Devona Gibbs, a retired nurse practitioner, said her father always told her that her great-grandfather, Henry Hines Jolly, laid the brick streets in downtown Poplar Bluff.
“Several years ago, I got on Ancestry,” she explained. “And then I found out about newspapers.com. And first thing I did was do (search) the name Jolly.”
There she found the full story told through a patchwork of articles, city council notes and opinion pieces from Poplar Bluff’s newspaper at the time, The Citizen Democrat.
The first calls for street improvement were found in 1906. A letter in The Citizen Democrat concerning the city’s dirt roads read, “A farmer says the county roads are better than some of the sidewalks. He came from a road where the roads would equal many of the sidewalks of your town much less the streets. It’s a shame and a disgrace to any town to have such streets and sidewalks when, I am told, over $30,000 is collected revenue for public maintenance.”
Jolly and another contractor named Begley oversaw the first wave of street improvement that year by macadamizing roads, coating them in tar and crushed rock. The macadam apparently did not satisfy citizens though, and complaints continued about the state of Poplar Bluff’s streets. The City Council began planning to brick the downtown roads as early as 1907, and there is mention of someone visiting Cairo, Illinois to evaluate how the process had worked there. Orders were placed in for vitrified bricks, which were treated at a higher temperature than typical construction bricks to make them harder and waterproof.
The public was eager for paving to begin. One article in 1911 read: “Good streets are essential to the business interests of the city...It’s almost a complete waste of money to dump any more macadam on them, seeing that paving can be secured at such a low cost. Not less than two miles of substantial brick or woodblock paving should be laid on Poplar Bluff within the year.”
The brick paving process consisted of layer concrete, sand, pitch and then brick.
“This style of pavement is durable and with it laid on the sand and in pitch the noise that generally annoys the residents and business people along a hard surface street is not suffered,” The Citizen Democrat reported.
The cost of paving, including grading and curbing the roads, was $4.50 per lineal foot for downtown property owners. It was readily accepted as a bargain for the quality, durability and aesthetic of the end result.
Jolly and another contractor, Roy Williams, won bids to brick the streets. Downtown improvement began March 1912 with Pine Street. North Main Street was finished November of 1913.
“Poplar Bluff can now boast of a main highway that is paved from its beginning nearly to the city limits,” an article read. The city had by this point expanded to around two miles in diameter.
But the project expanded that year to encompass Second, Main, Fourth and Fifth streets running north and south, and Pine, Vine, Poplar, Cedar, Maple, Cherry and Ash streets going east and west. The volume of material used was astounding — an article in the middle of paving noted a delivery of 300 cars of vitrified bricks from a plant in Murphysboro, Illinois.
The process seems to have gone smoothly, except for a dramatic fire and explosion from one of Williams asphalt vats when its operator deserted his post. The fire caused a 20 by 20-foot swathe of damage and the subsequent explosion wounded a foreman, TW Darnell, who “suffered a serious arm injury and an ugly scalp wound by parts that were blown into the air.”
The fire was put out with extinguishers from the nearby Dalton Adding Machine factory and work proceeded afterwards.
Throughout the paving process, The Citizen Democrat printed glowing praise for Williams but, to Gibbs’ amusement, multiple complaints about Jolly including delays and sub-par workmanship. A 1919 article said “a motion prevailed notify HH Jolly that the paving on Broadway and Ninth were not up to contract and the streets be repaired at the contractor’s expense.”
Gibbs is not offended by her great-grandfather’s shortcomings.
“HH is no reflection on me,” she chuckled. “I made my own reputation.”
Jolly passed away in 1921 at the age of 75, leaving his legacy bricked into Poplar Bluff and archived in print. Today, Gibbs has one of the bricks from the Murphysboro plant — among a plethora of antiques and vintage family photos — on her living room mantelpiece.
Her motivation for collecting is simple, she said. “I just like old things.”