A Unique Highway

 If you do a road trip in Missouri on Missouri Highway 36, anywhere between Hannibal and St.Joseph, you may probably understand why this road is called the Genius Highway. It has also been called the VFW Highway. Along this road are the childhood homes of General John J.Pershing (World War 2) as well as General Omar Bradley(the Great War). Three Civil War battles were also fought in places along this route. The Pony Express began in St.Joseph in 1860, and in Hannibal is the boyhood home of the famous author Samuel Clemens. Moving along from great generals and one author, we have two entrepreneurs. John and I visited the childhood home of Walt Disney in Marceline, Mo.last year, this time we visited the home of J.C.Penney in Hamilton. 

The J.C. Penney stores were started by the man pictured above. He at first worked his way up in the Golden Rule Stores, became a partner in those stores, and by 1913 bought out those partners. The new store he called J.C.Penney. In 1924 he opened his 500th store in Hamilton, his boyhood home.  By 1941 he opened store number 1600. We toured the Penney museum, in which his picture( above)was seen. We toured his childhood home, which had been moved from the countryside, just out of town, to a park within the city limits. It has two bedrooms- he was the seventh of twelve children. His father's untimely early death forced young James Cash Penney to work after high school and not carry out his plans for further education.

The Quilt Trail  can also be found along Highway 36, many of those sewing stores can be found just off the highway or within the Highway 36 corridor. It has been proclaimed 200 miles of fun, if you are a quilter. The mural below, on a building in Hamilton, announces the town's pride in being the home of Penney and "Quilt town USA"

The town of Chillicothe is another quilt town- there are two stores there. However, that town has another claim to fame: it was the place where the first bread slicing machine was invented in 1928. We found that machine at the Great River Historical Society Museum.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder is known as the "Father of Sliced Bread".  Pictured above is the second such machine- its first home was in the Smithsonian Museum, and is now on loan to the Great River Museum. We spent a wonderful afternoon at that museum, finding many other old treasures there; as a  Knabe square baby grand piano made in 1885, a hand-quilted Crazy Quilt made in 1880, and a printing machine (linotype 1872) - to name but a few interesting items which we saw there.                                                                      That was the highlights of our trip last weekend along Highway 36. I have not listed all the points of interest along that road, maybe you can discover the ones I missed. Wait, let us not forget the ladies!  Nellie Tayloe Ross, governor of Wyoming in 1925 and first female governor in the nation, was born in St.Joseph.