This is the first in a series of posts commemorating the centennial of the United States Numbered Highway System.
U.S. Route 40 (US 40) was one of the transcontinental routes of the newly created United States Numbered Highway System to be officially approved by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads in January 1927. US 40 was designated to cover 3,205 miles (5,158 kilometers) altogether and cross a total of 14 states between Atlantic City in New Jersey and the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
By the summer of 1927, the overall public enthusiasm and painstaking professional work with respect to US 40 could clearly be seen in the building of a portion of this highway in central Missouri. This effort involved constructing a solid, seamless U.S. highway route between the major cities of St. Louis in the eastern part of Missouri and Kansas City on western boundary of the Show-Me State.
“Complete ‘Slab’ Across State on U.S. Route 40,” announced a headline in the edition of the St. Louis Globe Democrat on Sunday, August 7. In the accompanying article, reporter Norman M. Higgs described the efforts of the Missouri State Highway Department (now part of the Missouri Department of Transportation) to replace a gravel road of approximately 30 miles (48.3 kilometers) with a concrete section for US 40.
Higgs stated, “United States Highway 40, the airline route [a road designed to be as straight as a plane’s flight path] between St. Louis and Kansas City, will be opened without a troublesome detour Wednesday, according to Robert W. Hodson, in charge of the Jefferson City division of the Highway Department.” Higgs also noted, “The opening of this road will give Missouri its first paved highway.”
The inauguration of this hard-surfaced segment took place as planned later that same week. “Concrete on Highway 40 Open All the Way,” proclaimed a headline in the Missouri Telegraph. This newspaper reported, “The concrete slab of United States highway No. 40, joining St. Louis and Kansas City and crossing Callaway county several miles [kilometers] north of [the city of] Fulton, was opened to traffic along its entire route without detour or any appreciable length at 6:35 o’clock Wednesday morning, August 10.”
Two employees of the Missouri State Highway Department performed active roles in the formal inauguration of this comparatively small but still significant stretch of US 40, E.W. Crutcher, the maintenance engineer for that area of the state, removed the road barrier at the end of the new concrete section in the city of Columbia. At the same time, assistant maintenance engineer Walter H. Harrison removed the corresponding barrier at the other end of the section at a place identified as Overfelt Corner.
The 243.9-mile (392.5-kilometer) link of US 40 between St. Louis and Kansas City was now fully established. Additional confirmation of this appeared two years later in the Pennsylvania-based Waynesboro Republican. This newspaper asserted “that the National Highway U.S. No. 40, between Kansas City, Mo., and Washington, D.C., is open throughout and in good condition.”
US 40 in its entirety now encompasses 2,285.7 miles (3,678.5 kilometers) and 12 states. The accompanying photo of this highway in the vicinity of Blue Springs, Missouri, was taken in 2023.
Photo Credit Rowen Hansen (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rdhansen) — licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
For more information on US 40 in Missouri, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_40_in_Missouri
Transportation History 
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