By Bonita Wilborn
Joe’s Truck Stop, located on 5th Street NE in Fort Payne, is not what most people would think of when they hear the words “truck stop”, but rather a special wall that was built in 1959 by Joe Faulkner, for the purpose of “stopping” monster trucks [18-wheelers] from crashing into his yard, and maybe even his house.
In 1935 Joe Faulkner built a house on Fifth Street, directly in front of a mountain road.
Things were fine until 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 were taken out, one by one. Diverse loads such as chickens, watermelons, cows, logs, lumber, and steel were dumped 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 on 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.
It is said that when the wall was constructed, children from the area began calling the wall “Joe’s Truck Stop”. The name caught on, and over the years even emergency personnel from Fort Payne and the surrounding area are dispatched to “Joe’s Truck Stop” whenever there is another crash there.
The most recent victim of Joe’s Truck Stop met its fate on Monday, December 3, 2018 at 8:40 am, when a truck owned by E Trucking of Chamblee, Georgia lost control and crashed into the wall.
Police Chief, Randy Bynum stated, “There are two major causes for accidents at Joe’s Truck Stop. One is mechanical failure and the other is operator error, where the driver is not paying attention to signs that are clearly posted and doesn’t gear the truck down in time to make the sharp turn at the bottom. ” According to Bynum’s estimation in excess of 200 18-wheelers successfully make the sharp turn on 5th Street NE on a daily basis. “In the past five years there have only been eight accidents there, with no deaths,” he said.