Story of the Origins: Stories: Illinois Lincoln Highway Coalition

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The Lincoln Highway was created by visionaries who promoted the automobile industry by capitalizing on the country's demands for better roads in an aggressive campaign to build a highway from New York City to San Francisco.

Even before the 20th century, groups like the League of American Wheelman were promoting good roads. In the early part of the century there were more than two dozen private organizations advocating road development. The most effective of these was the Lincoln Highway Association.
In 1912, Carl Fisher, founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, had a dream of a highway spanning our continent from one coast to another. Because of the Pan American Exposition of 1915, he chose San Francisco as the western end of the highway with a promise that motorists could drive there for the exposition.
Henry Joy, president of the Packard Motor Car Company, was an early advocate of changing the name of the highway from the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway to a highway commemorating Abraham Lincoln.
The Lincoln Highway Association (LHA) was established in 1913 with Joy as president.
The LHA's aim was to motivate the public to accept the concept that long-distance roads should be built not only for local convenience but for the benefit of everyone-roads for the nation, not just the county. This became a patriotic movement.
Fisher and Joy developed a fund from industrialist's and motorist's donations that would provide roadbuilding materials. They believed this would stimulate local governments to provide labor and machines.
Henry Ford believed that the federal government should foot the bill, not private industry. His lack of support meant that the LHA could not raise sufficient funds for materials.
The LHA shifted from being roadway planners and builders into becoming a catalyst for change. The route was laid out in time for the 1915 Pan American.
Exposition in San Francisco. Still a dirt road in most places, it served as a prototype that, with increasing support from various groups, prodded government into action.
Seedling miles with cement donated by the Lehigh Portland Cement Company became the alternative plan. The first seedling mile was built at Malta near DeKalb in the fall of 1914. Malta was considered appropriately rural and muddy giving the greatestcontrast between concrete and mud.
The Army caravan of 1919 camped for the weekend near Thorn Creek in Chicago Heights. The local Star newspaper reported that a young Private Phillip Fred Golik fell madly in love with Miss Mabel Ruth Kelly on Saturday night, borrowed $5 for a license, and married her on Sunday.
The “Ideal Section” built in 1922 on the Illinois-Indiana border exemplified what highways could be. It had concrete 10 inches thick and 40 feet wide to allow for four lanes of traffic. It included landscaping, lighting and an adjacent footpath in a 110 foot right-of-way
Even in 1913, the planners of the LH knew that the road should be routed around the congestion of Chicago, and the first urban bypass was born. Fisher's interest turned to his dream to develop Miami Beach and the Dixie Highway that would bring Chicago residents there. The Dixie Highway crosses the Lincoln Highway at a prominent intersection in Chicago Heights.
Mooseheart, a 1,200 acre community for children, was established in 1913 between Batavia and North Aurora along the then dirt-surfaced Lincoln Highway. On Good Roads Day, 1,500 Moose members from all over the country came with pick and shovel to grade the highway. In appreciation, the state of Illinois paved an extra ten-foot strip in front of Mooseheart.
The Lincoln Highway stimulated numerous transcontinental highway projects by communities eager to take advantage of commercial dreams fed by cross country travelers. Even on the Lincoln Highway battles ensued over which communities it would be routed through.
In 1925, the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) began forming a uniform system of numbered highways to remedy the confusion caused by the proliferation of named highways. Much of the LH was designated U.S. 30. The AASHO also adopted a standard set of road signs and markers and mandated that markers of all named roads be removed.
Boy Scouts placed three thousand concrete mile-marker “monuments” along the Lincoln Highway in 1928 as a lasting memorial to Abraham Lincoln. These markers were the icons that were meant to immortalize the dream of an ideal highway after its official existence was eliminated by the federal highway numbering system. A few exist as nostalgic artifacts. Four can be seen on the road near Franklin Grove. Others can be seen in front of buildings or other public places near the road. “The 1928 markers were once imbued with great meaning, but the people who revered them are gone, leaving only their symbols, the objects that still glow somehow with light of meaning.”
By 1926 the LHA had promoted itself out of a job. From then on, road building became the responsibility of government.
Jens Jensen, a nationally renowned landscape architect from Illinois, won a contest for the design of the 1928 LH memorial markers. Previously, he had designed the landscaping for the Ideal Section, a prototype stretch of highway on the Illinois-Indiana border.