Greetings
From The Lincoln Highway: America's First Coast-to Coast Road ,
by Brian Butko
The first thing I did when I finished reading
Brian Butko's extraordinary new classic Greetings From The
Lincoln Highway: America's First Coast-to Coast Road was
to grab my planning calendar and pencil in a two-week period
that I can use to go explore what's left of this amazing historical
road. Doesn't traveling from New York to San Francisco on a
highway that pre-dates Route 66 by more than a decade sound
romantic?
The Lincoln Highway, "America's Main Street"
is approximately 3,400 miles long and travels through fourteen
states. New York claims the shortest piece of Lincoln Highway
with only one mile inside its borders. Nevada, Nebraska and
Wyoming have the longest stretches -- each has over 400 miles.
While Henry Joy generally gets the credit for naming the road,
it was quite interesting to learn that Frances McEwen Belford,
a Colorado politician, introduced a bill in Congress in September,
1911, calling for the creation of a "Lincoln Memorial
Highway between Boston and San Francisco" years before
the official proclamation of the new highway on September
14, 1913.
Butko does an excellent job of weaving in historical
detail gathered from the published journals of early travelers
together with his own discoveries in the 21st century. Beyond
the often humorous tales told by those hardy automotive pioneers,
the author vividly conveys the complex story of the infighting
and intense gamesmanship that went on as local politicians
and business leaders sought to gain the prestige of having
the first transcontinental highway pass through their jurisdictions.
One tangible result of the infighting is that
there is no one route. Different factions within the state
governments and the Lincoln Highway Association kept revising
the route over its lifetime, and among the best features of
this book are the color maps Butko uses to detail the generational
changes for the route in each of the states. The story of
the highway is told from east to west, with the opening chapter
discussing the original eastern terminus at Times Square and
then progressing westward all the way to the parking lot at
the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco,
which at one time was fittingly known as Land's End.
While not specific enough to use exclusively
to physically navigate the entire route across the country,
the book has more than enough detail to travel the Lincoln
Highway by armchair. A fabulous addition to any coffee table,
the book has over 400 gorgeous color and black-and-white photographs,
vintage postcard reproductions and snippets from the memoirs
of early travelers. That would be enough to make this book
worthwhile, but it is the author's prose and meticulous research
that is the real delight. Butko shares the stories and secrets
of a legendary road that we as modern travelers would never
discover on our own. For instance, near New Carlise, Indiana,
there is a field adjacent to the highway studded with an assemblage
of 8,259 pine trees. These trees were planted to spell out
the word "Studebaker," making the forest the largest
living advertising sign in the world. Legible only from the
air, it's a roadside marvel you could drive by forever without
ever learning its secret.
Two other elements that I will be looking for
after reading this book are the phenomena known as "Seedling
Miles" and the "Ideal Segment." The Lincoln
Highway engineers made a point of choosing particularly bad
sections of dirt road. Then they built pristine concrete highways
for a mile or so -- "Seedling Miles" -- as a way
of inspiring the local citizenry to encourage local governments
to pave the rest of the roadway. The "Ideal Segment"
was a 1.3-mile stretch between Schereville and Dwyer, Illinois,
that was built between 1921 and 1923 to showcase the latest
concepts in highway design, landscaping and lighting.
Much of the Lincoln Highway has been incorporated
into modern highway routes and obliterated, but there are
still sections that are in nearly the same condition as they
were in the early 1920s. In Iowa, nearly 85% of the route
has been bypassed by modern highways and can still be driven.
Surprisingly, much of the surviving route throughout the country
is still dirt. Also surprising is that quite a few of the
roadside motels and attractions that were popular in the 1920s
are still open and serving customers today. Butko does a great
job of matching historical perspectives with current-day observations
for many of these operations.
Whether you are an armchair traveler or a back-road
wanderer, this visually appealing, easy-reading, high-quality
hardback book will delight, educate and enrich your understanding
of America's original cross-country highway. It really is
an American classic and one that belongs in every road lore
enthusiast's personal library.
Mark
Sedenquist
3/26/06
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