The Lincoln Highway was once the most famous road in America.
It was the symbol that “Good Roads” supporters
rallied around in their crusade to create a highway system
for the country. It was the first successful transcontinental
highway and served as the catalyst for the driving improvements
that were being demanded by an increasingly mobile public
and by the car makers of Detroit. The Lincoln Highway was
the first successful, all-weather, coast-to-coast, automobile
highway. The Lincoln Highway owed its success to promotion.
In the beginning, there was no federal funding to build
highways. In 1913, when Carl Fisher proposed the “Coast-to-Coast
Rock Highway,” dirt roads led from one town to the
next, and few people could give directions beyond that.
Fisher was a dreamer. He had founded the Indianapolis Speedway,
owned the Prest-O-Lite Headlight Company, and would later
create the Dixie Highway. He approached the fledgling automobile
industry for support and funding for his highway. Eager
to put America on wheels, many executives from automobile
manufacturers and tire companies joined ranks of the Lincoln
Highway Association in its inaugural meeting on July 1,
1913.
Henry Joy, president of the Packard Motor Car Company,
was elected president of the new association and it was
his suggestion to dedicate the road to the martyred Abraham
Lincoln.
Without federal funding, and adequate financial backing,
it was impossible to construct a road across America.
It was, however, possible to identify existing roads
and to label them as the Lincoln Highway. Signs were
cheaper than rock and concrete. Any road could be marked
as the official route, if it were sanctioned by the Association
out of their Detroit office. Guidebooks and signs constituted
the early highway.
In the very first year of their existence, the Association
set out to identify a route across the continent. They
did it with flair and publicity and an entourage of twenty
cars with streaming red, white, and blue pennants as they
took a fact-finding road trip across America
While the western route fluctuated drastically over the
ensuing years, the route through Illinois held relatively
steady. The highway was perhaps the first urban bypass,
skirting Chicago and its congestion, passing through Chicago
Heights, Joliet, Aurora, DeKalb, Rochelle, Dixon, Sterling,
Morrison, and finally exiting the state at Fulton with
its spindly Mississippi River bridge.
The route across America was determined by a number of
factors, such as the need to connect major cities and supportive
communities, including scenic landscapes and historic sites,
and above all, follow the most direct route.
Within a year of its beginnings, The Lincoln Highway Association
was broke, but just beginning their crusade to enlist
the public and the government to build better roads.
It was said that the road was
paved more with printers ink than with concrete. The
Lincoln Highway Association realized that its limited
funds were better spent on promotion than on highway construction, especially after corporate
America failed to provide strong sponsorship. They made
the Lincoln Highway the centerpiece in a massive marketing
campaign to convince the public that better roads were
needed and that the government should build them.
Concrete “seedling miles” were built at locations
strategically placed between notoriously muddy stretches
of dirt road to serve as prototypes of what an improved
highway could do for the nation. An “Ideal Section” was
constructed near the Illinois/Indiana stateline. Illinois,
as much as any state embraced and reflected the evolution
of the Lincoln Highway. It was the home of the first to
hard-surface the entire section of the Lincoln Highway
that ran through the state; it took less than 10 years.
The Lincoln Highway and the Good Roads Movement faded
away as a result of their own success. By the late 1920’s,
there was a reliable network of roads crisscrossing the
nation. At least 9 transcontinental highways existed by
1922. The Lincoln Highway, although famous for many more
years, was just another road. Federal funding became increasingly
available.
The twenties were the peak of fame for the Lincoln Highway.
In 1919, the Army embarked on a celebrated caravan crossing
of the entire highway as a test of national preparedness.
Cross-country racers were setting records and capturing
headlines. Songs and poems were written about the road.
The highway caught on in the advertising world. Restaurants,
motor garages, campgrounds, and hotels proudly displayed
the banners and named themselves after the highway.
By 1925, the web of roads on the face of America had become
confusingly marked with a baffling number of signs and
painted logos. Some states had already adopted systems
of numbering roads, and by 1925, the American Association
of Highway Officials instigated a policy of numbering all
interstate roads. All named highways, like the Lincoln
Highway, were subject to the numbering system. The Lincoln
Highway that connected the country from coast-to-coast
would become a series of disconnected numbers.
The mission of the Lincoln Highway Association was complete.
It disbanded on December 31, 1927 as an active board after
passing one final resolution to mark the route as a final
memorial to Lincoln. The markers were designed by landscape
architect Jens Jensen of Illinois, who won a national competition.
They are cats concrete with a bronze head of Lincoln, the
highway logo, and a blue directional arrow. In one day,
September 1, 1928, Boy Scouts placed 3,000 markers at every
mile across the coast-to-coast highway. Of approximately
175 markers placed in Illinois, less than two dozen remain.
Artifacts from another era, these are some of the last
tangible icons of the original Lincoln Highway.
The final loss of identity came after the passage of the
Interstate and Defense Act of 1956, which ushered in the “super
highway” system of limited access interstates. Ironically,
it was signed into law by President Eisenhower who 37 years
earlier was a young officer on the 1919 Army caravan that
struggled across the Lincoln Highway.
Today, travelers race across northern Illinois on Interstate
80 or 88. Few people realize that just a few miles north
lay the remnants of America’s once famous highway.
Known now as US30, Ill.31, and Ill. 38, the old route still
exists. In some fields and second-growth woodlands, roads
and bridges are gracefully disintegrating. In other places,
street names, businesses, and communities celebrate the
history of the coast-to-coast highway and the stories of
lives that “crossed on America’s greatest road.”
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