Lincoln Highway

(Steam pours out of a locomotive as it begins to pull out of a railroad station.)

[Abby Brown] From the moment the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, trains were the only transportation method for people who wanted to go long distances between states.

Roads that people traveled on in wagons or carriages pulled by animals like horses were thought of as the only way to travel locally, not long distances, until the Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln Highway was our country's first transcontinental highway.

(A concrete post has a bronze, circular emblem with the profile Abraham Lincoln. Below the emblem is a white vertical rectangle with a blue letter “L.” The rectangle has a strip of red on top and blue on the bottom. On the side of the post a blue arrow points to the right.)

In 1913, the route was established, and by 1915 it was official.

(A map of Iowa shows the Lincoln Highway running through the center of Iowa in the following counties from west to east: Pottawattamie, Harrison, Crawford, Carroll, Greene, Boone, Story, Marshall, Tama, Benton, Linn, Cedar, Clinton.)

People could travel the highway from New York City to San Francisco.

(Official Inspection Party 1917. A black and white picture of four men standing around a car on a dirt road.)

It opened up a whole new world for people wanting to travel from coast to coast.

I'm at the Lincoln Highway Museum in Grand Junction, Iowa, with my new friend Joyce. So when was the Lincoln Highway route, all the way from New York to California, first established?

[Joyce Ausberger, Lincoln Highway Museum] It was established in 1913.

[Abby] Okay, but we didn't have hard surface yet. So tell me what it was like when it first was established.

[Joyce] Except for around the communities like New York and Philadelphia, they had hard surface, but everything else was mud.

(A black and white photo of a man driving a roofless car through the mud. The wheels of the car are covered in mud. The mud is caked up the sides of the car, and it has been splattered with mud.)

[Abby] And what was travel like in mud?

[Joyce] It was very, very bad.

And in 1919, there was such a thing as the Army convoy going across the United States. Dwight Eisenhower was on it, and they were trying to prove to people, we need good roads. They called it the Good Road Movement. And so he and all of these people, and I have a book here showing pictures, of the long convoy that went across and they got stuck and they'd pull each other out and they got stuck. They broke down bridges. They had to rebuild them. And it was nothing but a muddy mess. And they hated Iowa because we had the gooiest mud.

(An old photograph captures an Army truck driving along the wet and muddy Lincoln Highway. The truck is metal, boxy design with sturdy, spoked wheels and high ground clearance. The back of the truck is covered in canvas. The front tire is completely covered in mud, obscuring the spokes. The driver is bending over at the front of the truck looking underneath.)

[Abby] Really?

[Joyce] Yes

(laughter)

[Abby] So how long did we have this mud highway before we had it completely paved?

[Joyce] Well, there were some counties that graveled their road.

(A black and white photograph shows two men operating two road rollers to flatten the dirt road.)

[Abby] Here in Iowa.

[Joyce] In Iowa, Well, in other states, too.

[Abby] Okay. But here in Iowa, there was a movement towards not just gravel, but concrete, Right?

[Joyce] Right.

[Abby] So they started with these seedling miles. Tell me about that.

[Joyce] Well, they wanted the people that lived far away from anything that looked like concrete to know there was such a thing as concrete.

[Abby] Yeah.

[Joyce] So each state had what they called the seedling mile. And the one in Iowa is between Mount Vernon and Cedar Rapids. And you drive through the mud, maybe even get stuck because they chose the time of the year when it was wet.

[Abby] Sure.

[Joyce] And they had this mile long of concrete. And people had never seen concrete before.

(A black and white photograph of men standing in front of mounds of concrete poured between two wooden guide rails. There is a steam powered concrete mixer in the background.)

[Abby] People are still traveling the Lincoln Highway to get from coast to coast of our nation. But there are lots of choices for highways now. Right? So what does that mean for Highway 30?

[Joyce] Well, if you want to take the scenic route, you take Lincoln Highway. If you want to get there in a hurry, you take Interstate 80.

[Abby] Because you go a lot faster.

[Joyce] It goes clear across the 13 states, just like the Lincoln Highway did.

[Abby] Why is it called the Lincoln Highway?

[Joyce] Well, actually, in 1912, when these people got together, they said, okay, what are we going to call this highway that we've proposed? And they said, I think it should be a memorial to Abraham Lincoln. At that time, there was no statue of Abraham Lincoln. That’s a memorial in Washington, D.C. But obviously Lincoln tried to bring the country together.

(A map of the Lincoln Highway connecting the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California.)

And we said we're bringing the country together by putting 13 states and going across country. And it's free.

(Abby holds up a square, metal Lincoln Highway road sign with a thick, red stripe on the top and a thick blue stripe on the bottom and the capital “L” in the middle of the sign. The word “Lincoln” is written in blue above the “L” and the word “Highway” is written in blue below the “L”.)

[Abby] I see lots of these in your museum. And I've also seen these when I've been on Lincoln Highway. And kids might too. Tell me about this sign.

[Joyce] Well, we want people to know when they're on the Lincoln Highway and the main way to tell it. They started out by painting posts and it was painted Lincoln Highway just like this.

(An old wooden post painted blue on the bottom, white in the middle with a blue “L” and red on the top with a white arrow.)

Because we decided this would be the logo clear back in 1913. So they painted all these posts telling them where to turn with an arrow. The next thing we did was put Lincoln Highway markers, which is a concrete marker, like about this high (Joyce holds her hand up just above her waist) with this logo on it. And so then the DOT in Iowa helped put all these signs up to tell you where to turn.

[Abby] So next time you're on a family road trip, cruising down the road, going 65 or 70 miles an hour, imagine what that trip would have been like for a kid like you a hundred years ago. How would that trip have been a whole lot different? Have fun investigating new discoveries in Iowa.

Funding for FIND Iowa has been provided by The Coons Foundation, Pella and the Gilchrist Foundation.