In 2003, the Lincoln Highway Association sponsored the 90th
Anniversary Tour of the entire road, from Times Square in New York City
to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. The tour group, led by Bob Lichty and
Rosemary Rubin of LHA and sponsored by
Lincoln-
Mercury division of the
Ford Motor Company, set out from Times Square on August 17, 2003. Approximately 35 vintage and modern vehicles, including several new
Lincoln Town Cars and
Lincoln Navigators
from Lincoln-Mercury, traveled about 225 miles (362 km) per day and
attempted to cover as many of the original Lincoln Highway alignments as
possible. The group was met by LHA chapters, car clubs, local tourism
groups and community leaders throughout the route. Several Boy Scout
troops along the way held ceremonies to commemorate the 75th Anniversary
of the nationwide LH route marker post erection of September 1, 1928.
When the tour concluded at Lincoln Park, in front of the
Palace of the Legion of Honor
in San Francisco, another ceremony was held to honor both the 90th
Anniversary of the road and the 75th anniversary of the post erections.
In 2013, the Lincoln Highway Association hosted a tour commemorating the highway's 100th anniversary.
[18]
Over 270 people traveling in 140 vehicles, from 28 states and from
Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Norway and Russia, participated in
the two tours which started simultaneously the last week of June 2013 in
New York City and San Francisco, and took one week to reach the
midpoint of the Lincoln Highway in
Kearney, Nebraska.
The tour cars, both historical and modern, spanned 100 years, from 1913
to 2013, and included two of Henry B. Joy's original Lincoln Highway
Packards, as well as a 1948 Tucker (car #8). On June 30, 2013, the
Centennial Parade in downtown Kearney featuring the tour cars plus
another 250 vehicles was attended by 12,500 people. The next day, on
July 1, 2013, the Centennial Celebration Gala was hosted at the Great
Platte River Road Archway Museum, where a proclamation from the United
States Senate was presented to the Lincoln Highway Association.
An independent international motor tour also toured the highway from
July 1–26. Seventy-one classic cars were shipped from Europe to the
United States and driven the entire route before being shipped home.
[19]
In 2015, the Lincoln Highway Association hosted a tour celebrating the 100th anniversary of the famed 1915 tour led by
Henry B. Joy, president of the original Lincoln Highway Association, from Detroit to the 1915
Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
[20] Joy was president of the
Packard Motor Car Company.
Both the Packard Club (Packard Automobile Classics) and the Packards
International Motor Car Club participated in the planning of the tour.
[21][22] The 2015 tour, with 103 people in 55 cars, took 12 days and traveled 2,836 miles (4,564 km) from the
Packard Proving Grounds north of Detroit to the Lincoln Highway Western Terminus in
Lincoln Park in San Francisco.
Mapping
In 2012, the 25-member Lincoln Highway Association National Mapping Committee, chaired by
Paul Gilger,
completed the research and cartography of the entire Lincoln Highway
and all its subsequent realignments (totaling 5,872 mi or 9,450 km), a
project which took more than 20 years. The association's interactive map
website includes map, terrain, satellite and street-level views of the
entire Lincoln Highway and all of its re-alignments, markers, monuments
and historic points of interest.
Roadside Giants of the Lincoln Highway.
Roadside giants
During
early Lincoln Highway days, business owners were intrigued with all the
automobiles traveling the Lincoln Highway. In an effort to capture the
business of these new motorists, some entrepreneurs created
larger-than-life buildings in quirky shapes. Structures like Bedford's
2 1⁄2-story coffee pot, or the
Shoe House in York are great examples of Roadside Giants of the Lincoln Highway.
[23]
The oversized quarter at the entrance to Down River Golf Course
In 2008, the Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor secured funding from
the Sprout Fund in Pittsburgh for a new kind of Roadside Giants of the
Lincoln Highway. High school boys and girls enrolled in five different
career and technology schools along the 200-mile (320 km) Lincoln
Highway Heritage Corridor were invited to create their own Giant that
would be permanently installed along the old Lincoln. The project
involved collaboration among the schools' graphic arts, welding,
building trades, and culinary arts departments. A structural engineer
was hired to provide professional guidance to the design and
installation of the Giants.
[23] They include:
- A 12-foot-high (3.7 m) 1920s Packard Car and Driver
- A 25-foot-high (7.6 m), 4,900-pound (2,200 kg) replica of a 1940s Bennett Gas Pump
- The 1,800-pound (820 kg) "Bicycle Built for Two"
- The oversized quarter, weighing almost a ton
- An amazingly detailed 1921 Selden pick-up truck
- The world's largest teapot, 12 feet (3.7 m) tall and 44 feet (13 m) wide
Medicine
The
carotid sheath,
a layer of connective tissue, was called the "Lincoln Highway of the
Neck" by Harris B. Mosher in his 1929 address to the American Academy of
Otology, because of its role in the spread of infections.
[24]
Media
Literature
In 1914, Effie Gladding wrote
Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway
about her travel adventures on the road with her husband Thomas.
Subsequently, Gladding wrote the foreword to the Lincoln Highway
Association's first road guide, directing it to women motorists. Her
1914 book was the first full-size hardback book to discuss
transcontinental travel, as well as the first to mention the Lincoln
Highway:
We were now to traverse the Lincoln Highway and were to be guided by
the red, white, and blue marks: sometimes painted on telephone poles;
sometimes put up by way of advertisement over garage doors or swinging
on hotel signboards; sometimes painted on little stakes, like croquet
goals, scattered along over the great spaces of the desert. We learned
to love the red, white, and blue, and the familiar big L which told us
that we were on the right road.[25]
In 1916, "Mistress of Etiquette"
Emily Post was commissioned by
Collier's
magazine to cross the United States on the Lincoln Highway and write
about it. Her son Edwin drove, and an unnamed family member joined them.
Her story was published as a book,
By Motor to the Golden Gate. Her fame came later in 1922, with the publication of her first etiquette book.
In 1919, author Beatrice Massey, who was a passenger as her husband
drove, travelled across the country on the Lincoln Highway. When they
reached Salt Lake City, Utah, instead of taking the rough and desolate
Lincoln Highway around the south end of the Salt Lake Desert, they took
the even more rough and more desolate "non-Lincoln" route around the
north end of the Great Salt Lake. The arduousness of that section of the
trip was instrumental in the Masseys deciding to ditch their road trip
in Montello, Nevada (northeast of Wells, Nevada) where they paid $196.69
to board their automobile and themselves on a train to travel the rest
of the way to California. Nevertheless, an enthusiastic Beatrice Massey
wrote in her 1919 travelogue
It Might Have Been Worse:
You will get tired, and your bones will cry aloud for a rest cure;
but I promise you one thing—you will never be bored! No two days were
the same, no two views were similar, no two cups of coffee tasted
alike...My advice to timid motorists is, "Go".[26]
In 1927, humorist Frederic Van de Water wrote
The Family Flivvers to Frisco,
an autobiographical account of him and his wife, a young couple from
New York City, piling their belongings and their six-year-old son into
their Model T Ford and camping their way to San Francisco on the Lincoln
Highway, traveling over 4,500 miles (7,200 km) through 12 states in 37
days. In his book, not much is made of the burden of traveling with a
child who has a mind of his own. When they were forced by passing cars
into a ditch near DeKalb, Illinois, Van de Water writes that his son ("a
small irate figure in yellow oilskins"
[citation needed]), "scrambled over the door and started to walk in the general direction of New York".
[citation needed] The Van de Waters' travel expenses for their entire trip amounted to $247.83.
[citation needed]
In 1951, Clinton Twiss authored the famous and funny memoir
The Long, Long Trailer,
about his adventures living in a trailer and traveling across America
with his wife Merle. Many of their episodes occurred on the Lincoln
Highway, including almost losing their brakes coming down off
Donner Pass, barely squeezing across the narrow
Lyons-Fulton Bridge over the
Mississippi River, and getting stopped at the
Holland Tunnel because trailers weren't allowed through. Twiss's book became the basis for the popular 1954
MGM film of the same name, directed by
Vincente Minnelli, and starring
Desi Arnaz and
Lucille Ball.
Although no filming occurred on the Lincoln Highway, early in the
movie, Desi, who finds Lucy's suggestion of living in a trailer
ridiculous, jokes: "The Collinis at home! Please drop in for cocktails!
You'll find us someplace along the Lincoln Highway!"
[citation needed]
In April 1988, the
University of Iowa Press published
Lincoln Highway, the Main Street Across America, a text-and-photo essay and history by Drake Hokanson.
[27]
Hokanson had been intrigued by the mystery of this once-famous highway,
and tried to explain the fascination with the route in an August 1985
article in
Smithsonian magazine:
If it had been restlessness and desire for a better way across the
continent that brought the Lincoln Highway into existence, it was
curiosity that kept it alive—the notion that the point of traveling was
not just to cover the distance but to savor the texture of life along
the way. Maybe we've lost that, but the opportunity to rediscover it is
still out there waiting for us anytime we feel like turning off an exit
ramp.[28]
From 1995 through 2009, author and historian Gregory Franzwa
(1926–2009) wrote a state-by-state series of books about the Lincoln
Highway. Franzwa completed seven books:
The Lincoln Highway: Iowa (1995),
The Lincoln Highway: Nebraska (1996),
The Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (1999),
The Lincoln Highway: Utah (with Jesse G. Petersen, 2003),
The Lincoln Highway: Nevada (with Jesse G. Petersen, 2004),
The Lincoln Highway: California (2006), and
The Lincoln Highway: Illinois
(2009). The books were published by the Patrice Press. Each state book
contains both detailed history and USGS level maps showing the various
Lincoln Highway alignments. Franzwa served as the first president of the
revitalized Lincoln Highway Association, in 1992.
In 2002, British author Pete Davies wrote
American Road: The Story of an Epic Transcontinental Journey at the Dawn of the Motor Age, about the
1919 Army Convoy on the Lincoln Highway. About the book,
Publishers Weekly said:
In his newest book, Davies (Inside the Hurricane; The Devil's Flu)
offers a play-by-play account of the 1919 cross-country military
caravan that doubled as a campaign for the Lincoln Highway. The
potential here is extraordinary. Using the progress of the caravan and
the metaphor of paving toward the future versus stagnating in the mud,
Davies touches on the industrial and social factors that developed the
small and mid-sized towns that line the highways and byways of the
nation.[citation needed]
In 2005,
Greetings from the Lincoln Highway: America's First Coast-to-Coast Road, a comprehensive
coffee table book
by Brian Butko, became the first complete guide to the road, with maps,
directions, photos, postcards, memorabilia, and histories of towns,
people, and places. A mix of research and on-the-road fun, the book
placed the LHA's early history in the context of roadbuilding, politics,
and geography, explaining why the Lincoln followed the path it did
across the US, including the oft-forgotten Colorado Loop through Denver.
Butko's book also incorporated quotes from early motoring memoirs and
postcard messages—sometimes funny, sometimes painfully descriptive of
early motoring woes—hence the
Greetings title. Butko had
previously written an exhaustive guide to the Lincoln Highway in
Pennsylvania in 1996, which was revised and republished in 2002 with
different photos and postcard images.
[29]
In July 2007, the W.W. Norton Company published
The Lincoln Highway, Coast-to-Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate: The Great American Road Trip by
Michael Wallis, best-selling author of
Route 66, and voice in the movie
Cars, and
Michael Williamson, twice a Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer with
The Washington Post.
[30]
Completed in 2009, Stackpole Books published
Lincoln Highway Companion: A Guide to America's First Coast-to-Coast Road,
authored by Brian Butko. This handy glove-compartment guide contains
carefully charted maps, must-see attractions, and places to eat and
sleep that are slices of pure Americana. The book covers the major
thirteen states the Lincoln Highway passes through, from New York to San
Francisco, as well as the little-known Colorado loop and the Washington
DC feeder loop.
1920's Packard Car and Driver
1940's gas pump
oversize quarter
1921 Selden Pick-up Truck
