This picture is from my 2007 trip on Boone’s Lick Road. The picture is of some of the chairs lined up in front of Crane’s Country Store in Williamsburg, Missouri. The store is still there so the chairs might be too. I sure hope so. As I reviewed the original journal to make this post, I realized that a disheartening number of things mentioned in it are gone. It’s a realization that started with a bang in the first paragraph of the first day. The east end of Boone’s Lick Road was in St. Charles, MO, a little northwest of St. Louis. I had learned that Vandalia, IL, was a reasonable drive from home and a good starting point for doings in the St Louis area. I spent the first night of the trip in Vandalia at a place I was familiar with, Jay’s Inn. I say that in the first paragraph and mention the restaurant next door although I ate dinner that night downtown at The Depot. Jay’s restaurant would be closed in less than two years. Within three years The Depot would burn, reopen, burn again, and close permanently. Jay’s Inn is now shown as closed permanently.

It was Nathan Boone that was involved with the creation of Boone’s Lick Road but his more famous father, Daniel, eventually moved to Missouri and was buried near the road. The large bronze plaque at his grave which I photographed in May 2007 was stolen barely a year later. A black granite plaque has replaced it. The journal tells of eating my second dinner of the trip at Trailhead Brewery in St. Charles. It closed, I just now learned, in January 2020. Stein House in Boonville, which sported a really cool neon sign and where I had dinner on the third night, is listed on Yelp as permanently closed. With so many things mentioned in the journal closing or disappearing, finding the Crane’s Store website active was a real bright spot. The delightful Marlene Crane, who is pictured in the trip journal, died in 2015 at the age of 84 but the family business continues under son David. And Boone’s Lick Road can still be found along with its DAR markers.

The trip occurred during a period when I was regularly writing articles for American Road Magazine’s “Our National Road” department. It resulted in an article in the Spring 2008 issue. In writing this post, I revisited that article which triggered a couple of memories and a couple of smiles. Articles I submitted were naturally edited before publication but I was rarely consulted about changes or even aware of them before seeing them in print. I don’t recall exactly how I described the Corps of Discovery’s departure from St Charles aside from calling it “the last bit of civilization” they would see. Whatever I said was not, apparently, sufficiently energetic and it was changed to “galloped into the unknown”. The Corp had floated away from civilization on the Missouri River with not even a pony aboard their boats. I was kind of upset over what I considered an inappropriate change but I was also a bit amused by the image of Lewis and Clark galloping away in their pirogues. The second memory involved the last sentence of the article and the only “fan mail” I ever got through American Road. The preceding paragraph talked of the actual Boone’s Lick Road which had previously been described as initially traced by “eighty men on horseback”. Maybe that’s what was on the editors’ minds when they put in that “galloping” phrase. It was certainly what was on mine when I closed the article with “Calvary saddles, after all, didn’t have cup holders.” The “fan” correctly pointed out that mounted soldiers are called cavalry and that Calvary is the name of a spot near Jerusalem. It would have been cool if whoever tossed in galloping had noticed and fixed this instead.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.