Road.
Your traveling correspondent has been on the road for a month, from Cincinnati and Indianapolis to Illinois to Colorado and Texas.
He has not been to Auxvasse.
Auxvasse is the home to 1,001 people. At least it was in the most recent census. It has a total area of three-quarters of a square mile. It’s a few miles north of Kingdom City, the crossroads of Missouri. You might catch a glimpse of its former small business district as you flash past it on Highway 54. The town tavern has survived.
It originally was called Clinton City when it was platted in 1873 but changed its name to honor a nearby creek because the postal service was easily confused by the presence of another town in Missouri named Clinton, with no “city” on the end. It has had a post office since 1874. It is the largest populated area in Jackson Township of Callaway County.
Blogger Tom Dryden, who might be the most famous person to come from Auxvasse—because of his blog—notes that the town website refers to the community as “the third largest fourth class city” in the county. He says I have been pronouncing its name incorrectly, Oh-vawz. No, it’s “Of auze.”
Dryden wrote a loving tribute to his hometown in his October 23, 2016 entry. I suggest you check him out at TOMDRYDEN.COM. He has written some other things about the town and its people, too.
Dryden admits the town is so insignificant he cannot convince his car’s GPS system that it exists, which led him to concede in his May 14, 2012 blog entry, “When you’re from Auxvasse, you can’t go home again.”
I can appreciate his love for his town because I grew up in a couple of small towns in Illinois—one of about 1,500 people (Mt. Pulaski) and the other of about 3,300 when we moved there (Sullivan), probably considered big cities when Tom was a kid.
Now I live in a REALLY big city. Jefferson City (43,228 people in the most recent census). And Auxvasse has been irritating me for decades.
(By the way, we made an interesting discovery on our way back from Albuquerque last weekend. We drove through Wichita, which has a listed population of 397,552 in the 2020 census. St. Louis claims 301,578. Wichita, Kansas is bigger than St. Louis!!. Sedgewick County can’t hold a candle to St. Louis County, though, so St. Louis is still a bigger metro area)
Tom Dryden’s GPS doesn’t know where Auxvasse is. But he’s wrong. He CAN go home again. The Missouri Department of Transportation makes sure of that. Interstate 70 exit 148 has a big green sign—
Maybe it’s a conversation piece designed to keep drivers bored by hundreds of miles of billboard-ugly, mostly straight, highway alert by trying to figure out (a) how to pronounce that top word and (b) why it is important enough to be on the highway sign.
“Hey, Maude, get out yer Triple-A guidebook and look up Ox-Vassy and see what’s there.”
“It’s not listed, Claude.”
“They why do you suppose Missouri wants you to go there?”
Well, why does it?
Why doesn’t the sign say “Jefferson City?” It’s only the state capital, you know. It’s only the place where the department has its headquarters.
Heck, with Kingdom City’s development into almost-Effingham West, why isn’t Kingdom City on the sign?
We are left to ponder whether Auxvasse has the distinction of being the smallest town in Missouri, or in America, to be listed on an Interstate Highway exit ramp sign.
But it just irritates the sock off me that Jefferson City apparently is less important to the department than Auxvasse is. I will confess, however, that there have been some times when I’m just one more tired and semi-dangerous driver on the road late at night, that seeing that sign has kicked up the mental processes just enough to make it the last 30 miles or so home safely. That and the Coke I get at the Kingdom City McDonald’s drive-through window.
Congratulations to Auxvasse, though. Every day, tens of thousands of people go past a sign that says it is more significant than the capital city of the state. If I lived in Auxvasse, I’d be proud of that.
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