THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY - AS IT BEGAN

With an excitement and awestruck wonder, a line of towns stretching from New York to San Francisco was celebrating on October 31, 1913. Folks in Trenton, New Jersey, jammed bunting-draped streets to watch a parade of Marmons, Stanley Steamers, Hudsons and Stutz Bearcats. Farmers in Indiana placed glowing jack-o’-lanterns on fence posts. Citizens in Omaha built a huge bonfire of old railroad ties. Everywhere mayors delivered speeches saying, “The Era of Good Roads Has Come.” The United States was dedicating the proposed route for its first transcontinental highway.

October 31 had been declared a legal holiday all along the course. This route was to become the famous Lincoln Memorial Highway, the first road to join the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean.

But on that day, the highway was still only a daring dream, a red line across the map. There was no semblance of a connected road in the entire 3,500 mile route. Ruts and trails were all over the map. There was only one mile of paved public road outside city limits in the entire land, just north of Detroit.

Many celebrants that October night in 1913 actually thought that an ocean-to-ocean highway would magically appear within the next few months. One man of imagination and leadership roused the nation to believe in it, Carl Graham Fisher, a flamboyant 43 year old multi-millionaire who had perfected gas headlights for the automobile, founded the profitable Prest-O-Lite Company to manufacture them, sold more cars than any other man, and started the Indianapolis Speedway.

He suggested getting public support through selling “Highway Memberships” at the yearly dues of $5 and $100, predicted completion of the road in time for a cortege of 25,000 cars to drive cross-country for the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco on May 11, 1915. He and his business partner, James A. Allison, planned to foot the preliminary administrative bills. His partners wanted to name it the Fisher Highway, but due to the respect Carl always held for Lincoln, he insisted it be named “The Lincoln Memorial Highway,” with the insignia, a set of red-white and blue rings around telephone posts, each color six inches wide, bearing the letter “L” in the white position. President Woodrow Wilson purchased Membership Certificate No. 1.

 Fisher came up with a publicity scheme that was certain to sell Prest-O-Lite, a cross-country tour in which every make of car would participate. Fisher announced the forth-coming “Trail-Blazers’ Expedition.” As Fisher had hoped, improving roads for the tour went on all across the continent. Seventeen cars and two trucks were outfitted with rope, a pair of tackle blocks, chains, mudhooks, a barn-lantern, water bags, canned goods, and a tent with mosquito-bar windows. One truck carried equipment sufficient to shelter and feed the entire personnel of seventy. A second truck was loaded with spare tires.

 On July 1, 1913, the caravan got under way from Indianapolis, the home of Carl Fisher’s Prest-O-Lite. Included were two doctors, photographers, and newsmen. This first major westward trek since the covered wagons a half century earlier was followed with the same suspense as the first expedition to the North Pole.

Wheels dropped off, tires collapsed, radiators boiled, axles cracked. Strong arms had to drag the vehicles out of hub-deep mud and across unbridged rivers. On the steep grades, gasoline tanks were so much lower than the carburetors that the whole caravan had to turn around and back up. Despite difficulties, the Trail-Blazers pulled triumphantly into Los Angeles only 34 days after the start.

It was a master stroke for the “good roads” cause. Fisher and his founders then wrote out a Proclamation of the Route of the Lincoln Highway from New York, through Philadelphia, South Bend, Chicago, Council Bluffs, Omaha, Denver, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, and Reno to San Francisco - following the historic Overland Trail. The founders turned down President Wilson’s urgent plea to include the nation’s capital and some of the Southern States as it would mean a needless detour.

By 1923, instead of being unfurled like a magic carpet overnight, the Lincoln Highway was laboriously laid out piece by piece. Fisher will, of course, go down in history as the “Father of the Lincoln Highway” and “Pioneer of the Dixie Highway”- the man who set the country afire with the good roads cause.

The succeeding phases of the project are as fascinating as the start. Fisher thought crushed lime-rock was the most feasible surfacing material; but the cement industry came forward with an offer of nearly 2 1/2 million barrels of free cement, for “The Seedling Miles.” The State of Illinois was given first chance, and work started near Malta in DeKalb County in early October, 1914. The first Seedling Mile was a narrow strip only ten feet wide.

The cement association next decided to build its own “Seedling Mile” with standards of excellence for the roads of the future. “The Ideal Section of the Lincoln Highway,” opened December 1, 1922 in Lake County, Indiana, was a 1 1/3 mile of motoring heaven, a 40 foot concrete surfacing ten inches thick, broad shoulders, fine drainage, landscaping, underground wiring and electric lights were a few of the sensational features. Standards set here influenced highway construction around the world for years to come.

In 1927 the Lincoln Highway association voluntarily disbanded. The goal of a completed trans-continental highway had been achieved. One commitment remained unfulfilled. The permanent marking of the road. This was executed in surprising fashion. On a September morning in 1928 the Boy Scouts of America placed 3,000 concrete markers from San Francisco to New York. These bore the Lincoln Highway insignia, a bronze medallion of Lincoln’s head and the words: “This Highway dedicated to Abraham Lincoln.”

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