Bloomfield man recalls early 114 project

By NOREEN HYSLOP

Managing Editor

When 95-year-old Loyd Snider of Bloomfield read in a recent article in The Daily Statesman the plight of the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) with regard to a stretch of Highway 114 through Dexter and Essex, he was prompted to give the paper a call.

It recently came to the attention of MoDOT officials locally that a portion of the highway is likely the oldest state-maintained concrete highway in the state of Missouri and may be one of about 10 concrete pavements in the country with as long a history of service still in relatively good condition.

MoDOT sent out a message to Daily Statesman readers asking for anyone with knowledge of Highway 114's beginnings to come forward. They were especially in need of the contractor's name who headed up the paving project that is believed to have been in 1924.

Within the original article published on Sept. 8, it was stated that one lane of the highway is believed to have been paved in 1924. Eight years passed, according to MoDOT officials, before the second lane was paved.

"That is absolutely, positively, not true," says Snider, who vividly recalls as a child when the highway was surfaced.

Snider, born in August 1918, lived with his parents on what was the Shirell Smith farm on Highway 114 in 1926. The road then served as Highway 60.

"I was eight years old and in the second grade," Snider recalls. "There was no school nearby where we lived earlier, and so I didn't start school till I was seven."

He remembers well when the gravel road in front of the Smith farm was paved.

"I was right at the age where I was pretty curious, so I watched them a lot," Snider says of the period around 1926.

"They came out of Dexter and they setup their headquarters right across the road from us," he recalls. "They had a three-mule team and a driver, and they came around with a big, long lever that they pulled down to get the road bed built. They'd load up the dirt and take it down the road and dump it."

Snider vividly recalls the image of concrete being mixed at the site of the roadway. The mixer, he said, came from Dexter.

"They mixed the concrete right there," he explains, "and they started with the south side of the roadway first."

Contrary to MoDOT's recent theory, Snider says there was only a span of about three or four days before the work crew paved the north side of the roadway.

"They waited a few days, but it sure wasn't a few years," he attests.

Snider remembers the horse and wagon traffic along the roadway, but also recalls the time when vehicle traffic became more prevalent than the wagons.

"Of course there wasn't the traffic like there is today," he smiles, "but it was a pretty well traveled road."

The roadway's paving, Snider says, didn't serve to change the lives of those who lived in the area at the time, other than traffic perhaps moving a bit quicker on the concrete than it had on its gravel predecessor.

Snider vividly recalls a sorghum mill near his old homeplace, operated using a mule-drawn planter. The sorghum cane was raised nearby the Smith farm, and he remembers watching the process as a young boy, and how the men would use sharp knives to cut the stalks as close to the ground as they could.

"They'd put the stalks in bundles on the ground and then come around in a wagon and pick them all up and take them to the mill."

The smell of the mill seems as pungent to Snider in recalling the process as it was 85 years ago. He recalls also the days of picking cotton on the Smith farm."

"I could get a little better than 100 pounds picked by noon," he says, "but then in the afternoon I couldn't even match that."

A sister four years his junior, he says, could pick a full third more than he could in a day's time.

"I'd pick 200 pounds in a day, and she'd pick over 300."

Snider has spent his life in Stoddard County and is somewhat of a walking history book of rural life in the mid-1900s, including the paving of Highway 114. That recollection, and the memories of others, will serve the Missouri Department of Transportation well as they try to replace lost information on the highway's history.