Driven: Missouri 90

As the Ozarkbahn speeds closer to its second anniversary, we're striking back at the center of this little world. Down past the leafy crust, through the layers of affable history and backwoods irony, all the way to the molten asphalt core. We need the joy of sawing blacktop spirals across middle-America's oasis of steeps and green. Eyes up, brakes hot, knuckles white.


Just the basics.

The here and now demands a drive on par with the raw theater of Arkansas 123, the darty tourist folds of US 62 near Eureka Springs, or the remote thrills of any number of rural twists across the Ozark Plateau. There are miles of greats out there, but one standout escapes notoriety among many locals. Though hilly and reliably scenic, the highway in this edition lacks a single towering peak, breathtaking overlook, or other postcard reprieve. So, what does it have going for it? It's only my favorite road in the Ozarks.

[Google Maps: Missouri 90 from Noel to Washburn]

Missouri 90 holds the core of what makes spirited driving lively and gratifying. It's a repeatably stirring drive with the elusive quality of flow, an engaging lineup of dips and turns that feed on the dynamism of momentum. Contrast this with so many grizzled Ozark highways that are abrupt, point-to-point jaunts between grades with a stop-and-go flavor. Gearheads readily laud the pomp and circumstance of a disjointed route peppered with sharp curves, but flow is substance. For most of its length, MO-90 loads and unloads a car's chassis with the fluidity of a racecar driver's most admired road course.


Pitching and rolling along the twists of Missouri 90.

Missouri 90's essential alchemy is that the route wasn't carved into the landscape, but draped over it. The asphalt rises and falls with the rolling Ozark hills, allowing the terrain's character to shine. According to Wikipedia, MO-90 was born among the early state-funded road works of the pre-war era, visible in its non-existent shoulders and well-cambered curves. The highway was never a major carrying route like nearby US 71, so it escaped the sanitizing effect of rock cuts, detours, widening, flattening and other dull modernization. It still slides under jutting rock faces at Noel, crosses a one-lane bridge East of Jane, and regularly crests blind hills into sharp turns.


Our drive's Western end by the bluffs overlooking the Elk River at Noel (pronounced NAHWL, for the non-Ozarkians).

Despite being somewhat old-fashioned in design, the current state of the road gives drivers generally smooth pavement and good markings. The result is something quick, nervy, and indulgent at full tilt, yet energizing and assuring at a moderated pace.


A one-lane bridge East of Jane suggests a slower way of life, but peaks and curves invite a quicker pace.

Slowpokes are the scourge of any fun road with limited passing opportunities, so MO-90's relatively light traffic is another element of its appeal. The highway doesn't connect any major population centers, and a lone general store at the intersection of MO-E is the only convenience between Noel and the terminus at Washburn. Most of the road's neighbors are small hilltop farms. Though pleasant days risk entanglement with slow-moving cruisers and other dawdlers, there's a fair chance of stealing some uninterrupted joy.


A decorated Phillips cottage-style gas station in Noel is among several roadside reminders of yore.

I should caution that my "favorite road" shouldn't necessarily mean your favorite. If the Ozarkbahn has any motive, it's simply to encourage motorkind to get out and explore the beauty and novelty of the seldom-traveled. Driving is a personal act. I have the opportunity to drive this highway dozens of times each year, which has earned it a sense of familiarity and a freedom to pursue at a stirring tempo. Everyone has license to discover their own blacktop provenance. However, if you need inspiration, Missouri 90 is my favorite place to start.



Traffic: mercifully cooperative
Driving challenge: enjoyable, but mind the far side of the hill
Purty mouth: it's a long walk to the nearest fillin' station
Ozarkbahn rating: "blacktop provenance." I like that. Let's go with that.

Driven: Missouri DD

The Old Wire Road Project was quite a detour. An ambling hop down a quiet nowhere road revealed an unexpectedly rich Ozark narrative, charting a flourish from dusty wagon trail to unlikely pivot of American commerce. We could follow this track indefinitely, but the Ozarkbahn is an exercise in mobility. People to see, things to do. Time to hit the road.



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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Driven: the Old Wire Road

Until now, my model Ozarkbahn drive has been a blacktop whip-crack with tires and brakes wincing in protest. This second installment of the Old Wire Road Project takes a new direction. We're abandoning the roads less traveled, and turning down the most beaten path in the Ozarks.



The essential companion to this trip is the Driver's Guide to the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, Volume One: Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma by Kirby Sanders. It's a turn-by-turn, full-color vault of Old Wire information, charting the first half of John Butterfield's goliath stagecoach route. Check any Ozark historical society or museum to get your copy. I can vouch for it's value because I failed to discover it until after weeks of hazard and error. Stopping for directions defies the spirit of freewheeling discovery, but I'll recommend the book as a matter of local interest and historical completeness. It also contains directions, if you're the kind to admit using them.


Old Wire Road at the Missouri-Arkansas border

Of course, the 2,800-mile Butterfield Trail can't be covered in one sitting. Even the Old Wire Road's full Ozark trek is too wealthy in sights for one undertaking. Let's start at the Missouri border, and follow the road's most unique stretch through the most Northwest corner of Arkansas, Benton County. Heading South, it begins as Missouri 37 tracks the general bend of the original Old Wire Road from Springfield into the Ozark hills. A spur splits from Highway 37 and marks a telling divide at the Arkansas border. Can you tell which side won the Civil War? No consulting your Driver's Guide.


Pott's Hill battle marker and other sights along the Old Wire Road

Here the pavement ends and the old Confederacy begins. In February 1862, fast-marching Union forces chased Rebels raiders Benny Hill style towards Arkansas, finally catching them near Pott's Hill on the Arkansas border. A historical marker notes this valley along Old Wire Road was the Civil War's first engagement on Arkansas soil. The brief clash ended with each side drawing back to their respective sides of the border to regroup for the upcoming Battle of Pea Ridge. No sexy parties ensued.

[Skirmish at Pott's Hill at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture]

With the days of armed battled long expired, travel along this valley on an August evening makes a solid case for endless Summer. Slow ride, take it easy. A canopy of trees shadows the road, carrying us through rustic scenes that have changed little in 150 years.


Lazy Summer scenes

These few miles of graded dirt roads lead to the edge of Pea Ridge National Military Park, where a fence bars entry into a well-preserved mile of stagecoach-era Old Wire leading to Elkhorn Tavern (as previously introduced). From the tavern, a park tour road echoes the old trail out of the park and onto gravel roads towards Little Sugar Creek.


Little Sugar Creek park and bridge over the creek into Brightwater

In March 1862, the Union Army dug into bluffs along Little Sugar Creek hoping to repel a 16,000-soldier Confederate force marching up the Telegraph Road. In the cover of darkness, the crafty rebels opted to take the scenic route around this position and begin the Battle of Pea Ridge about a mile to the North. A pleasant little park at this site marks the Thing That Never Actually Got Around to Happening. However, drama did not elude the hamlet of Brightwater that sat on the opposite side of the creek. In 1947, a tornado completely erased the town from the map, killing four.

[Brightwater, AR, on Google Maps]


Avoca railroad bridge, town offices, and stone marker

When the Frisco Railroad laid tracks along Little Sugar Creek in the 1880s, the residents of Brightwater relocated their town site to a hill just to the South in order to receive a rail station. A concrete railroad arch over the still-unpaved road serves as a portal between the original site and its successor, now known as Avoca. Today the town of Avoca embraces its history with liberal dose of stagecoach imagery and an Arkansas-shaped stone marker listing history's designations of the Old Wire Road.


Old Rogers and the former Summit Motel, once the location of Callahan Station

Leaving Avoca, the road unceremoniously parallels the railroad tracks into an aged, workaday section of Rogers. A few blocks from a metal scrap yard, Old Wire meets the site of the Butterfield line's first official stage stop in Arkansas, Callahan Station. In his Driver's Guide, Kirby Sanders identifies the current building as the 1889-vintage Summit Hotel, an antique in its own right. By default, we can figure the original coach station burned down in the Civil War. Sharp-eyed readers have probably noticed everything in the Ozarks got burned down in the Civil War.


Old Rogers continues along Old Wire Road

From Callahan's Station, our byway passes the rather well-kept Rogers downtown, then snakes Southward through the hills above Lake Atalanta and the working-class neighborhoods that lead out of town. The pavement ends past the city limits, and the road once again dips into into the tangy glaze of history in a valley known as Cross Hollow.

[Cross Hollow on Google Maps]

To defend its hold on Arkansas, the Confederate Army established Camp Benjamin in Cross Hollow near current-day Monte Ne. The army maintained a sentry point on the high ground overlooking the Old Wire Road just to the East of the camp, an important outpost against Union traffic from the North.


Old Wire Road enters Cross Hollow

The camp barracks were erected under contract from sawmill entrepreneur Peter Van Winkle, who held the land that would become Hobbs State Park. No visible trace of Camp Benjamin remains, as it was burned down by the Union Army pressing the Confederates back towards the South.

[Article: Confederate Encampment at Cross Hollow from Arkansas Historical Quarterly]

Cross Hollow does have one slightly newer relic, a decaying rock post office built during a brief period prosperity in the valley. Around the turn of the century, a railroad spur was built to Coin Harvey's now-sunken Monte Ne resort, later serving the Rogers White Lime Works, a defunct kilning operation. Lime, baby!


Derelict Cross Hollow post office, and a scenic pond in the hollow

South of Cross Hollow, the Old Wire Road straightens and returns to pavement East of Lowell, and cruises past Bethel Heights on its way to Fitzgerald's Station just past the boundary of Benton County. This drive is short in miles, but long in history.


Heritage Trail markers

Drive it yourself, and you may notice signs marking a "Heritage Trail." This is the work of the Heritage Trail Partners, Inc., a group seeking promote Northwest Arkansas history and points of interest through recreational travel along the road. The group's ultimate aim is to add bike and pedestrian trails the length of the contemporary alignment in Western Arkansas, making the road an attraction in itself.

While not a driver's delight, Old Wire Road exhibits such a varied past that you may find yourself sharing in the enthusiasm.

Traffic: everything from no cars allowed (Pea Ridge walking section) to active Ozark artery
Driving challenge: leave the sports car at home
Purty mouth: let's just say some sections still don't get a lot of visitors
Ozarkbahn rating: histor-a-tacular