Missouri supplemental route
system of lettered highway routes in the U.S. state of Missouri
A supplemental route is a state secondary road in the U.S. state of Missouri, designated with letters. Supplemental routes were various roads within the state which the Missouri Department of Transportation was given in 1952 to maintain in addition to the regular routes, though lettered routes had been in use from at least 1932. The four types of roads designated as Routes are:
Farm to market roads
Roads to state parks
Former alignments of U.S. or state highways
Short routes connecting state highways from other states to routes in Missouri
Supplemental routes make up 19,064 miles (30,681 km) (59%) of the state highway system.
History
Prior to 1907, all road improvement activities in Missouri were undertaken by the individual counties, with little expertise or coordination between them. Amid growing automobile presence and insufficient road networks in Missouri in the ensuing years, the state legislature created a state highway department and the state highway commission as well as enacted various laws aimed at improving transportation in the state. In 1920, recognizing that economic prosperity and growth are highly related to good transportation, the legislature passed a $60 million bond issue for road work. This effort, along with the Centennial Road Law passed by the legislature in 1921, shifted highway building efforts in Missouri from the local level to the state level. As a result, the state highway commission undertook an aggressive road building campaign throughout the 1920s and 1930s aimed to get Missouri "out of the mud".
In 1952, the state highway department embarked on its Missouri 10-Year Highway Modernization and Expansion Program. Through this effort, the state assumed maintenance responsibility of over an additional 12,000 miles (19,000 km) of secondary and farm-to-market roads previously managed by the counties.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Missouri supplemental route” is system of lettered highway routes in the U.S. state of Missouri. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Missouri, supplemental and route, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2485547. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1932, 1907 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Missouri supplemental route” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.