On September 10, 1913, a man named Carl Fisher announced a road from New York City to San Francisco, and he intended to build it with private money. No federal dollars. No act of Congress. In 1913 the country had 1.
2 million registered automobiles and roughly 200 miles of paved roads outside the cities. Fisher was demanding a 3,389-mile highway across 13 states before those states had road budgets, before anyone had driven coast to coast on a schedule, and before the federal government had any mechanism at all for building or funding an interstate highway. He got his road eventually. It took 15 years, a war, and an army convoy to make the reality of that road clear.
In May 1912, Fisher called a meeting in New York. The year before, he had driven from Indianapolis to New York for the Vanderbilt Cup races, and the trip had taken nearly two weeks. The same drive today takes about twelve hours. Fisher was 38 years old.
He had already built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway out of crushed stone and tar and watched fast cars race on it for four years. He understood something very few people in Washington accepted: the country had the cars, but it did not have the roads, and the automobile industry would have to do something about it itself. The men he called to that meeting ran the American automobile companies. Henry Joy of Packard was there.
Roy Chapin of Hudson was there. Frank Seiberling of Goodyear was there. Fisher’s pitch was direct: pool the industry’s money, build the road, and split the costs among the states. His number was $10 million.
What he got instead was Henry Joy, who told him the money would not work that way, but the idea was right. Joy proposed a permanent organization to determine the route, hold states accountable to standards, and keep up the pressure year after year. Fisher had the selling skill. Joy had the patience.
Together they had everything an unsubsidized highway needed. On July 1, 1913, they founded the Lincoln Highway Association in Detroit. The name was Joy’s suggestion. The country was in the midst of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, and the name Lincoln carried weight.
Practically, Lincoln was the president who signed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, the last time the country had committed itself to building a single line across the continent. The association set up offices in Detroit, issued a bulletin, and began working out the precise route of the highway. On September 10, 1913, the route was announced from start to finish. From Times Square in New York City, south through New Jersey, across Pennsylvania through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, then Indianapolis and Chicago, south through Iowa and Nebraska, through Cheyenne and across southern Wyoming, into Utah and across the Salt Lake basin, then across central Nevada, over the Sierra Nevada, down into the Sacramento Valley, across the bay to San Francisco, and ending at Lincoln Park on the edge of the Pacific.
Thirteen states. 3,389 miles. The association was very clear about one thing. It was not asking for federal money and it was not waiting for a federal program.
It would build this road out of what states, counties, and private donors could provide, piece by piece, using whatever roads already existed and paving the gaps through local effort and pressure. That clarity of method was also an admission about the road itself, because what the association called a highway was, in many parts, simply ground stretching between one town and the next. American roads in 1913 were almost entirely a local affair. A county maintained its roads, or it did not.
A township graded its lanes after the spring mud dried, or it waited for the roads to harden on their own. There was no national road fund, no federal highway agency, and no standard specifications for pavement width or drainage. The country had nearly 2. 5 million miles of roads.
Only about nine percent of them had a hard surface. The other 91 percent were dirt or gravel, and in the rainy season much of it was impassable. The Lincoln Highway would tie all of that together into one road, city to city, coast to coast. In the summer months, in good weather, a determined driver could cross the road.
In the spring, in the rainy season, in the heart of the plains states, after a week of rain, there were places on the highway that stopped cars entirely. The worst of those places were in Iowa. The Lincoln Highway in Iowa ran 370 miles through the central farming counties, and the soil was the same black clay silt that Iowa’s cornfields were famous for. The soil turned heavy and dense in dry weather.
In wet weather, it absorbed water without limit and released it under the wheels as a thick, sticky material that clung to tires and packed onto the moving parts until the car stopped, not because of an obstacle in the road, but because the ground itself had become the obstacle. The Lincoln Highway Association published its first complete guide to the road in 1915. Section after section of the Iowa part was marked with a note that stopped the reader cold: impassable after rain. Not rough.
Not slow. Impassable. A driver who reached central Iowa three days after a rain did not arrive late. He stopped where he was and waited for the ground to dry, or paid a farmer to pull him out.
The price of pulling a car out of Iowa mud was not fixed, and the guides of those years do not record the cost, but they mention the service, which means it was common enough to be worth noting. Farm families along the road kept draft horses and mules, partly for the farm work, and partly because the road outside the farmyard turned those animals into a commercial asset every time it rained. The situation was similar in Nebraska. The Lincoln Highway ran through the Platte River valley west of Lincoln on county roads that were graded when county money allowed and left ungraded when it did not.
The association’s guides used a star rating system. A star after a section meant it was paved or improved. No star meant it was unimproved, a dirt road. In 1915, in Nebraska, almost nothing earned a star.
The association had no authority to force any county to do anything. It could ask, publicize, and embarrass. Then in 1914, it found something more useful than all of that. Starting that year, the association began working with cement manufacturers to build short experimental stretches along the road at no cost to the county.
A perfect mile here, half a mile there, built to the association’s full standards with an 18-foot concrete surface, properly crowned for drainage, with ditches dug to the right level on the sides. They called these stretches seed miles. The logic was deliberate. Put one mile of smooth concrete between two miles of mud, and every driver who crossed it would notice the difference.
Every county commissioner who crossed it noticed too. The seed mile in DeKalb County, Illinois became the most photographed stretch of road in the country for several years running. The Portland Cement Association helped fund it and printed pictures of it in every automobile magazine it could reach. The road ran clean and white through the cornfields with straight edges and proper drainage, and cars that crossed it came out the other side onto a dirt road, and the comparison made its own argument.
By 1920, the association had placed test miles in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska. Some became the core of the paving campaigns that followed when county and state money finally arrived. Others stayed in the middle of dirt roads for years before the surrounding counties caught up. What the association learned from the seed mile program was something every road builder after it would learn as well: you cannot persuade a county to pave with brochures.
You can persuade it with a road. In Utah, the highway had a stranger problem. The original route crossed the Bonneville Salt Flats west of Salt Lake City, the bed of an ancient lake that had dried into a hard crust of salt and clay stretching for miles across the basin floor. In dry summer weather, the crust held and vehicles crossed without incident.
In rainy seasons, the surface softened and broke under the wheels. The road across the flats was one lane wide and marked in its original form by nothing more than telephone poles placed several hundred feet apart. Drivers who strayed from the marked line in the rainy season sank. The association spent several years pushing the state of Utah to improve this crossing.
The solution was a gravel road laid over the salt and raised slightly above the flat surface so water drained away from it rather than pooling underneath. Work began in 1918. The road needed new material every season because the salt seeped up through the gravel layer and weakened it from below. The gravel had to be hauled from the mountains, across 20 to 30 miles of desert, to reach the crossing.
The surface held well enough for summer travel, but for no other time of year. The association’s guides continued to flag it with seasonal warnings into the mid-1920s. Nevada was the longest hard stretch of the entire road. West of Ely, the Lincoln Highway crossed the basin and range country of central Nevada on tracks that were in some parts graded roads and in others merely wheel ruts that drivers followed only because the telephone poles ran alongside.
The association’s 1915 guide listed water sources in the Nevada basin by name, location, and distance from the road. You do not put a water-source listing in a road guide unless running out of water in August is a real possibility for anyone taking that road. The association worked with Nevada county commissioners through the mid-1910s to grade the worst crossings of the central basin and maintain the water sources. Nevada counties were among the largest in the country by area and the least populated.
The tax base for funding road maintenance was spread over hundreds of miles of desert and highland, and the road across those basins was not a priority for commissioners whose voters lived in mining towns far from the highway’s line. In the association’s 1924 guide, in the section on Elko County, Nevada, one stretch of the road is described as in good condition for the season. The road was never a fixed fact. It was a seasonal negotiation between the traveler and the ground.
With every spring, every storm, and every year of use, the terms of that negotiation changed. After 15 years of the association printing maps that called this one road, the most that could be said about parts of it was: good for now. Ask again in November. Into the middle of all this came the United States Army in the summer of 1919.
The war in Europe had ended the year before. The army had moved men and machines across France on roads the French had built over two centuries, and it had done so with vehicles heavier and more numerous than those roads were designed for. General John Pershing returned from France with strong opinions about what American roads ought to be. The War Department agreed with him.
No one had ever sent a mechanized military convoy across the entire width of the country, and the War Department wanted to know what would happen when it tried. On July 7, 1919, the first transcontinental motor convoy assembled on the Ellipse south of the White House in Washington. The convoy consisted of 81 vehicles: heavy and light trucks, motorcycles, an ambulance, a mobile kitchen, a field repair shop, and a searchlight truck. The official mission was to test the practicality of motor transport across the continent under conditions simulating wartime movement.
The real mission was to drive the Lincoln Highway and record its truth, mile by mile, when the army’s equipment was put on it. The convoy followed the Lincoln Highway west toward San Francisco. Its average speed was 58 miles per day. That average conceals everything.
The daily journal kept by the convoy’s historian, Lieutenant E. R. Jackson, records what that average was made of. In Missouri, a bridge built for farm wagons collapsed under the weight of a loaded army truck, dropping the vehicle into the creek bed below.
The convoy spent hours recovering the truck and finding a ford. In Iowa, the black mud that had stopped touring cars since 1913 stopped the army trucks the same way, only worse, because the trucks were heavier. The journal records vehicles sinking to their axles on roads that local farmers said had been passable that morning, before the rain. Men dug with shovels for hours.
Chains were attached to other trucks. Iowa clay did not care that these were government vehicles on a government mission. In Wyoming, a wooden bridge frame failed under the load, and the convoy forded the stream instead. In Nevada, the column left the road entirely in stretches where the open desert beside the road was more navigable than the road itself, holding to the compass and the telephone poles across the basin floor.
Jackson’s journal is not a complaint. It is a document. It names the counties where the road failed and records the specific reasons: bridge collapse, surface failure, loss of the route, and no paved road at all. The convoy that should have taken 40 days took 62.
It reached San Francisco on September 6, 1919. One of the officers attached to the convoy at the last minute as an observer was a 28-year-old lieutenant colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote his own report on the trip, separate from Jackson’s journal, and his language was less restrained.
He described the Iowa stretches as the worst roads any vehicle ever attempted to cross. He described the Nevada sections, where the convoy left the route, as evidence of the road’s failure in itself. He had spent the previous year watching the army move across France on French roads. He was now watching it cross the entire width of his own country, in July, on the only road the country had, and it was taking 62 days.
Eisenhower was not yet a general. He was a young officer who learned something specific about roads and what they meant for military movement, and he did not forget it. In his report, he wrote that the experience made clear to him that a modern nation could not rely for military transport on roads in that condition. He drove across the country again in 1946, after World War II, on improved roads, and thought about 1919 again.
He became president in 1953. The law he signed in 1956, creating the Interstate Highway System, drew from many sources. Among them was what he had seen on the Lincoln Highway and thought about for 37 years. While the army was learning what the road was, the association was working on what it should become.
By 1921, the association required an 18-foot-wide concrete surface and a 6-inch-deep base as the minimum for any stretch bearing the Lincoln Highway name. The next year, it raised that to 20 feet in heavy-traffic areas. In 1921 it published a notice addressed to every county along the road: pave your section. Do not grade it with dirt.
Do not gravel it. Pave it. The association would help with the specifications. The counties would provide the money.
In Pennsylvania, that money was available. The state had high population density, a gasoline tax, and political pressure from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the cities between them. Pennsylvania paved most of its 350-mile section by the early 1920s. In Lancaster County, parts of the original 1918 Lincoln Highway concrete are still visible under the edge of the current road surface where drainage work has cut into it.
You can see the seams, the joints where one crew’s work met the next crew’s. In some counties, the present U. S. Route 30 is the second road built on the same line.
The first concrete is still underneath it. Indiana paved its section from the Ohio border west to Chicago almost entirely by 1923. The Indiana State Highway Commission records list the Lincoln Highway section by section with paving dates and contractor names. Wayne County paved its section at Fort Wayne in 1921.
Elkhart County finished its section in 1922. Allen County and St. Joseph County followed in turn. Of all the midwestern states, Indiana was the place where a driver in 1923 could travel most days without stopping because of mud.
The paving dates of this road across Indiana run faster than in any other state in the region. Iowa took longer, as the mud had always suggested. Linn County, containing Cedar Rapids, paved its Lincoln Highway section in 1923. Story County, through Ames, followed in 1924.
By 1925, about 40 percent of Iowa’s Lincoln Highway was concrete, which meant 60 percent was not. The unpaved sections included some of the stretches that the 1915 guide had marked as impassable. Paving came county by county, on each county’s own schedule, and the counties with greater agricultural wealth paved faster than those without it. Nebraska paved slowly through the 1920s.
The state highway commission was founded in 1915, but its appropriations were spread across the whole state rather than concentrated on a single route. The Lincoln Highway was just one of many roads Nebraska was trying to improve, and the Platte River valley counties had to compete for money with counties that had no part of the transcontinental route at all. The Federal Highway Act of 1921 helped by providing matching federal funds for road improvements for the first time, and Nebraska’s sections of what would become U. S.
Route 30 drew on those dollars through the mid and late 1920s. The road faced competition that made it harder to raise money in some states. The Victory Highway Association was founded in 1921 to promote a route from Washington to San Francisco that ran partly over the same pavement as the Lincoln Highway and partly over other roads. In Utah and Nevada, the two associations competed for the same county road budgets and argued over the same routes.
The National Old Trails Road claimed the southern transcontinental route through Missouri, Kansas, and New Mexico. By 1925, the American Association of State Highway Officials counted more than 250 named highway associations in the country, each with its own signs and promotional maps. The result for drivers was that a transcontinental trip required a different map for each state, with no guarantee the maps matched where they met. The numbered system that ended all of this was proposed by the American Association of State Highway Officials in the spring of 1925 and approved by the Bureau of Public Roads in October of that year.
Every major road received a number and a uniform white shield sign with black numerals. The named highway associations were to be dissolved or absorbed into the numbered system. The Lincoln Highway, running east-west across the northern part of the country, became U. S.
Route 30 for most of its length, with sections operating as Route 30N and 30S where the route had historically split. The eastern end through New Jersey became part of U. S. Route 1.
The Utah crossing became U. S. Route 40. Parts of the Nevada route became U.
S. Route 50. The red, white, and blue markers with the L in the center, which the association had been placing since 1913, were removed. Henry Joy argued against the change and lost.
Fisher had already moved on to his next project, a highway from Chicago to Miami called the Dixie Highway, which was absorbed into U. S. Routes 1 and 41 on the same federal maps. The Lincoln Highway Association spent 12 years building a name and a network of supporters, and in one administrative year, the name disappeared from official maps.
The number remained. The road remained. The name did not. The association’s response was its most complete document.
The Lincoln Highway Association Guide of 1924, the last guide published before the numbering system replaced it, is the single best picture of what the road was like at the peak of its operation. The guide covers the entire road in both directions, lists every town with fuel, lodging, and food, rates the surface type of each section, and notes the seasonal warnings a driver needed before crossing certain parts. Reading it from beginning to end is a way of measuring what Fisher had started building in 1913 against what it had become 11 years later. The East was mostly paved.
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, Indiana, and northern Illinois showed concrete sections interspersed with improved macadam or asphalt surfaces. Iowa was patchy: concrete in the counties that had the money, unpaved in those that did not. Nebraska was mostly improved gravel with short concrete sections around the larger cities. Wyoming was mostly gravel.
The crossing of the Utah salt flats carried its seasonal note. Nevada was gravel, and in the central basin it was marked as dry-weather road only. California, from the Nevada border over the Sierra and across the Sacramento Valley to the Oakland ferry, was mostly paved. The paving map of 1924 followed the same pattern as Route 66 and every other transcontinental road of that era.
The money moved east to west, and the paving moved with it. In 1928, the association made its last significant decision. It adopted the Wendover route across Utah, a shorter, straighter line from Salt Lake City northwest to Wendover on the Nevada border, cutting across the northern salt flats rather than passing south through the city and then back north. The change reduced the total distance from 3,389 to 3,143 miles.
The association updated its signs where possible and published the new route in its final bulletin. In the same year, the association placed a granite marker in Lincoln Park in San Francisco at the western end of the road. Lincoln’s profile was carved into the stone. The words read, “This highway is dedicated to Abraham Lincoln.
” The association wound down its active operations shortly after that. The road it had spent 15 years marking and promoting was now U. S. Route 30 on federal maps, administered by the states, partly funded by the federal matching program, and improved as state and county budgets allowed.
The association had accomplished its mission of proving the road was possible. The governments took over the job of building the rest of it. The marker is still in Lincoln Park. It has been there since 1928.
If you want to drive the Lincoln Highway today, you can. The Lincoln Highway Association was re-established in 1992 and publishes a complete guide to driving the original route. The drive starts at Times Square in New York City, heads southwest through New Jersey, and crosses the Delaware River into Pennsylvania near Trenton. Pennsylvania is the state where the road’s old concrete shows most clearly.
From Philadelphia west through Coatesville, Lancaster, and York, the road runs as Route 30 through farming country. In Lancaster County, sections of the original 1918 concrete still exist beside or beneath the present road. Past Gettysburg, the road climbs toward the mountains. At Chambersburg Gap, where the highway crosses the first ridges of the Alleghenies, segments of the old route can be seen on the hillsides above the present road.
The association’s driving guide points these out with turn directions. Over the mountains to Bedford, down the Laurel Highlands to Pittsburgh. West of Pittsburgh, the road enters eastern Ohio via Route 30 through Canton, Massillon, and Wooster. Ohio’s section was among the first in the Midwest to be fully paved with concrete, and some of the original modest work survives in the road shoulders where the present pavement has been widened over the years.
Entering Indiana at the Ohio border near Van Wert. West through Fort Wayne, where a historic marker at the city’s Lincoln Highway intersection records the paving dates and the early contractors. Then west through Valparaiso and Gary to the industrial corridor of Chicago. The road enters Chicago from the south, and there is a marker in Jackson Park near the lakefront at the point the association designated as the dividing line between the eastern and western halves of the road.
Iowa begins at the Mississippi River at Clinton and runs west on Route 30 through DeWitt, Cedar Rapids, Marshalltown, Ames, and Jefferson to the Missouri River at Council Bluffs. The Iowa Lincoln Highway Heritage Byway covers the full route in the state and identifies historic structures, including sections of the original concrete still lying in the ditches beside the present road. Directly across the Illinois state line from Clinton is the historic marker of the DeKalb County seed mile. Nebraska continues the route west from Omaha through Columbus, Grand Island, Kearney, North Platte, and Ogallala toward the Wyoming border.
Old concrete sections survive in Dawson and Platte counties, reachable from frontage roads beside Interstate 80. This is the flattest, straightest part of the entire road, and in 1919 it was also one of the hardest. The combination of clay soil and rain stopped the army trucks on the same ground where the Platte River runs straight for a hundred miles. Wyoming takes the road up from Cheyenne through Laramie, Rawlins, and Rock Springs toward the Utah border.
North of Interstate 80, the original route runs as county roads, and in some parts as unmarked tracks through the sagebrush of the high desert. The Wyoming driving guide identifies the historic routes with specific county road designations. Between Rawlins and Green River, the road cuts through some of the most isolated country on the highway, and the 1919 convoy journal describes this section as a place where navigating by telephone poles and compass was routine. The Utah salt flats lie west of Salt Lake City on what is now Interstate 80 and U.
S. Route 40. You cross them at highway speed on pavement that looks nothing like what the army convoy crossed at four miles per hour in July 1919. The telephone poles that marked the original route are still there, running parallel to the interstate.
On a clear day, you can see both mountain ranges at once: the Stansbury Range behind you and the Silver Island Mountains ahead, the same view the convoy saw from the middle of the crossing. There is a rest area halfway across with a historic marker about the flats and the Lincoln Highway. The road in Nevada runs west through Elko, Battle Mountain, Lovelock, and toward Reno on what is now U. S.
Route 40 and then Interstate 80. The central Nevada sections of the original route, classified as dry-weather only in the 1915 guide and traveled partly by compass by the 1919 convoy, are accessible as dirt and gravel roads branching off the main highway. The Nevada Lincoln Highway guide identifies the specific turns and flags the sections requiring four-wheel drive. The crossing of the Sierra Nevada goes west from Reno on Interstate 80 through Truckee and Donner Pass.
The original Lincoln Highway route ran slightly south of the present highway in places, and the old roadbed can be seen on the hillside above the interstate on the steepest sections. The grade on the eastern face of the Sierra, where the loads of early cars had to be lightened before they could reach the summit, is still steep enough that loaded trucks slow down there today. From Sacramento, the road runs through the valley to the Bay Area at Oakland. The Lincoln Highway crossed San Francisco Bay by ferry until the Bay Bridge opened in 1936.
The modern drive uses the bridge. The Lincoln Park terminus, with its granite marker, sits in the northwestern corner of San Francisco near the Cliff House at the edge of the land overlooking the Pacific. That marker has stood since 1928. No one planned for the story to end there with that particular symmetry.
Fisher announced a transcontinental road before the roads existed, and the road he got was paved by county boards on county schedules, section by section over 15 years, documented and defended by an association that relied on industry donations and the strength of the argument the automobile made for itself wherever it went. The numbered system took its name. The interstate took its route. But a surprising amount of the original concrete still lies under the present road in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio, and the whole route can be driven today if you know where the original line left the numbered highway.
Eisenhower drove the Lincoln Highway twice. The first time took 62 days and taught him what a transcontinental road could not do. The second time took a week and showed him what 30 years of improvements looked like.
The system he signed in 1956 was not the Lincoln Highway, but the Lincoln Highway was the reason everyone understood the difference between what the country had and what it needed.
