 |
In 1912, Carl Fisher of Indianapolis came up with what was a radical and preposterous idea for the time. He wanted to build a coast-to-coast highway across the U.S. that could be easily navigated by any motorist. As a manufacturer of automotive accessories and the founder of the Indianapolis Speedway, Carl Fisher believed the automobile was the wave of the future. He also knew that the development of the automobile was linked to the improvement of passable roads. Cars were swiftly evolving from sputtering horseless carriages into smooth, reliable transportation. But America's roads were pretty much the same as they had been throughout the 19th century.
The development of roads, at that time, was left to local towns or counties and it was not a high priority. There was no federal funding for road building whatsoever. Whatever road work took place was an afterthought--a locally coordinated stop-gap measure to fix a damaged road or bridge. Advanced planning, cooperation and coordination between states was unheard of. There was a lack of road building skills in those days because there was very little need for improved roads. The roads of 1912 were well-suited to accommodate the traffic of horse-drawn carriages and buggies--the majority of the vehicles on the road at the time. This was, after all, an America which was only recently out of the Victorian era. The automobile was a relatively newfangled invention and there weren't that many of them on the road.
Aside from the roads being ill-equipped to handle automobile traffic, there was no such thing as cross-country routes. Very little information even existed about how to get from one city to another by road. It sounds ludicrous by today's standards, but in fact, few roads actually led anywhere. Some roads radiated out from towns into rural areas, but these roads were used mainly by farmers bringing their produce to markets or rail centers in town. They usually did not connect from one city to another. The smooth, fast railroad was really the travel method of choice for long distances anyway. One of the only aids in navigation at the time was The Automotive Blue Book, which was made up primarily of text and contained almost no maps. It relied on anecdotal information and landmarks to string these disjointed, isolated dirt roads into long distance routes. It had directions like "Fork in center of town; bear right, keep going along RR. Pass stone water trough."
Just before the turn of the century, John and Louise Davis tried to travel from New York City to San Francisco by car. They were making such poor time that a bicyclist with only one arm who left New York ten days after them passed them in Syracuse. They gave up the grueling journey when they got to Chicago. Mr. Davis said that automobile touring demanded "plenty of pluck, patience, and profanity, and I think that I am becoming proficient." The first cross-country automobile trip was completed by Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson in 1903 and it took 63 days. Carl Fisher's highway was to be called the Coast-To-Coast Rock Highway. It would be a gravel road that would run from New York City all the way to San Francisco. He wanted to have the road finished in time for motorists to use it to travel to the Pan American expo, which was to be held in San Francisco in 1915. He estimated that it would cost only 10 million dollars to complete. He issued releases to the press about his planned highway. Public excitement over the idea grew as newspapers speculated about the possible route of Fisher's highway. Financial support from industry and private citizens flowed in as towns vied for the chance to be included along the path of the first transcontinental highway.
In 1913, they had raised $4 million and decided on a new name for the project--the Lincoln Highway. Fisher and a few other key people, including Henry Joy and Frank Seiberling, president of Goodyear incorporated the Lincoln Highway Association and published their statement of purpose: "To immediately promote and procure the establishment of a continuous improved highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, open to lawful traffic of all description, without toll charges and to be of concrete wherever practicable." They LHA presented their route to state Governors and the press. The Lincoln Highway started at Times Square in New York City, headed through Trenton and Philadelphia then turned west. It passed through Pittsburgh, Ohio, Ft. Wayne and South Bend and bypassed Chicago. The flat topography allowed the route to shoot directly west across Illinois and Iowa. It then crossed into Omaha to Cheyenne, through the edge of the Great Salt Lake, then went on to Reno and over the Donner Pass into Sacramento. From there, it went up through Stockton and into San Francisco by way of a ferry from Oakland. The route ended in Lincoln Park in San Francisco and was a total of 3,389 miles. It ran through 12 states. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It is easy to take well-built, well-organized interstate highways for granted today, but back in 1912 less than 7% of the roads in the U.S. were improved in any way whatsoever. Most roads were just dirt, heavily rutted by the thin, hard wheels of wagons and buggies and would turn into mud holes at the first sign of rain. An "improved" road back then didn't even mean brick or cobblestone city streets or gravel macadam roads. A dirt road with engineered drainage was considered improved. There were only a few miles of paved concrete roads in the whole country and these were experimental. 
In spite of the lack of roads and information, a few resilient automotive adventurers still set out on cross-country treks. But these were feats of daring, not relaxed get-away vacations. Under these conditions, traveling long distances in an automobile was a laborious, confusing ordeal, more akin to riding a pogo stick across the Rocky Mountains than it is to the interstate automobile travel of today. Road maps and road signs didn't really exist outside of the northeast. Automobile tourists were left to stop at farm houses and ask directions. Unfortunately, most farmers only knew about roads that were within 20 miles of their house. People's lives centered specifically either around urban life or rural farm life. 