Before you loosen the chin strap on your learning helmet, recall that Arkansas' hesitant membership in the losing side of the War of Northern Aggression earned it no favors. The economic setbacks tendered in the nineteenth century are even visible in the Old Wire Road itself, where it trades gravel for blacktop at the state line. This field trip down Missouri DD begins with a thwump as the original 'bahn leaves the South for now-paved Union territory.
Guess where Arkansas ends and Missouri begins. No cheating.
A marker for a Civil War skirmish at Potts Hill is the only ceremony offered at the border, but something about the tidy pavement's edge takes on additional fascination. Here is a Mile Marker Zero, a place where old ventures end and a fresh batch of asphalt invites new exploits. A clean break.
Like the most angular sections of Ozarkbahn favorite Arkansas 123, Missouri DD looks and drives less like a modern highway and more like the unpaved path on which it was based. The asphalt tenuously clings to the often narrow creek bank at the base of Lennox Mountain, leaving little margin for error. While the DD-grade curves are entertaining and scenic, there are no guardrails to lift and separate the overeager from unintended motorboating.
Rustic storage at roadside.
The road follows a unique and simple Missouri naming convention. Like cords on a banjo, the more letters you pluck, the more twang you'll get. Major highways are numbered, intermediates receive a single letter, and the backroads take two letters. The Alphabetical highways were a mid-century state project to bring the all-American joy of paved driving within a few miles of nearly every person, place, and thing in the Show Me State. Most of these lettered roads are short jaunts into lightly traveled terrain, creating often engaging fractals of asphalt throughout the Ozarks. Names were frequently recycled from county to county with no spatial relationship, so you'll encounter DD's all over Missouri.
[Highway DD in Barry County, MO, on Google Maps]
Our MO-DD started as a farm-to-market road, which means the local trade remains quaint and unassuming small-scale agriculture. Still, the inbr...err, innate Ozark character glows intensely. MO-DD features the finest feat of postal engineering in America, a mailbox magnifique combining the most expert hillbilly building techniques: collecting junk and stacking junk.
Rejecting art's traditional aesthetic, this mailbox masterpiece channels Marcel Duchamps with materials likely re-purposed from a local ravine.
While the above route in is not a lengthy drive, it is rich in context, linking the Old Wire Road with the excellent Missouri Highway 112 and Roaring River State Park, seen previously. This section of MO-DD terminates in Seligman, a town with history as a trading post dating back to the times of earliest American settlement in the Ozarks. As the Rootsweb Focus on Seligman web page shows, Seligman grew swiftly with the introduction of a railroad line after the Civil War. Today the formerly bustling downtown is bypassed by the latest alignment of the Old Wire Road, Highway 37, and now sits largely disused. Still, a few roadside gems remain. One is the former Linden Motel, A turn-of-the-century construction that was moved down the street from its original location in the 1920s (yeah, wow), then given the native stone exterior that still stands today.
Compare to the original photo from Focus on Seligman. Same building.
Missouri Highway DD: short, curvy, and full of personality. You could do worse.
Traffic: doesn't really register
Driving challenge: mind the crick and roadside art
Purty mouth: yours is looking real good-like
Ozarkbahn rating: were you expecting a "DD" to be anything less?
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