Devils Elbow, Missouri: The Log-Jam Bend

Ozark lumberjacks had a problem: the Big Piney River made a sharp horseshoe bend here, and timber rafts floated downstream would often break up in that curve. They called it a devil of an elbow, and the name stuck. A community formed around the bend in eighteen seventy, and a steel truss bridge was built across the river in nineteen twenty-three.

When Route Sixty-Six was commissioned in nineteen twenty-six, it crossed that same bridge, making Devils Elbow one of the Mother Road's most scenic and isolated stops. The State Planning Commission once listed the bluffs here among Missouri's seven beauty spots. The bridge remains the only curved bridge on all of Route Sixty-Six still open to traffic, and the hamlet of fewer than one hundred people has barely changed since the highway bypassed it decades ago.