Since its initial inception the Lincoln Highway (LH) has had multiple major alignment changes in addition to many minor local changes. The LH Association had to deal with local chambers, politicians as well as national politicians promoting and lobbying for their areas/towns to be included along the route. A merchant in 1915 wrote that traffic along his road has increased over 500% since they were included on the LH. Before the LH they saw a grand total of two to three cars per day!
Prior to the LH there were no organized major auto routes to connect towns across the USA. Directions were along the lines of "go over that hill, follow the fence until you see the yellow house and then make a left on the trial that goes north west". With the gaining popularity of the automobile (thank you Henry Ford) individuals were able to travel at will, freeing themselves from the railroads. Automakers, many that never made it past the great depression (Maxwell, Packard, Studebaker and many others) promoted cross country driving as a way to demonstrate the quality of their vehicles. If their vehicles were able to withstand the rigors of a cross country drive than they must be of high quality!
The routes, especially out west, even as they changed to better alignments were still largely unpaved. Rain and inclement weather brought unimaginable challenges. As time went by improvements in road surface allowed cross country driving to become a bit less problematic to the travelers of the day. I am not even mentioning service station availability. A trip on some of the originals alignments will present to you a LH that remains unpaved but is still in use on a local basis. I hope to share a few of these original roads with you!
For now I will continue to use multiple guidebooks, Mapsource and Google Earth to develop a route that will then be downloaded into a GPS that I will utilize. GPS is cheating to some degree but because many segments of the LH are not marked very well I plan on using it as a tool to cutback on travel time wasted due to being lost! The Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois LHA have made great strides in marking what they call LH corridors. Fort Wayne Indiana has just announced that by the end of June 2009 that their sections of the LH will be marked clearly. Leaders are realizing that the LH can be a boon to increase tourism to their areas. To this day the modern LH associations are facing difficult decisions as to which alignment should be marked.
Much of this information was gleamed from the Brian Butko Lincoln Highway books
Stay tuned for more updates
