Fort Payne, Alabama: Joe's Truck Stop

Alas, it looks like Joe's Truck Stop ultimately failed to work. Joe's house is no longer there.

Someone finally made it past Joe's Truck "Stop" and directly into the adjacent house, in January 2013.

Joe's Truck "Stop" is all you said about it and more. The tip said that kids call it Joe's Truck Stop, but by now even emergency personnel are dispatched to "Joe's Truck Stop" whenever there is another crash there. It is a monument to the failure of the state of Alabama to remedy a situation that has gone on for decades. But it is also amusing. Joe was a very pragmatic man and he took care of things his own way.

In 1935 Joe Faulkner built a house on Fifth Street, directly in front of a mountain road. Things were fine until around 1950 when Alabama designated the road State Highway 35, and truckers started using it. The truckers would burn out their brakes on the steep, two-mile mountain pass, and the first year thirteen trucks went through Joe's yard. He had a row of trees which they took out, one by one. Trucks, several of whose drivers died, spilled such diverse loads as chickens, watermelons, cows, logs, lumber, and steel onto Joe's yard, porch, and roof. He once had three circus trucks in his yard. In 1959, after various officials failed to make good their promises to remedy the situation, Joe built a four-foot-thick concrete wall reinforced with wire, grader blades, steel pipe, and the chassis from two Dodge trucks. The wall is only about two feet high, so loads still spill into his yard, but trucks have never been able to do anything worse to the wall than knock chunks out of it. In 1989 I went to Fort Payne to see the wall, which local kids have named Joe's Truck Stop.