Christian County
Plateau country, where near and reachable are different things
Two things follow for haulage and they pull against each other. The plateau surface has little relief and few streams to bridge, so the road networks here are among the thinnest in the state — 136 structures within ten miles, against 607 near a comparable operation at St Louis.
The reservoirs are the other half. An arm of a lake is a barrier with a crossing every several miles, so a market that looks circular on a map is really divided into lobes. A ten-mile radius measures what is near rather than what is reachable, and that gap is wider in this corner than anywhere else in Missouri.
And the county sits a little above the state line of it
Those lobes are worked from a county that restricts slightly more than average. Christian County restricts 6 of 38 county-maintained structures — 15.8 per cent against a statewide county rate of 12.7.
Within ten miles six structures are rated below legal loads, two of them the county’s own, and the nearest is 2.82 miles out.
The lowest that still takes a loaded truck is about 12.9 US tons — roughly 0.7 tonnes of stone over the tare of an empty tandem dump, against the twenty-five tonnes or so a legal 80,000 lb truck carries. That one takes a truck across close to empty, so it is a crossing a local driver plans around rather than uses.
The rest of the work is farm work. Missouri lets grain and grain co-products run ten per cent over the maximum during harvest so long as the truck stays off the interstate, so a grain truck here has legitimately spent part of its life loaded heavier than a stone truck ever could be.
Around the Clever Stone workings, and across Christian County and Stone County, this town turns over a steady amount of it.