Joplin: The City That Lead and Zinc Built

Before Route Sixty-Six ever reached Joplin, this corner of Missouri was already one of the most productive mining districts in the world. The discovery of lead ore beneath the Ozark hills in the eighteen fifties, and later the vast deposits of zinc in the eighteen sixties, created a boomtown so frenzied and wealthy that it built a downtown full of ornate Victorian buildings practically overnight.

At its peak the Tri-State Mining District, centered on Joplin and spreading into Kansas and Oklahoma, produced a very large share of the world's zinc and lead. The mines ran night and day. Workers came from across the South and Midwest, and later from Europe. By nineteen hundred Joplin had more than twenty-six thousand people and a reputation for both wealth and vice: gambling, saloons, and a red-light district ran alongside banks, theaters, and mansions.

The city also attracted a very different kind of visitor in the nineteen thirties. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow rented an apartment in Joplin's Oak Ridge Drive in April of nineteen thirty-three. When police raided it, the pair escaped in a shootout that killed two officers. In the apartment police found cameras, rolls of undeveloped film, and a poem. Developed, the photos showed Bonnie and Clyde posing with their guns in a way that looked almost playful. Newspapers published them across the country, and the images transformed two bank robbers into Depression-era folk anti-heroes. The Joplin apartment was the moment Bonnie and Clyde became legendary.

Route Sixty-Six arrived and gave Joplin something the mines never could: a place on the nation's consciousness as a crossroads city, where travelers from Chicago paused before the Great Plains began. The mining bust came in the mid-twentieth century; some of those old shafts now cause subsidence problems beneath subdivisions. But the downtown Carnegie Library still stands, and the lead-and-zinc money is still visible in the stonework.