A NEGLECTED HIGHWAY A Kentucky tourist, returning from a Western trip, writes interestingly to one of the Western Kentucky papers of the conditions he found in one short stretch of road on his return home. Of his impressions after ferrying from Cairo over to Wickliffe, Ky., he writes:
We got a surprise then. We had gone West to see scenery, but like Sir Launfal, and all that bunch of grail hunters, we came back home and found it right here in the back yard. Wyoming has a strip of road which it calls the most scenic seventy miles in the world, but I'll stack up the seven miles between Wickliffe and Bardwell, Ky., against any other lightweight scenery this side of Batang. There should be a movement started to make a national park out of this.
The old road is unequaled in the United States. There are places where the front of your car will be going north and the back end south, while the middle moves westward and both sides are going up. There are cascades in the road unequaled in Yellowstone, and there is one sheer drop that would put Bridal Veil Falls to shame. The bridges are miracles of Carlisle County architectural genius. There is one which has 457 planks in it, and no two of them in the same place. Ed Morrow says, "God rested when he made the world he' smiled when he made Kentucky." He laughed out loud when he finished this part of it. Ballard County should be renamed Wart County. The pleasure of a drive from Wickliffe to Bardwell is further enhanced by the broad acres of dog fennel, of persimmon bushes and the prehensile sawbriar.
The road which runs from Wickliffe, through Bardwell, Arlington and Clinton to Fulton is a Federal highway, U. S. 51. In Kentucky it is an unfinished stretch in what should be one of the most important north and south highways in the Middle West. From Chicago to Cairo, U. S. 51 is a splendid paved highway. From Union City, Tenn., to Memphis it Is practically completed. South of Memphis the traveler has a choice of several roads to the Gulf.
If this road through Kentucky were put in good condition, an enormous amount of tourist traffic would be diverted diverted through this State. U.S. 51 affords the most direct route from Chicago to New Orleans. Traffic now is diverted at Cairo through Missouri and Arkansas, returning to the east bank of the Mississippi at Memphis. This neglected Kentucky road probably will be among the first to be given attention by the State Highway Commission under the new Administration in 1928.
The Courier-Journal, 03 Sep 1927, Sat, Page 6
