Dispute over Route of I-44

I vaguely recall when Interstate 44 was constructed through Missouri, and I tend to think of it as an event that happened at a fairly specific time in the past. But actually it took almost a decade to complete from conception until the last leg of the highway was opened. Planning for the highway began about 1956, and the final section of the road was not completed until about 1964 or 1965. Throughout this period, newspapers contained stories updating the progress on construction of the highway. The progress hit a brief snag in 1959, when a protest arose over the proposed route of the road through Lawrence County.

Plans called for the new interstate highway to roughly follow the path of Route 66 from Springfield to Halltown and then to veer southwest across country to the Mount Vernon area, from where it would then roughly follow the route of U.S. 166 to the Oklahoma state line. In the early summer of 1959, a group of citizens from Lawrence County organized in opposition to the plan. The protesters, numbering about 200, wrote letters to US Senator Stuart Symington and US Congressman Charlie Brown demanding that Congress take action to stop construction of the highway until its route could be reconsidered. The group felt that, instead of building a completely new highway that ran between and parallel to Route 66 and US 166, the government should utilize one of the old highways as much as possible in construction of the interstate. The protesters felt that to build a completely new highway when both Route 66 and Route 166 were perfectly good roads was "a serious misuse of money."
Those who supported a brand new road pointed out that it was a little late to be organizing a protest, since plans for the highway had been known for at least two years or so. In addition, supporters of the already-announced plan said that, contrary to what the protesters said, constructing a new highway was actually cheaper than trying to bring either Route 66 or Route 166 up to interstate highway standards because of all the expenses involved in building access roads, overpasses, cloverleafs, and so forth.
Nothing came of the last-minute protest, and plans for the construction of I-44 across Lawrence County continued as scheduled. Only a small section of Highway 166 was used temporarily as one lane of the new interstate.