The Avenue of the Saints is a 563-mile-long (906 km) highway in the Midwestern United States that connects St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Avenue of the Saints continues north as just US 61, intersects with the western end of I-72 in Hannibal, reaches the northern terminus of its concurrency with US 61, then crosses the Des Moines River into Iowa.

The Avenue of the Saints was the concept of businessman Ernest Hayes of Mount Pleasant, Iowa who in the 1980s envisioned a four-lane highway between St. Paul and St.

[2] It was named by Gary Smith, who at the time was Executive Director of the Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission.

Smith and Hayes convened a group of area business and political leaders, who organized an effort to convince the Iowa Department of Transportation to study the idea, which they did in 1988.

The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 made the Avenue of the Saints an official "high-priority corridor," and signs were put along the route by the end of the year.

As a cost-saving measure, the government decided to build the Avenue of the Saints to expressway standards—with intersections at rural roads—rather than to full freeway standards.

Missouri completed four-lane segments from New London to Bowling Green in November 2000, and from Canton to La Grange in 2003.

In June 2005, a four-lane segment from the end of the Mount Pleasant bypass to the junction with Iowa Highway 16 east of Houghton was opened to four lanes of traffic.

[citation needed] On July 25, 2008, the final nine miles (14 km) of highway between the Lewis—Clark county line and Wayland, Missouri, was open to four-lane traffic.

Funding was finally unveiled in 2011,[4] and in November 2012 a design-build contract was awarded to the Walsh-Alberici joint venture team with designer Burns & McDonnell.

As the Eastern Iowa region has grown, traffic has increased, and the current arrangement of the interchange with its cloverleaf ramps has been deemed unsafe.

The Hannibal Expressway would then travel along the current US 24 East alignment and re-connect with US 61 four miles (6.4 km) north of the Rocket Junction.