Introduction
The Lincoln Highway, the first improved transcontinental highway in the United States, inspired the American motoring public for the nearly four decades between its establishment in 1913 and the passage of the Interstate Highway Act in 1956. Like Route 66, the Lincoln Highway was so iconic that it occupied a space as much in the imagination as on the map. However, the National Register has kept the Lincoln Highway in a kind of cultural holding pattern by defining its period of significance primarily as the campaign to build the highway – with the corridor itself and automobiles as the setting. In order to replace this reductive treatment with an integrative analysis that is culturally and historically more comprehensive, this paper updates the period of significance to include the life of the highway as an iconic national destination.
The colossal and wide-ranging impact of the Lincoln Highway on American society generates the central objectives of our paper: to reframe the National Register significance of the Lincoln Highway in ways that address both historical and current perspectives. Within the period of the so-called Modern in American history, what parameters are so paramount as to bring together officially divergent movements? At the most generic level, the interest in building a coast-to-coast automobile highway at the beginning of the twentieth century provided a common cause, at least rhetorically, for four truly divergent movements: the improvement of the Good Roads Movement, the purification of the Anti-Saloon League, the health-promotion program of the Traveler’s Protective Association, and the autoist-aesthetic concerns of eminent artist J. Alden Weir. The popular national vision, however, ultimately would rest in part on the technocratic predilections that supported making the highway coast-to-coast. On a less romantic plane, Americans would ultimately support a highway with a transcontinental route because the federal law gave equal interpretation to both coasts. Such a road served the interests of highways, manufacturers, and the general public's chauffeurs in promoting unity in a divided nation in which occasional crises with Mexico and Europe appeared possible, if not probable.
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The following capsule description of the Lincoln Highway describes what George Merrick, who oversaw the “trail” in Florida, considered “the rough draft of a dream of greatness.” For motorists transversing the continent by motorized vehicles, it appeared at once to be a highway of national utility, supposed natural beauty, and illumination-inducing destinations. The Lincoln Highway was a concept that could not be achieved until there were a substantial number of automobiles in the United States, and then only by using the advocates of the highway’s primary weapon – not significances; the tools of making the Lincoln Highway were legal official, if not justiciable, and the tools of defining significance for the National Register were historiographical.
The National Highway System, whose first identifiable segment from Trenton, New Jersey, to Oregon, Illinois, was completed by 1928, was an essential remediation – a secondary highway less than 20 years in the making that, like many Great Depression and New Deal projects, stood upon the Lincoln Highway, a monumental primary highway whose work in linking a previously fragmented nation had been channeled into separate localities and corporate entities. If the multi-volume Treatise on Building the Lincoln Highway can be seen as a historical artifact of the highway's time-consuming and work-intensive construction, then a modern report on its significance should take on new dimensions as well. In the following pages, visitors are invited to plot the long-distance development of the highway through descriptions of its associated lodging, dining, and natural areas, and its interactions with arriving cities and towns – and to speculate how the Lincoln Highway's regional impacts, embraced into nostalgia and then later highway heritage, paralleled and encompassed broader shifts in American culture.
The Historical Context
The 1910s were a pivotal moment in United States economic and land use history. The automobile had been available for a while, but after revolutionized production, cars became more accessible to a wider audience of Americans, and the supply of cars outgrew the supply of roads. Just three decades after the mass production car came into the fold, Americans owned 23 million cars, 1.6 million commercial vehicles, and 122,860 motorcycles. The coordinated arrival of a better, cheaper, more accessible car that many more people could afford, combined with better and safer roads, and the Second World War was surging strong. This increase can be attributed in part to the general economic boom in the 1920s. After World War I, Americans enjoyed a time of prosperity and consumerism, in part similar to the economic boom post-World War II. Change was in the air, and the need for better roads emerged.
Several men and organizations had been responsible before, during, and after World War I for planning and promoting national highways. One individual is often credited with developing the idea of a national highway, though many others had similar goals and objectives. More than any other organization, the Lincoln Highway Association sought publicity and the aura of greatness. In 1914, the Lincoln Highway Association proposed the first plan for an interstate highway network. They proposed three north-south routes between Canada and Mexico and three ocean-to-ocean routes. These routes, proponents claimed, would benefit every state and every American citizen. Each route would follow the most direct path across the continent, intersecting all the others at the greatest number of points, but crisscrossing as seldom as possible. This plan set the stage for discussions about a possible national highway network in Congress. Politicians, however, did not act immediately, letting the plan die with the final report in 1928.
Significance and Impact
The Lincoln Highway played a transformative role in American society, transforming commercial and cultural relationships and the physical environment. Although domestic market travelers likely received the greatest gain from the highway—receiving an improvement in standards of living simply through expedited passage—additional, often overlooked areas of importance are detailed here. The Lincoln Highway mapped a road capable of bringing the coasts closer, allowing for easier trade and the advent of new economic services based on the swell of traffic. Tourist industries emerged along the route; automobile sales grew in small towns and on farms, and roadside businesses grew in number while funeral cars became less used.
The attraction of the scenic vistas along the Lincoln Highway made wilderness accessible, lowering the cost of experiencing the aesthetic beauty of protected areas. Travel routes such as the Lincoln Highway and automobile camping encouraged both extensive and intensive park and land visitation during time periods when remote park travel was cumbersome before the automobile. The call of the open road in America; the case of the Lincoln Highway documents that travel gives an image of an individual who, in search of freedom, is staunch in his or her own personal manifest destiny as the last West is finally being taken. The Lincoln Highway, as its case, also documents the changing manner in which we appropriated and consumed the American landscape. The first automobile tourists and road trips took place on family drives down short, scenic routes. Each summer, people migrated to the mountains from their places of business or industry to escape the worst heat and to 'rough it', socializing with others who also sought relief.
Development and Evolution
The brief for this project calls special attention to the methods of planning, design, construction, and financing used in the initial construction of the road in order to explain the foresight of the original highway builders in anticipating the requirements of future generations. The magnet for the Lincoln Highway to be built lay in the distinctive American values of independence, freedom of travel, and mobility. The beginning of the good-roads movement in America is counted by many historians as originating in 1893, when the bicycle joined the horse-driven vehicles of the time on the country’s roads.
The Lincoln Highway itself took several short lives as it developed through a number of different phases, each with its distinct characteristics and priorities in its ability to serve as a transportation route and in the effect it had on the communities, cities, and the people it touched. These periods of time are described below:
- The Old Trails Era, 1900 - 1910. The idea of signing America’s trans-regional highways with unique route markers using alphanumeric or numerical systems was proposed in 1905.
- The Highway Era, 1910 - 1935. The cottage era of the highway was an era with an ongoing debate and confrontations between the major stakeholders, but the concept of the mixed street purposes of the Lincoln Highway was accepted as a part of the cross-country culture. It was during this period of history that any Lincoln Highway Association support for U.S. numbered highways developed, and the Lincoln Highway was so included in 1928.
- The Interstate Highway Era and the War Era, 1956 - 1995. When the Lincoln Highway ceased to exist other than on paper, it became the family highway that could take families from one distance to the other. It was the nation’s state and federal number systems that actually became the face of dependency in the Industrial era of the Lincoln Highway. The Highway turned into an Interstate Highway, left behind.
- The Industrial-Technological Era, 1980s - Present. Civil conversations about the state of nature, property loss, impact fees, and the role of Federal Highways are still vital local and national issues in the United States. The Lincoln Highway is only a road functioning; it had to evolve into a road system that functions, responds to the needs of the people it serves, and provides a use opportunity.
Legacy and Preservation Efforts
Vital to the investigation of historic roads is the establishment of the highway's enduring significance and resulting ability to withstand the forces of abandonment and destruction. The legacy of the Lincoln Highway is a modern appreciation, one that is unique to historic roads and a part of the road system's ability to interpret and convey the road's authentic character. Establishing significance and interpreting the lasting contributions of the historic road are the first steps local, regional, or state organizations can undertake if seeking to preserve a main street or town along historic corridors. National heritage areas, scenic byways, and historic park locations alongside historic roads allow protection of America's diverse historic roads and edifices, creating valuable corridors of scenic byways and historic parkways.
Reduced to a solitary line on a cartographer's map, the name "Lincoln Highway" bestows an identity and significance beyond its own history, one that will influence thousands of miles of historic travel through literature and art and enhance the recognition of small communities as part of a larger destination. Under the subheading of preservation, the current identity of the highway overlooks the highway's advocacy to reject modern bypasses, commercial traffic, and signs of suburban encroachment. Contemporary heritage tourism designates the remaining isolated, historic highway as a gateway stretching across a nation out of lifelong fondness for the first motor car trip. Placing the road on the National Register includes preservation in today's trailers and tourism industry, encouraging and aiding the interpretation and understanding of the road's historical role in the past, present, and future. Heritage tourism programs and historic preservation are special areas of necessary resources, and without them the road becomes endangered by commercial or business associations to market a product or idea that lacks a local identity. Industry favoring development of a historic facility or street further diminishes local tradition as old country roads become the fad of the business center.
The value of historic roads can be directly traced to their authenticity of painted relativism, the tie to personal identity through tradition of cultural geography and cultural continuity. Where towns and organizations have sought to preserve the road and identify with its representation, emphasis has been granted to civic identity through the right-of-way restoration, with a funded workshop laying the groundwork for such an endeavor.
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