Route 66 is known as “the Mother Road,” but those who first navigated the Lincoln Highway called it a mother, too. It was America’s first transcontinental passage, and it changed everything, the way the railroad had 50 years earlier.
In 1903, Ford Motor Company was incorporated, the Wright Brothers flew at Kittyhawk, and Dr. H. Nelson Jackson won a $50 bet by driving a 20hp Winton from San Francisco to New York. The journey took 65 days and covered 6,000 miles.
Carl G. Fisher had paved the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1911, and founded the Prest-O-Lite Company, before 1912 when he got an idea for “the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway.”
It was to be a great paved road connecting New York with San Francisco in time for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.
Early funding came from car manufacturers and related industries, like Goodyear’s Frank A. Seiberling. Henry Ford’s support might have inspired an industry-wide contribution, but he believed that taxpayers should pay for their own roads, and declined. Packard President, Henry B. Joy suggested that Congress spend $1.7 million not on a statue of Lincoln, in Washington, but on a great highway in his honor instead.
When funds ran low, Joy proposed the “seedling mile,” a sample section of completed roadway to be built in strategic, and especially rural areas, where the contrast would be the most evident, as a means of generating interest. The first, in DeKalb, Illinois, was just ten feet wide, and drew huge crowds.
By 1915, the promise of developing land in Miami Beach pulled Fisher away from his highway. Barely finished, it was passable enough to carry nearly 10,000 cars to the Expo.
When President Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, it meant more highways could be built, but involvement in WWI postponed such progress. Then, in 1921, President Harding’s Federal Highway Act amounted to 200,000 miles of improved roadways throughout the country. Within two years, a vast national network of highways began to emerge.
On November 19, 1925, a method for numbering highways was implemented, and with the addition of interstates, remains essentially unchanged today. But it spelled the end for Lincoln Highway as anyone knew it. The great road was broken up into several numbered roads, and law required that all markers and signs for named highways be taken down.
But it had served its purpose. It had made unforeseen things possible. It had created thousands of jobs, and allowed great advances in industry and commerce. The Lincoln Highway was a sign of progress, of things to come, and a demonstration of American ingenuity.