation’s midsection from Colorado to parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, including banks that might otherwise look to major cities such as Chicago for financial leadership? Ultimately, a combination of tradition, Democratic Party politics, existing business relationships, the geography of existing trade routes, and consideration of capital “balance” aided in the selection of these two cities for Federal Reserve headquarters.

Origins of the Federal Reserve Act

Historians frequently point to the Panic of 1907 as an essential motivation for reforming the nation’s financial system. Though panics on Wall Street, and even broader depressions had cycled through the American economy throughout the nineteenth century, this event’s “perfect storm” highlighted the restrictions of the money supply and the banks’ inability to coordinate an effective response.¹ Much of the blame for the 1907 financial panic can be attributed to a failed attempt to consolidate (corner) stock on the Amalgamated Copper Company, and the ripple effects it had on stock brokerages, banks, and trust companies connected to the owner, Fritz Augustus Heinze, and his associates. Other factors such as seasonal farm credits (a typical issue leading to short currency supplies in the fall), and the 1906 San Francisco Fire also drew significant amounts of gold away from the nation’s financial center in New York. Failing institutions led to a spreading panic throughout the country, and many banks were forced to close or issue scrip as currency due to the lack of supply of hard currency. The aging private financier J.P. Morgan stepped up to organize a response to the financial crisis. An effective response required significant commitments from the large banks of New York City to stabilize the financial system, a private bailout to the order of tens of millions of dollars. Overall, the Panic of 1907 demonstrated that the national banking system, unreformed since 1863 and lacking a centralized response structure or reserve system to respond to financial crises, needed significant overhaul. The panic also heightened many Americans’ long-existing distrust of bankers, Wall Street, and the “Money Trust,” which meant that reform efforts had to address the public’s fears of corporate control. In a period of increasing progressivism, the appeal of government control or at least oversight of the banking system was increasingly attractive—to many outside the financial sector.

In order to turn toward the government as a central force in banking, Americans had to overcome deep-seated fears of a central bank. These fears reached their height in the 1830s when Andrew Jackson killed the charter for the federally authorized national Second Bank of the United States, but traditional agrarian, anti-bank sentiments prevailed in the still majority-rural population. At the turn of the twentieth century, policymakers still considered a central bank impossible. German immigrant banker Paul Warburg led the way in proposing an institution more in line with European financial systems and helped convince conservative Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich to form a legislative research committee and write a reform plan.² The process took years, however. The tumultuous politics of progressivism, and the toxicity of Aldrich’s conservative name and record, led to delays and the handing over of bank reform plans to Democrats under Woodrow Wilson. Democrats also were divided on the issue of finance, being the party of Jackson and the still highly influential populist William Jennings Bryan, an advocate for the Free Silver Movement, which promoted unlimited coinage of silver. Still, reformers caught Wilson’s attention and convinced him of some of the important details of a new banking system. He coaxed along Congressional leaders Representative Carter Glass of Virginia and Senator Robert Owen of Oklahoma and eventually prodded Congress into passing the Federal Reserve Act in the waning days before Christmas in 1913. The United States had finally overcome fears of a central bank to create a uniquely American, federated system of regional banks with a blend of government and private control.

Organization of the Reserve Districts

Early in 1914, a committee to organize the Reserve Bank system got to work. Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo, Secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston, and Comptroller of the Currency John Skelton Williams traveled 10,000 miles over six weeks, holding interviews in 18 cities to determine where the eight to twelve reserve cities specified by the Federal Reserve Act should be located. Chicago, New York, and St. Louis, which the National Banking Act of 1863 had already designated as reserve cities, were considered “obvious choices.”³ To choose the other five to nine cities, the committee listened to business leaders give testimony on commercial, industrial, and agricultural statistics, trade and banking conditions, transit and communication links, and population figures that would aid a city’s case for a headquarters.

Cities actively lobbied for designation as a reserve city; 37 cities sought selection as a headquarters location and 18 received extensive hearings (beyond the already chosen New York, Chicago, and St. Louis). The final decisions produced some outcry among slighted cities. The Reserve Bank Organizing Committee (ROBC) ultimately produced more than 5,000 pages of evidence collected during its hearings, the results of a ballot poll among banks that would join the system, and statements defending its decisions to the American public. The committee thus presented ample documentation of their decisions to the American public.⁴ Kansas City, a more controversial pick than some, cited its new Union Station and ability to transport agricultural commodities through 16 major rail lines and 32 subordinate lines as evidence of its strength as a commercial center. Such rail lines also provided fast mail service to outlying parts of its eventual reserve district, as noted by testimonials from bankers as far away as Roswell, New Mexico. Mail correspondence was important to banking activity, thus the organizers strongly considered this point. Kansas City could also boast of higher correspondence banking activity, where banks in smaller towns and cities kept accounts in its banks for various reasons, than competing cities such as Denver and Omaha.⁵

A national poll asked 7,471 banks which cities would be their first, second, and third choice reserve city locations.⁶ Those giving St. Louis the edge for District 8 included bankers in the state of Arkansas, a large portion of Illinois (with Chicago as the other main vote-getter), and of course Missouri (votes split between Kansas City and St. Louis, 64-47). Portions of other states which the organizers eventually assigned to this district also selected St. Louis as a first choice, though other prominent choices included Chicago and Louisville.⁷ In the case of District 10, Kansas City received the overwhelming vote in Kansas, New Mexico, and northern Oklahoma. It also received more than half of the Missouri votes and mostly second place votes from Colorado and Nebraska institutions that eventually were incorporated into its district (and later given branches in Denver and Omaha).⁸

In the decision submitted to Congress and an accompanying public statement, the committee laid out the geographic boundaries of each district and pertinent statistics that had led them to draw the regional map as they did. For instance, St. Louis’s District 8 included at least 458 banks and up to $6,367,006 in capital (some of that accounting for state banks and trust companies that had applied for admission to the system after the initial membership period for national banks). Kansas City’s District 10 included at least 836 banks and up to $5,600,977 in capital. It should be noted that districts centered in New York City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago controlled significantly larger capital per district, ranging from about $12 million to $20 million each, but the two Missouri-centered districts were on par with the other six reserve districts throughout the nation.⁹

The balance of capital throughout the nation’s districts upheld the validity of the committee’s choices for headquarter cities and helped thwart the desire of Wall Street bankers for financial control of most of the Northeast if not the rest of the nation. Some of the chosen cities produced controversy; the committee selected Dallas and Atlanta over New Orleans, which was larger at the time, due to recent economic growth and other considerations. A few observers thought the outsized influence of “numerous Missouri politicians then in office” might have affected the decision to place two reserve centers in the state; although at least one prominent Missourian, Senator James Reed, initially opposed the Federal Reserve Act before changing his tune to boost Kansas City’s fortunes.¹⁰ The RBOC ultimately defended its choices by offering up transparently the many statistics, maps, and testimonials that had supported the chosen cities. It also composed a public statement addressing complaints from cities such as New Orleans, Baltimore, Denver, and Omaha. The committee suggested that those that complained misunderstood the function of the Federal Reserve Banks. Ordinary consumers continued banking operations much as before, at no detriment to these prominent commercial cities. Banks could also continue doing business outside of their designated districts if they chose, but ballots and testimonial evidence supported the selection of the chosen cities as central to national banking operations. The statement concluded, “It is simply misleading for any city or individual to represent that the future of a city will be injuriously affected by reason of its failure to secure a federal reserve bank. Every city which has the foundations for prosperity and progress will continue to grow and expand, whether it has such a reserve bank or not, and well-informed bankers, especially, are aware of this.”¹¹ The Federal Reserve district map ratified the committee’s decisions and recognized Missouri’s significant contributions to the nation’s economy in the early twentieth century with its two headquarter cities.

Conclusion—How the Federal Reserve Functioned

The organizing committee had worked quickly to select the reserve cities in just a few months after the legislative birth of the Federal Reserve in December 1913. Selected by April 1914, the chosen reserve cities had to move quickly before opening operations officially on November 16, 1914. Each bank had to select a Governor to run day-to-day operations, as well as an average of 20 employees including bankers, clerks, currency handlers, and support staff. In addition, the organization of each reserve bank involved selection of a nine-member Board of Directors. The Federal Reserve Board (a national body) appointed Class C Directors, including the Chair and Vice Chairman of each district board. Class A Directors were bankers from the region, and Class B Directors were members of regional commerce, agriculture, or industrial businesses but not bankers. Regional member banks selected all Directors.¹² Even though a national board oversaw the overall system (and legislative acts during the 1930s would strengthen the national board still further), the fact that districts directly selected most of the members of the district reserve boards helped shield the system from accusations of too much centralization. Banks also appreciated that the semi-private structure of the Federal Reserve allowed them to receive six percent dividends from their district reserve bank.

In its early years, the Federal Reserve Banks’ primary roles included “discounting” loans from member banks (exchanging liquid currency for these assets), clearing checks for the district, expediting wire transfers of funds among district banks, regulating member banks through timely examinations, and offering professionalization services to the banking industry.¹³ At the board level, Directors contended with a range of national and international events affecting policy decisions, such as how to support government bond drives during World War I. In the fluctuating economy of the 1920s, Federal Reserve Boards debated how to use discount rates and other policies to control member banks’ overinvestment in speculative stocks and bonds. They also promoted “productive credit” for agriculture and industry in its place; however, they did not successfully ward off the economic collapse of the Great Depression.¹⁴ New legislative mandates and policy arrangements beginning in the 1930s with the Glass-Steagall Act eventually helped the Federal Reserve take its position as the influential economic powerhouse it is today.¹⁵

One other notable contribution of the Federal Reserve from this early period to the present, is its role as an economic research engine generating commercial and financial statistics for the various districts. The St. Louis Fed has offered such data as well as institutional histories and primary sources related to the Fed through its highly useful digital platforms, FRASER and FRED. FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) first became digitized in 1991, with the publication of U.S. Financial Data. The database has since added other journals to its collection. FRASER (the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research), first online in 2004, builds on the legacy of St. Louis Fed Research Director Homer Jones, who first began providing economic information to the public in 1958. It offers the historical researcher ample material from the Fed’s legislative founding to the present.¹⁶ Missouri’s representation in the Federal Reserve System, not just in its two headquarters cities but also in its services to research and education, is therefore commendable.

Beginning in 1682, France laid claim to the area of central North America which included the vast Mississippi River drainage basin. French colonists moved to the region near the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers in the latter half of the seventeenth century. French fur traders, trappers, farmers, and Jesuit missionaries came from France, French Canada, and New Orleans to Upper Louisiana (la Haute-Louisiane) or what was often called Illinois Country, an area which consisted of the present-day states of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana.² Initially settling on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the first half of the eighteen century, the French slowly began to expand their settlement to the west bank of the Mississippi River as the population grew.³

The growth of French settlements in Upper Louisiana was largely made possible by the expansion of the fur trade. French colonists’ success in the fur trade was tied to their unique relationships with the Indigenous peoples of the area, which allowed fur traders to expand their trade networks far into the American interior. Once dismissed by American historian Fredrick Jackson Turner as insignificant to American westward expansion, more recently scholars have recognized French fur traders and trappers as integral to non-Indigenous settlement in Middle America.⁴ The French established trading posts such as St. Louis, Kawsmouth, and St. Joseph in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which grew into thriving urban areas in later years.

In addition to the fur trade, French colonists established farms, aided in the spread of the Catholic religion, and worked to extract valuable natural resources such as lead. French settlement was initially concentrated on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River in communities such as Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, and Prairie du Rocher, in what is now the state of Illinois. During the early years of settlement, residents chose to live near military forts or trading depots for protection and their agricultural lands fanned out in long strips from these centralized settlements. French settlers raised livestock and grew grain products both for subsistence and sale to growing markets in Lower Louisiana. French settlements in Upper Louisiana were vital to the survival of the French Louisiana territory as a whole as it depended on agriculture to feed its growing population. The French also increased their involvement in the fur trade with Indigenous nations and searched for mineral resources to exploit. French settlers eventually expanded their operation west of the Mississippi River into what is now the state of Missouri. Founded in the 1730s, Ste. Genevieve was an example of such a settlement, becoming the first permanent French community west of the Mississippi River.⁵ Ste. Genevieve’s growth is attributed to settlers’ desire to move closer to the agricultural fields they established west of the river and to the lead mines they had established near current-day Potosi, Missouri.⁶

The French colonists in Upper Louisiana — and the enslaved people whose labor they exploited — made significant economic contributions to France’s colonial empire through agricultural production, lead extraction, and access to the lucrative fur trade business. Yet, France did not value Louisiana, particularly its northern reaches, as much as its sugar colonies in the West Indies. During the Seven Years War, France covertly offered French Louisiana, including the port of New Orleans, to Spain in payment for their military aid in the war against Great Britain.  The Treaty of Paris in 1763 resulted in the French ceding their territory east of the Mississippi River to the British in acknowledgement of their defeat. Spanish rule went into effect the following year west of the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Many French settlers vacated their lands in Illinois Country in what was now the British controlled territory east of the Mississippi for Spanish lands west of the river. French settlers thought their prospects would be better under Spanish control due to their shared Catholic faith and a belief they would better protect their rights and claims to the land.  French settlers’ reasoning proved sound. Although the Spanish colonial government officially ruled Louisiana for the next 40 years, there was never a large migration of Spanish settlers to the colony. The Spanish administrative structure was light handed and French colonists and cultural practices continued to dominate the colony.

During the colonial era, French settlements were home to a diverse population of both new and long-established residents — French, French Canadian, Indigenous, and African, who engaged in farming, trapping, and mining.⁷ The French sought to create a cohesive community among these diverse peoples through such mechanisms as a shared language, the practice of Catholicism, and the fur trade. During the eighteenth century, Indigenous Americans were the dominant group in Illinois Country. In response to their minority population, French settlers purposely cultivated business and governing alliances through trade relations and intermarriage with Indigenous peoples in the region. These often-reciprocal business and family connections promoted the expansion of French economic and political interests. One such example was the Chouteau family whose reciprocal relationship with the Osage allowed them to dominate the fur trade in the region and establish St. Louis as the primary trading outpost for the venture.⁸

French settlements were structured by a social hierarchy; at the top were Catholic missionaries, military officers, and wealthy traders. Conversely, enslaved people of African or Indigenous descent occupied the bottom tier of the social hierarchy. Soldiers, boatmen, hunters, trappers, and farmers occupied the middle ground between the two groups at either end of the social spectrum.⁹ A person’s place within the social structure was not always dictated by wealth, however. For example, in Ste. Genevieve, while the wealthy still sat at the top of the social structure, less affluent French families that persisted for long periods and were considered respectable.¹⁰

Enslaved Indigenous and African peoples played a prominent role in the social and economic structures of Upper Louisiana. Jesuit missionaries were the largest enslavers of African peoples in Illinois Country in the early eighteenth century,¹¹ but by the latter half of the eighteenth century, the trader elites owned the majority of enslaved people, both Indigenous and African.¹² Even though the governor of Spanish Louisiana, Alejandro O’Reilly, officially outlawed Native American slavery in 1769, the edict was never enforced and the colonists continued to enslave various groups of First Nation people into the early nineteenth century.¹³ The importation of enslaved Africans increased dramatically over the eighteenth century as both the French and Spanish colonial regimes encouraged the use of enslaved people to increase agricultural and mining production in the region.¹⁴

However, under both French and Spanish law, enslaved people were theoretically given some legal protections. Under the revised French Code Noir of 1724, while still defining enslaved people as property, the enslaved were also viewed as human beings that deserved certain rights. The code specified that enslavers needed to adequately provide for enslaved people’s religious, food, and clothing needs, while also outlawing torture and family separation. These requirements were difficult to enforce; therefore, compliance was usually left up to the conscience of individual enslavers. Although the law was not always followed in colonial Louisiana, according to the revision of the Code Noir by the Spanish in 1777, white people were not permitted to intermarry or engage in sexual relationships with enslaved men and women. As was the case in slavery systems, white enslavers frequently sexually exploited enslaved people, although there were a few interracial relationships that were long lasting and occasionally resulted in the freedom of enslaved individuals. Laws regarding manumission were more generous under the Code Noir. Some enslaved people were able to buy their own freedom, and, on some occasions, enslavers granted people their freedom. Emancipation was at the discretion of individual enslavers, however, as there were no fixed rules for the process. Overall, while the various “protections” for enslaved people were written into the law, there was no guarantee of enforcement of those protections.¹⁵

The law and custom allowed white women to enjoyed certain rights and some agency in determining their own lives in Upper Louisiana. In the eighteenth century, white men outnumbered white women by a significant degree in Ste. Genevieve and other French communities. French colonial women often married men over ten years their senior, resulting in significant age gaps between the parties. Because of this age disparity, women were more likely to be widowed and to remarry. Over time, some women accrued property and influence. Prenuptial contracts protected French women’s financial interests when they married.  Women often brought property into their marriages due to a douaire (dowery) or inheritance. Indeed, it was customary for French children to inherit their parents’ estates equally regardless of gender. Women could use these claims to financial assets as a means by which to protect property from their husbands’ debts and insolvency. At their husbands’ deaths, widows received the dower portion stipulated in the marriage contract as well as half of the couples’ joint property with the remainder divided among their children. Women without children were entitled to the entire estate. Widows frequently carried this property into subsequent marriages. Through these financial protections, French colonial women were able to maintain and manage their own property, which resulted in their ability to wield influence in their communities.¹⁶

French colonial women also demonstrated some agency within their marriages. French colonial men rarely worked in a single profession, instead they diversified their economic activities to guarantee their continued success in an ever-changing region. Their husbands were frequently absent from their families and households, no matter their economic situation. Wealthy men traveled for trade, diplomacy, and simply a desire to travel, while less wealthy men worked as soldiers, hunters, and boatmen. In their place, French wives acted as deputy husbands, given the power to act to protect business and family interests.¹⁷

The scarcity of white women in the colony encouraged white men to form sexual attachments with Black and Indigenous women. While many of these relationships were not consensual and were instead the result of an imbalanced power dynamics and even violence, there were some cases in which white men and Black or Indigenous women engaged in what might be described as common law marriages. Both parties understood the social and economic benefits of these partnerships. It was common for French men to forge economic and diplomatic relations with Indigenous people through marriages to Indigenous women. They also appreciated women’s domestic labor and fur processing skills. Some French men lived openly with their wives and children in French settlements, while other resided with their families upriver in the hunting grounds.  It also was not usual for French men to have both French and Indigenous wives and families.¹⁸

While most women of African descent during the colonial period, were impoverished and enslaved, in St. Louis there were cases of free Black women who owned property. In comparison to the British, the French and the Spanish had a more fluid understanding of race and were more tolerant of interracial relationships, especially in communities with uneven gender ratios. In some cases, French men even manumitted enslaved women with whom they shared long term relationships. A few Black women gained financial assets when their white partners put property in their names to legally protect it from the men’s creditors. Later, the women laid claim to the property when the relationships ended through voluntary separation or death. Eager to strengthen its presence in Upper Louisiana, the Spanish government was willing to grant land to petitioners, no matter their sex or race, also allowed some free Black women to acquire property. These exceptional women were part of a growing free Black community in St. Louis.¹⁹

Although the French lived in the region for over a century, these diverse colonial communities remained sparsely populated. In fact, there had been such limited migration to the region that the Spanish leaders of the colony started to recruit American settlers, including Daniel Boone and his family, to move to Upper Louisiana with promises of generous land grants, no taxes, and protections for slavery. After assuming power in 1800, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte worked to restore France’s claims in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and North America.  He was able to successfully negotiate with the Spanish in secret for the return of Louisiana through the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1802. Yet, French troops were unsuccessful in their attempts to regain control of Saint-Domingue from the free Black and formerly enslaved revolutionaries who had fought to liberate the colony from French rule beginning with an uprising in 1791. Napoleon ultimately decided to cut his losses and agreed to sell all of Louisiana to the United States for $15 million. The U.S. was initially interested in only purchasing the port of New Orleans but recognized the value of acquiring claims to the vast territory offered them. Through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the United States laid claim to the territory that soon after became the state of Missouri. In the following years, many of Missouri’s flourishing urban areas, such as St. Louis, Kansas City, and St. Joseph, were built on the foundations of the remarkable early French communities. The state’s French roots remain visible to this day though place names and historic artifacts left by these early Missouri settlers.²⁰

When forging trails and roads, humans and other animals typically take the path of least resistance. Early Missourians used the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and their tributaries to traverse the state, but in order to travel through what we now know as the Ozarks, the trails that became the Old Wire Road were almost the only option. The original route was created by Indigenous Americans, predominately the Osage, who followed trails created by large game, along what is now known as the Ozarks Plateau. The first non-Indigenous people, such as Spanish explorers, French traders and trappers, and European American settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee, used these same trails to enter the Ozarks region. The trails also allowed these newcomers to extract and exploit the area’s many natural resources.¹

The trails were not entirely stable and were not always easy for travelers. Flooding and other natural events often forced changes in the route and travelers on foot encountered rugged terrain. Often, people who traveled the route had to cross multiple waterways along their way. Those on horseback had an easier time as they could move faster and were able to cross streams and rivers much more easily, although a trip along the trail was still quite arduous. The emergence of wagon use in Missouri necessitated the construction of better and more stable roads and the needs of the large vehicles often required taking a slightly different course than the original trails. The state government finally consolidated multiple trails into an official road in 1836, part of which is now the Old Wire Road.

The Old Wire Road also played a part in the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral lands in 1838. The Cherokee people were originally located in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and eastern Tennessee, but the United States government forced them to leave their homes and move to “Indian Territory” (present day Oklahoma). The Cherokee people were forced westward along a route now known as the “Trail of Tears.” The Cherokee entered Missouri near Cape Girardeau and traveled overland through Farmington and Potosi, eventually meeting up with The Old Wire Road in Rolla. Headed by federal guides called “conductors,” the Cherokee traveled roughly ten to fifteen miles each day on foot, in often brutal winter conditions. At least one fourth of the Cherokee Nation died as a result of this forced migration.²

In 1857, John Butterfield’s Overland Mail Company was awarded a federal contract to provide transportation of the mail from St. Louis, Missouri to San Francisco, California. The route that Butterfield developed and operated covered over 2,700 miles and used stagecoaches to move both mail and passengers starting in 1858 and ending in 1861, at the start of the Civil War.³ The Missouri portion of the route began in St. Louis, traveled west to Tipton, Missouri, by railroad, by road south to Springfield and Fort Smith, Arkansas, and then west to California. When the first telegraph line in Missouri was built in 1859, it utilized the same route. The road soon became known locally as the Old Wire Road because of the telegraph wires that were strung parallel to it.⁴

In 1859, construction began on the Central Division of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. In order to take advantage of the natural resources of iron, lead, and oak, the railroad followed the corridor of the Wire Road from St. Louis to Springfield. By 1860, the railroad had reached Rolla, Missouri, and when the Civil War began in 1861, Rolla became a major supply depot for the Union Army; as people and supplies moved between St. Louis and Rolla via the railroad. The Union army installed a new telegraph line, paralleling the railroad tracks from St. Louis to Fort Smith. Travel from Rolla to Springfield continued by foot and wagon for another 12 years due to disruption in construction of the rail line as a result of the war.

During the war, the Old Wire Road was crucial to Union communication, troops, and supply routes between Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis and Fort Smith in Arkansas. Several pivotal battles were fought along the Wire Road, including Wilson’s Creek near Springfield in 1861, the Battle of Pea Ridge and the Battle of Prairie Grove in Northwest Arkansas in 1862, and the Battle of Springfield in 1863. In the aftermath of each battle, the sick and wounded were transported up the Wire Road to the General Hospitals in Springfield and St. Louis.⁵

Over time, the Old Wire Road has been called by many names – The Great Osage Trail, The St. Louis/ Springfield/ Fayetteville Road, Highway 14, and Route 66. The road’s most iconic moniker is the Old Wire Road, due to the telegraph lines that followed along it. In the nineteenth century, the telegraph was as innovative as the internet is today. It allowed for quicker communication for news, business, personal messages, and train arrival times. The route is still often referred to locally as the Old Wire Road, even though today I-44 is the U.S. Department of Transportation’s official name for it on the map.⁶ Although the interstate does not take the exact route of the Old Wire Road, the highway continues to follow the railroad line from St. Louis to Springfield, connecting towns along the way and playing an important role in Missouri’s history.

Long before Route 66 was conceptualized, transportation changes in the early 20^th century prompted local and national interest in creating a public road network. In 1911, over 16,000 cars were registered in Missouri. That number climbed to 150,000 in 1917, as a growing number of Missourians could afford to purchase automobiles.¹ This new population of car-owners created a demand for a navigable, well-maintained public road system to replace existing unpaved and inadequate roads. Missouri voters approved a $60 million bond issue to improve road conditions in 1920.² A year later, the federal government, which shared an interest in improving roads, introduced the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1921 with the intention to create a cohesive highway network that connected rural and urban communities.³ Together, these state and national efforts paved the way for the creation of Route 66.

Route 66 also grew out of the shared interests of Springfield Attorney John Woodruff and Oklahoma Highway Department Chairman Cyrus Avery. Although only Avery is remembered as the “Father of Route 66,” both men were extremely influential in planning and promoting the motorway; Avery was also prominent in naming Route 66. Woodruff and Avery advocated for Route 66’s diagonal Chicago to Los Angeles route believing it would divert traffic from Kansas City to Missouri’s rural towns.⁴ Their proposed route would pass through the state, crossing St. Louis before heading southwest through Cuba, Rolla, Lebanon, Springfield, Carthage, and Joplin. After years of unsuccessful lobbying, Route 66 was finally approved to travel their route by the Secretary of Agriculture on November 11, 1926.⁵ The following year, Avery pushed for the creation of the US Highway 66 Association to promote and pave the road. Woodruff became the organization’s first president and Avery its vice president.⁶ Although Route 66 would not be entirely paved until 1938, Avery and Woodruff’s efforts paid off in 1931 when the Missouri stretch was completed.⁷

The promotion and improvement of the highway in the late 1920s caught the attention of the trucking industry, in its infancy, quickly recognized Route 66’s promise as a shipping way. Unlike highways in the Northern United States, the diagonal, all-season route traversed flatlands through temperate climates.⁸ It also crossed rural and previously isolated regions, like Southwest Missouri, enabling farmers to ship their grains and produce by truck.⁹ These conditions made Route 66 an ideal choice for transporting freight from the Midwest, and by 1930 the trucking industry rivaled the railroad in terms of shipping.¹⁰ The need for roadside amenities along Route 66 resulted in the proliferation of small businesses along the road, particularly in Missouri.¹¹ The increased demand for roadside services along Route 66 throughout the 1930s continued to feed the growth of Missouri’s small towns and businesses, despite devastating economic and environmental crises. Although trucking declined because of the economic downturn during the Great Depression, Route 66 saw increased traffic from laborers, farmers, and working families desperate to find economic opportunities in California and the West. Many of these travelers were also fleeing the Dust Bowl, a destructive environmental disaster that caused drought and soil erosion across the Great Plains, including parts of western Missouri. By the end of the 1930s, an estimated 400,000 people had traveled west on Route 66.¹² This unprecedented movement westward led to a boom in many of Missouri’s towns and mom-and-pop businesses along Route 66.

Although civilian travel on the road declined during World War II, Route 66 continued to bolster Missouri’s roadside economies as it served as a major military transportation corridor. From 1939 to 1945, the highway provided an avenue for moving materials and personnel from centralized production locations and military bases in the Midwest and West to coastal staging points.¹³ As military families and people seeking employment in western defense plants traveled the highway, new businesses emerged and existing service stations, restaurants, and motor courts reaped the financial benefits of long-term and repeat visitors. Motor courts or “tourists courts” emerged in the 1930s and 40’s as a “classier alternative to dingy cabin camps. Unlike downtown hotels, courts were designed to be automobile friendly. You could park next to your individual room or under a carport.”¹⁴ One collection of roadside businesses just north of the newly constructed Fort Leonard Wood were so successful that they eventually grew into a town called St. Robert.¹⁵

After World War II, Route 66 experienced a “golden age” as Americans gained unprecedented wealth and enjoyed increased leisure time. These conditions led to a rise in the number of families who could afford to purchase a car and take vacations. The preceding decades of travel along Route 66 had created infrastructure in small towns to support travelers. As a result, the road quickly became the popular choice for the “Great American road trip.” The increase in travel sparked another, much larger, boom in Missouri’s businesses along the route. One popular motor court, the Coral Court in St. Louis, was founded in 1941 with twenty-one rooms. The number of rooms grew to 66 by 1946.¹⁶ The increased demand for roadside amenities also drove innovation in the restaurant industry and led to the creation of the first drive-up restaurant. Fittingly located in the birthplace of Route 66, Red’s Giant Hamburg in Springfield drew travelers off the highway for a bite to eat.¹⁷

Taking a road trip on Route 66 involved extra considerations for Black Americans looking to take part in America’s new favorite pastime. Although white Americans found countless travelers’ courts and roadside attractions along Route 66, Black tourists faced the challenges of navigating segregation and sundown towns as they traversed the road west. This was especially true in Southwest Missouri, where several sundown towns¹⁸ and unwelcoming businesses dotted the route.¹⁹ Sundown Towns are historically all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that exclude Black and other historically marginalized people “through the use of discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence.”²⁰ The name derives from the posted and verbal warnings issued to Black people that they may be allowed to work or travel in a community during the daytime, but were instructed to leave by sundown, or face the prospect of violence.²¹ African American travelers relied on tools such as The Negro Motorist Green-Book and a similar Southwest-Missouri pamphlet to help them locate the few Black-owned and welcoming businesses along Route 66 in the state.²² One Springfield business, Alberta’s, was listed in the Green Book almost every year from 1954 to 1967 and provided travelers a safe place to stay, eat, and shop. Similar businesses included Williams Hotel in Joplin and Austin House in Columbia, among others.²³

Ironically, the success and popularity of Route 66 occurred at the same time as its demise. Dwight Eisenhower had observed the importance of an efficient road system to national defense as a general in World War II. Taking inspiration from Germany’s system of high-speed autobahns, President Eisenhower pushed for a highway system that connected major cities via direct routes. Congress approved the Federal Highway Aid Act in 1956, jump-starting the modern Interstate Highway System. That same year, on August 2, Missouri became the first state to award a contract under the new highway law, and the first interstate construction began in St. Charles, Missouri, on I-70 at Missouri Route 94.²⁴ Nearly 20 years later, Route 66 was almost completely bypassed in Missouri by I-44, and by 1985 the road was officially decommissioned in the state.²⁵ The decline in travel and decommissioning of Route 66 increasingly led to the demise of many roadside towns and businesses. Red’s Giant Hamburg closed in 1984 and the Coral Court ended operations in 1993.²⁶

In the wake of the highway’s decommissioning, the Missouri Route 66 Association was formed in 1990, with an intention to “preserve, promote, and develop old Route 66.”²⁷ At the time, Missourians recognized the importance of preserving the ideas and themes that Americans associated with the route. In popular culture, Route 66 was memorialized in an American Adventure crime drama television series that ran from 1960-1964, called Route 66; it starred Martin Milner and George Maharis. Route 66 had become more than a major route West. The highway was a symbol of freedom to Americans; the freedom to travel, explore, try new things, and seek a better life. As Bobby Troup’s song about the famous highway suggests, “Get your kicks on Route 66. It winds from Chicago to L.A. 2,000 miles all the way.”²⁸ Today, Route 66 lives on as the old “Mother Road” from Missouri to the great west, providing travelers a glimpse back in time to a lost era.

“Western steamboats from the beginning were common carriers in the service of the general shipping and traveling public,” wrote historian Louis Hunter.¹ The waterways were busy highways and steamboats were the freight trucks, operating as the US Post Office, UPS, and Federal Express does today. Over the years, government and private companies have worked together to improve infrastructure and modes of transportation in an effort to facilitate people’s mobility and increase commerce. Hence, similar to our consumer needs for modern-day freight lines, innovations in steamboats occurred because it was critical to successfully ship tons of merchandise and tens and thousands people to the West in the fastest and less expensive way possible.

The first steamboats navigated the Mississippi Valley region around 1811 and the stakeholders were fur traders and the US military. The interests of these two parties were intertwined, and both took advantage of the steamboats’ ability to move both up and down rivers for moving troops, provisions, and merchandise for forts and trade purposes. The American Fur Company used steamboats to transport western furs to market.² The U.S. military’s Indian agents, one of whom was Robert Campbell a fur trader and commission merchant from St. Louis, also contracted steamboat firms for transporting goods to fulfill treaty agreements with Indigenous groups for land use or purchase.³ By the 1850s, the population of Missouri had grown as settlers had moved to the state in the preceding decades to take advantage of low cost land and economic opportunities. The demand for steamboat shipping was at its peak in the years before the Civil War. Missouri residents relied on steamboats for transportation and to ship agricultural products to market as well as to gain access to consumer goods from the East and Europe. As with all expansion, government land was offered from east to west. Business increased yet again as the land west of Missouri was opened open for settlement by the Kansas and Nebraska Act in 1854. The U.S. government promoted urban growth in the West by establishing a new shipping route from eastern manufactures to Pittsburgh and then down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi to St. Louis wholesalers. These middlemen sent merchandise to the commission merchants in Missouri and Mississippi river towns, where it was forwarded further inland to the rural country merchants.⁴  

Steamboat firms were ready to risk the loss of their boat for the high profits gained from shipping freight and passenger travel on the Mississippi and Missouri River, but first some stumbling blocks had to be remedied or at least lessened. The steamboat industry worked to overcome structure modifications and natural hazards on the river, sometimes pressing the government to aid them in promoting safer riverboat travel. Steamboats had some design flaws and could be death traps and the rivers themselves included hazards that could sink a boat. In 1840s, books and newspapers generated public attention to the dangers of steamboat travel and this led to regulations to protect live passengers and the establishment of the Steamboat Inspection Service.⁵ Boats typically were brought down by two of the greatest threats to steamboat travel: snags and explosions.

There were few details about the loss of the Steamboat Bedford. The boat “struck a snag and sank in five minutes,” possibly on a dead tree at the bottom of the river. “It is unknown how many drowned while traveling south on the Missouri River on April 27, 1840. However, the only one worthy of being named was Mr. Moore who was a revolutionary soldier. It was noted that “All passengers lost their baggage.” The Steamboat Arabia also hit a snag on the Missouri River near Parkville, Missouri, on September 5, 1856. It was heavy with 200 tons of cargo destined for communities in the newly opened Kansas and Nebraska territories. The passengers had time to safely disembark but the cargo and a mule sunk to the bottom of the Missouri River.⁶

Snags a leading cause for a steamboat loss. This led to the innovation of snag boats⁷ that removed debris from the riverbed, but this was an ongoing and frustrating task and there was frequently political conflict over the federal government’s role in paying for “internal improvements.”⁸ Unlike the ocean ships with a deep hull for a cargo deck below, western steamboat’s key innovation was a flat hull, often called a flat bottom, which eliminated a deep hull for freight and allowed safer travel. By the end of the decade and into the 1850s, steamboats were improved to ply in shallow rivers, many boasted in water only two feet deep. The inland rivers rose and dropped based on rain and mountain snow melts, which made safe traveling geographically unpredictable. It was generally thought that the season of navigation for the Missouri River commenced with the May rise and possibly through September when the rivers were often less than two feet deep. With such a small window of time, each summer many boats heavy with St. Louis freight travelled to the western border of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska Territory, and Iowa along the Missouri River. The Mississippi also had the same dilemma, but its travel season was far longer so that made St. Louis a perfect place for a wholesaler market.

As seen by the next steamboat accident, explosions were the greatest threat for steamboats. Most incidents were caused by problems with the engine works. The engine had a boiler that was fueled by either wood or coal. To prevent an explosion the boiler had a second cavity wrapped around it that kept the boiler cool by pumping a continuous flow of water from the river. The devise was called a doctor and when these were clogged by the muddy water, an explosion could occur. This problem gave rise to a new government agency called the Steamboat Inspection Service that opened an office in St. Louis in 1853. They enrolled steamboats and inspected the hull, engine, and pilots according to the new regulations to protect human passengers.

From 1826 to 1848, the western rivers had 171 explosions and 1,381 deaths compared to the Ohio Valley that had only 42 explosions and 491 deaths.⁹ Many chemists sought to produce stronger metal that could withstand pressure and this saved many lives.  Another type of accident with the boiler was caused by human error as seen by this story of the explosion on the steamer Belle, in which two hundred passengers survived. The incident occurred while traveling to St. Louis, when the boat stopped to pick up fuel for the boiler at a woodyard a mile above Liberty, Illinois. A fire started, which may have been due to the captain’s decision to increase the pressure on the boiler to blow out excessive cinders from the stacks. This ignited the gun powder stored on the boat, completely blowing up the vessel and all its valuable cargo. “It is doubtful whether an individual would have escaped, had not the boat lay close by the shore, thereby enabling the passengers to leave previous to the explosion.”¹⁰ The chances of an explosion were highest when coming to dock. From these incidents and witness testimony, regulations banded transporting gun powder, but very likely this rule was ignored. 

In another gruesome explosion, possibly due to a similar action as described above, twelve deck passengers and four crew member were killed. This explosion occurred on the steamboat Dubuque’s trip from St. Louis to Galena on August 15, 1837. The starboard side flue (stack) collapsed on twenty-three passengers as a resulted of the explosion . It was described that “the force of the explosion literally cleared it of freight, and everything which stood in its way. The deck passengers and several of the hands were dreadfully scalded. Many of them, in their agony, fled to the shore, stripped, themselves of their clothes, taking off with them much of their skin. It was several hours before any of them died.” The report made sure to state that the wealthier cabin passengers “escaped with little or no injury,” while passengers from the lowest social class died.¹¹

In spite of the dangers, steamboat travel and transport continued into the late 19th century when it was overtaken by railroads and was made obsolete by the invention of cars and airplanes. Today, paddlewheel steamboats are relicts of the past and only ply the waters of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers to transport tourists or entertain casino gamblers. Even so, the rivers still serve as important avenues for commerce. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have heavily invested in flood control and river dredging operations to protect the people who live along the rivers’ shores and to keep the rivers open for commercial barges that still transport products to market.