Background of Lincoln Highway Special Resource Study

[rotating photos] credits at bottom of page

The Lincoln Highway is a 3300-mile long road stretching across the United States from New York City to San Francisco. Its creation was the result of the first successful effort to create an all-weather transcontinental highway specifically for automobiles. Carl Fisher, Prest-O-Lite headlight manufacturer, launched the idea of developing a coast to coast highway in 1912. Fisher was soon joined in the promotion of this road, named the Lincoln Highway, by a cadre of executives from the automobile, tire, and Portland cement industries who used patriotic appeal and mass marketing to mastermind a national "good roads" campaign.

The Lincoln Highway began as a miscellaneous collection of downtown streets, country lanes, and old trails marked with signs showing an "L" rectangular graphic emblazoned in red, white, and blue. While the confusing and haphazardly maintained condition of the early Lincoln Highway illustrated the long-neglected nature of the American roads inherited by the automobile, by the 1920s, it had become the nation's premier cross-country thoroughfare and a testing ground for new road and bridge-building techniques. A dynamic, commercial roadside emerged along the Lincoln Highway and other roads of that era, pioneering the marketing of gas, food, lodging and other motorist services through innovative architectural form and design.

Today, the roads that comprise the Lincoln Highway approximate sections of the present day Federal and State Highway System: U.S. 1, 30, 40, 50, and I-80 traversing New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Early in its history, the Lincoln Highway was also routed through the northeastern corner of Colorado.

In December 2000, a bill was passed by Congress and signed by the President directing the National Park Service to coordinate a comprehensive study of the routes of the Lincoln Highway. This Special Resource Study (SRS) will evaluate the highway and related resources to present management alternatives for long-term preservation of the highway, including alternatives involving management as a unit of the National Park System, and management by state and local governments and private sector organizations. An environmental impact statement describing the potential environmental impacts of each management option will accompany the study.

A team of NPS staff with expertise in history and preservation of roads and trails, cultural landscapes, and planning from 4 NPS regions (Northeast, Midwest, Intermountain, and Pacific West), the NPS National Center for Cultural Resources, the Federal Highway Administration, and, through cooperative agreement, the Organization of American Historians and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, will work together on this Special Resource Study. The Midwest Regional Office will have the lead for the study, which is expected to take three years to complete.

Three rotating photographs depict:
1) A Model A on a 1920 brick section of the Lincoln Highway located in Elkhorn, NE. Courtesy of Carol Ahlgren
2) Widely advertised by motor guides and postcards, the Hotel Joliet benefitted from its central location relative to four major trunk routes that came to intersect in Joliet, IL; the Lincoln Highway (US 30), US 66, 52 and 6.
3) The 1913 Lincoln Highway was originally conceived to have been completed in time for San Francisco's 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Although the entire road would not be paved for nearly twenty more years, the Pan-Pac Exposition played a significant role in publicizing the early Lincoln Highway. Parallels were drawn between the Lincoln Highway and that other piece of transcontinental infrastructure celebrated by the fair, the Panama Canal.
Photos 2 and 3 courtesy of Kevin Patrick

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