Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It’s a relic of a bygone era. A place where families once took a break on long road trips, but that has now been replaced by the lure of neon marquees along the roadside.
Its centennial passed without much notice. As an innovation, it was used to being passed by unnoticed, but it was quietly waiting when someone needed it. They still exist today, but they’re not used very often. In their day, though, it was an idea that drew millions of users.
Nope, not the refrigerator, the AM radio, or even early television, the roadside table was much simpler than all those inventions, but it answered a need by Americans that soon spread across the world.
You probably don’t even notice them, and if you do, they’re invariably made of concrete and placed adjacent to rest stops on some isolated stretch of highway. Around us, you’ll find them at the Waltman, Sweetwater Station, and Bull Lake rest stops.
The roadside table dates to 1919, Michigan.
Herbert Larson was a civil engineer, hired by the fledgling Michigan State Highway Department in the late teens to design and build roads.
Larson took his family on a road trip, a substantial undertaking in the second decade of the 20th century, and couldn’t find anywhere to stop and eat the meal he and his wife had packed.
As an engineer, he saw a problem and came up with a solution, one that would lead to thousands of replicas.
Larson found a forested area alongside a highway, built a couple of picnic tables and dug an outhouse a few dozen yards away in the trees.
The roadside table was born.
Larson’s table was on private property with the permission of the owner. A decade later, another Michigan engineer, Allan Williams, built a table made from salvaged guardrail planks inside the highway right of way.
The state-sanctioned roadside table led to an exponential growth in roadside rest stops.
Michigan, with small towns every few miles, seems a strange place for a public rest stop to emerge when compared to the vastness of the American West.
The West quickly caught on.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps built rest stops across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
There were even a few along the Lincoln Highway in southern Wyoming.
In Riverton, the town built a public campground in City Park in 1922. The campground featured electric lights, natural gas heat, and hot and cold running water. It was a hit with travelers, and Riverton began to be mentioned in travel guides all along the East Coast when they were planning road trips to Yellowstone.
Today, families don’t stop very often at roadside tables; there are just too many attractive alternatives.
We’ve driven to and from Pittsburgh a few times, and a few more to Minneapolis and Texas. Too often, we fly down the highway on Interstate 80 or 90 on our trips east or on I-25 heading south. You don’t see much of real America at 70+ miles per hour while dodging huge tractor-trailers.
You can tell when you’re approaching civilization by the signs a mile or so before each exit listing the local fast-food places, another sign with chain motels, and the generic highway signs with drawings indicating food, fuel, and lodging.
When given the chance, I still take the two-lane roads across rural America. Each time I’m driving through rural Nebraska, Iowa, or South Dakota, I’m reminded of the Moe Bandy song, “Americana.” If you haven’t heard it, you should; here is a snippet.
…today I took a detour down a back road
Through a little town whose name I can’t recall.
There were old men on benches playing checkers
Children playing hopscotch on the square
And high above a statue of an unknown soldier
Old glory was waving in the air
Suddenly I realized what I’d too long forgotten
Chill rose up like mountains on my skin
Overcome with a feeling
I knew I was seeing
America all over again
Yep, it’s just nostalgia, but nostalgia inevitably happens when you go around the sun a few dozen times.
As a kid, we traveled across the USA many times. When we lived in Arkansas, Dad drove us to Riverton every summer, four times in all. The fifth trip was just a stop in Fremont County on our way to Northern California. We lived there for five years and came back to Wyoming four times, and one time we made the epic trip to Arkansas.
Dad preferred to travel at night. Occasionally, he’d have a buddy sign him out a few hours before his shift ended, and his 30-day leave from the Air Force began, so we’d hit the road in the late afternoon.
The trip to Arkansas began with a run through central California, passing through the San Juaquin Valley until we hit Bakersfield, and then headed east, south of Death Valley, into Arizona.
I think Dad’s travel plans had a dual purpose; first, it was cooler and the traffic lighter, and second, my little sister and I were asleep. (None of those epic, “I touched you last!” sessions in the back seat that fathers enjoy so much…)
Mom packed a big cooler with sandwiches, fruit, Cragmont (no brand names on a sergeant’s salary) pop, and a grocery sack with cookies and chips.
We stopped at roadside tables all along the route.
We didn’t stay at the Holiday Inn or any other national chains. On the runs from Arkansas across Missouri and into Nebraska, we stayed at the same “Mom and Pop” motel on every trip. The nice elderly couple remembered us after that first trip and had cookies waiting for Susie and me when we arrived.
There was a big neon Marlboro Man sign with a huge cowboy hat, a moving arm and a lit cigarette with a red glow on the end of it outside the motel in this little western Missouri town.
Maybe that’s where my love of the backroads was formed.
One year, Dad decided to take Highway 2 across Nebraska. In the days before Google Maps, GPS, or even Rand McNally atlases, the gas station highway map was the only way to navigate.
Mom could fold the Texaco map up neatly each time, but Dad didn’t have the patience, and many a map ended up in a wad of paper.
My parents always tried to find faster routes, sometimes Kansas, sometimes Oklahoma, but Nebraska won out once we left Missouri.
Highway 2 was almost a straight line from Grand Island to Alliance; it was a much more direct route, except in 1964, it wasn’t paved. We drove almost 200 miles of gravel road from just outside Grand Island to a few miles east of Alliance.
We caught Highway 20 and headed west.
Little did I know as a seven-year-old when we crossed into Wyoming that Lusk would become such a big part of my life.
Mom swore off that route for future trips. She didn’t appreciate the gravel, and she appreciated the four-foot-long bull snake I found in the grass a few feet from the roadside table we stopped at even less.
When our children, Brian and Staci, were little, Sue and I made a point of packing lunches and staying at roadside parks on road trips.
On one memorable run to visit Sue’s grandmother in Valentine, Nebraska, we packed the cooler with dry ice. When we opened it at a little roadside park near Rushville, we found exploded orange soda all over the inside. Dry ice gets a little cold. The cans that hadn’t burst were warped and bulging on each end.
Today’s kids won’t have these memories. Fast food and easy access have retired the roadside park.
In states like Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, the state rest stops now have franchise chains incorporated into the state-owned facilities.
Americana on the side of the highway.