On its front cover (above), the 1938 state highway map featured the state capital and various scenes around the state. The inside of the map was in full color, a practice started for the previous year's map. Even though the 1939 map had a color cover; black-and-white covers reappeared shortly after World War II for the 1946-1947 and 1948-1949 official maps.
While the 1938 official Missouri highway map wasn't the first map printed in full color, it was the first map to use a yellow background was used to differentiate land in Missouri from land in other states. The 1937 map had a full-color cover; but the 1938 map was the first to feature photographs on the cover. This may be the reason that the cover went back to being in black-and-white.
The back side of the map featured inset maps of the Kansas City and St. Louis metropolitan areas, as well as a diagram showing road and street signs then in common use in Missouri. Large inset maps had also been included in the 1937 map. The 1938 insets showed quite a few route changes in the Kansas City area, and a new state route in St. Louis County.
From this page, you can access fair use excerpts of the map. Due to its age, the folds are noticeable, but the map itself is actually in very good condition.
Note: These are huge scans, running up to 400 or 500 KB in size. Such large file sizes were necessary in order to show the detail that this map provides. The areas shown by the scans overlap.
Route Logs
Also included in the map, carried over from earlier years, were route logs of the US routes in Missouri. The logs show the mileage between notable cities, as well as the major routes intersecting the highways. This was the last year for route logs, except for the 1951 official highway map.
