Westward on the Old Lincoln Highway (April 1995 | Volume: 46, Issue: 2)

Westward on the Old Lincoln Highway

AH article image

Authors: Philip Langdon

Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

April 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 2

I had been driving across Pennsylvania’s hills and valleys for five hours when suddenly my destination for the evening appeared ahead. On a high, level clearing in the state’s mountainous southwest quarter, just beyond the immaculate little town of Bedford, stood the Lincoln Motor Court, a roadside lodging almost exactly the way it looked when travelers passed by in Hudson Hornets and Studebaker Land Cruisers.

The gravel driveway made low, crunching sounds as my car pulled into the court—a U-shaped cluster of thirteen clean little cabins, each of them surfaced in gray Permastone, with white shutters adorning the windows and old-fashioned metal lawn chairs waiting by the front doors. Hip-roofed cabin No. 6 was all mine for twenty dollars a night. What more could an explorer of historic highways ask? I had set out to travel the nation’s first transcontinental motor route, and here I was experiencing the famous Lincoln Highway in all its obsolescent charm.

In 1912, Carl Graham Fisher, president of the Prest-O-Lite carbide headlight manufacturing company and founder of the Indianapolis 500, had first advocated building a road that would let people drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific on a “rock highway”: drive without devoting weeks to the journey, drive without choking in clouds of dust or sinking in axle-deep mud. That year, the United States Congress had decided to spend $1.7 million to erect the Lincoln Memorial in Washington—a solemn and inspiring piece of symbolism, certainly, but, in Fisher’s view, low on practicality. Highway promoters like Fisher and his ally Henry Joy, the Packard Motor Car Company president, insisted there was a more useful way to honor the sixteenth President. Asserted Joy: “Let good roads be built in the name of Lincoln.”

The plan called for a 3389-mile route starting in Manhattan’s Times Square and ending in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park.

Fisher and Joy’s plan, as it evolved, called for a 3389-mile route starting in New York City’s Times Square, spanning the Hudson River via ferries, climbing the nearly 3000-foot ridges of the Allegheny Mountains, traversing the mammoth Midwestern prairie, crossing the deserts of Utah and Nevada, and weaving through the Sierra Nevada before coming to an end in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park.

 

It was a proposal both audacious and prescient. Few people were prepared to make a transcontinental auto trip in 1912. Those who wanted to travel quickly and comfortably went by rail. Nevertheless, by 1912, there were 901,000 cars in operation, and, in just three years, the number would nearly triple. By 1920, automobile registration would surpass the eight-million mark. Leaders of the nascent auto industry saw the scarcity of reliable roads as an obstacle requiring an all-out national campaign. So, Fisher and Joy proposed a motor route that would let Americans drive across the continent to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a much-anticipated event that San Francisco was going to mount in 1915.

Fisher and