The Little Brown Reader

America's first cross country highway

America's first cross country highway

In RV Travel Issue 97 we asked readers to name the first highway to span the United States. Was it Route 66, U.S. Route 1 or the Lincoln Highway?

Readers who chose the Lincoln Highway were correct. Route 66 received its number in 1926 and ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. U.S. 1 runs north-south along the East Coast.

The Lincoln Highway was America's first coast-to-coast road, started in 1913 by men in the automobile industry. Because the government was not yet building roads, the plan was to connect and improve already existing roads. The Lincoln and the hundreds of named roads which followed inspired the highway numbering system, which ultimately made the named highways obsolete.

In 1912, there were almost no good roads in the United States. The relatively few miles of improved road were only around towns and cities. A road was "improved" if it was graded. Asphalt and concrete were yet to come. To get from one settlement to another, it was much easier to take the train. Carl Fisher decided there needed to be a "Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway." And so he began a campaign to make it happen.

The road was dedicated on October 31, 1913. Towns and cities all across America celebrated with torchlite parades, bon fires, speeches, dances, fireworks and cannon fire. Completion wasn't as dramatic as the Last Spike in railroad lore but in 1927 the Boy Scouts of America honored the highway by placing commemorative markers from coast-to-coast. The highway was then transporting motorists across the continent, connecting Times Square and San Francisco.

By the late 1940s, the Lincoln Highway started to fade away. A new generation of Americans were born, one which had grown up with paved roads and a numbered highway system. Most Baby Boomers, and even more of their children, have never heard of the Lincoln Highway. But many stretches of the old Lincoln are still part of major auto routes. The most scenic and historic stretches include US 30 through Pennsylvania and western Nebraska and US 50 across central Nevada (the "Loneliest Road").

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)