Romance of the Road: Stories: Illinois Lincoln Highway Coalition

The Lincoln Highway and the automobile gave people personal mobility previously unimagined and allowed them to see America.

Highways take people to places where they can personally experience the differences in air, sky and landscape and connect to their historic roots
Early auto travelers relished the closeness to the places where they traveled. From a train they saw the landscape in abstraction like a motion picture, but from an open automobile the land was made vivid by intimacy. The motorists traveled within the land rather than across it.”
“The automobile first appeared as a rich man's toy. As late as 1909, the Oregon paper reported with amazement, 'The automobile traffic through Oregon was tremendous, something like over 100 machines passing through the streets on that day. Seven year's later a traffic survey counted 1,065 automobiles coming through the town in one day, together with 82 motorcycles, 24 trucks, 37 horse-drawn wagons, 177 carriages, and four men on saddle horses. The automobile, thanks to Henry Ford's Model T, was now cheaper to operate than a horse, and far faster, safer, and more convenient, and less polluting.”
Emily Post's trip in 1915 is testimony to the intangible meanings of the road for earlier travelers.
On Wednesday, August 25, 1915, Anita King, a former race car driver and movie star set out from Los Angeles to be the first woman to cross the continent alone. She drove the Illinois LH on route and after successfully completing the journey. Soon after the trip, production started on a movie version entitled “The Race” starring Anita King and Victor Moore.
“The LH was popular not only with auto travelers and residents of towns along the route, but with school kids, hobos, and the Grand Army of the Republic. In 1916, the Women's Relief Corps, the auxiliary of the GAR, planned a campaign to provide every schoolhouse along the LH with an American flag of standard size. Not to be outdone, a group of Daughters of the American Revolution proudly announced their intention to plant floral flags in city parks and on lands both public and private clear across the land.”
The LH became the route of choice for transcontinental auto speed records, mostly sponsored by small auto companies trying to compete with General Motors and Ford. The first was in 1916 when Bobby Hammond set the mark at six days, 10 hours, 59 minutes. Over the years this dwindled to four days, 14 hours. The most famous runs were by L.B. Miller in 1925 (102 hours, 45 minutes) and in 1926 when he made a round trip, stopping only one minute in NY City before heading back west.
In 1916, the Van Buren sisters became the first women to “solo” the LH on their own Indian motorcycles. They were arrested once on their trip for wearing men’s clothing. The year after they rode the highway, Illinois became the first state to ratify women’s suffrage.
The road itself was engineered over the years to make it speedier. “Speed became the measure of a trip, not adventure or enjoyment along the way. Year after year the stream of traffic, bigger and busier than ever, rolls two miles an hour faster…through speed limits and safety campaigns, grade-crossings, traffic laws, stop signs and motor cops-two miles an hour faster. The tense grasp of the wheel with hunched shoulders became the posture of the auto traveler…Certainly no one missed being stuck in the sand in Wyoming, or pined for the days of breakdown far from town, but with great road improvement and enclosed cars with radios, came isolation from the land around. Seen through the safety glass of a Plymouth, the world became as remote as it had been through the plate glass of a Pullman.”
"Races, baseball games, and special grand spectacle shows were to be found north of River View Park in Aurora in an area today called Riddle Highlands. Aurora's famous Driving Park was built here. Early racecar drivers, such as “Red” Fetterman, could bring home a trophy and an ego boost after racing in the Peerless 8.”
The “Lincoln Highway” radio show was a popular national program in 1940-1942. It used the Lincoln Highway as a backdrop, “...where lives cross on America’s most famous highway.” It featured Hollywood celebrities like Lucille Ball, Vincent Price, Rita Heyworth, and most screen stars of the era. It had a LH theme song.