Old Pavement
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Day 3: October 4, 2024 Old Pavement Comment via blog |
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I anticipated a rain filled day and it was pretty wet at the beginning but
I left the rain behind me in surprisingly short time.
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I stayed completely dry while walking in Winchester, IL. , in the dry. The
current Scott County courthouse was built in 1885. A
plaque in the park diagonally across the street from the courthouse
indicates that this was where the courthouse stood when Lincoln and
Douglas debated in its courtroom.
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This is the Pike County courthouse in Pittsfield, IL. The three busts were
placed here in 2018 to honor an author, a lawyer, and an editor.
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About a dozen miles west of Pittsfield, there is a bypass bit of old
pavement on the south side of the active road. The lane of gravel going
down to it makes me think driving it might be possible but I played it
safe and just walked down. I took one picture to the west, another to the
east, and one of a quarter in case anyone is
reading who can estimate the age of concrete by the size of gravel in it.
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You will now be treated to two panels of misguided adventure. I had points
recorded in my GPS that looked like they might mark the end points of a
bridge across the Mississippi at Hannibal, MO. I couldn't quite reach the
marked point on the east bank but I tried. Whatever road had been there
had been pretty much obliterated at the railroad tracks. I returned to
US-36 and crossed the river in the company of I-72.
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More adventure was waiting on the west bank. The point I had marked on
was about 3/4 of a mile north of downtown Hannibal. I headed up the narrow
road an passed a couple of building along the way. I also passed some
well intended warning signs. The GPS was not wrong however. It was the
driver. The "NO TURN AROUND" sign was pretty much correct although I
probably could have managed if that pickup truck hadn't been parked there.
At the end of the day, it became rather apparent that my marked points
belonged to the existing railroad bridge and not to an early auto bridge.
So none of the pictures in this and the previous panel have anything at
all to do with the PPOO but after driving a quarter mile in reverse on a
skinny riverside road, there's no way I'm not going to use them
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Back in Hannibal proper, I snapped a picture of that iconic Tom and Huck
statue then took in my first brewery of the trip,
Friendship
Brewing Company, right across the street.
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I have taken in some of the Mark Twain sites in the past so did not spend
time on them today but did grab a picture of a white picket fence. The
spinning mug was familiar to me. I once spent a night in the motel across
the street where I could watch it spin from my window. But I'd never been
inside so remedied that today.
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Passing through Hunnewell, MO, I got to drive some original width PPOO.
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There was one aspect of driving two-lanes through the midwest on a Friday
afternoon in October that I had not considered. Shelbina, MO, was the
second of three towns that I could not drive through because of big high
school homecoming parades.
When I drove US-36 in 2011, this station in Clarence, MO, was a real museum. I wonder where all the cars and petrobilia are today. West of Bevier, I got another reminder of how the road might have once looked, and Chillicothe provided a reminder of what was first sold there on July 6, 1928. I paused a moment to reflect on the fact that when named auto trails like the PPOO, NOTR, LH, and JH were at their peak, the brave folks traveling on them were constantly dealing with unsliced bread. |
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There is a nice four mile stretch of Old Highway 36/PPOO just a couple of
miles south of Chillicothe.
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