1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy

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description: US Army transcontinental expedition evaluating the state of America's roads

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The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift  · 8 Jun 2011  · 423pp  · 129,831 words

we were hungry, when we tired, and wherever caught our fancy. We'd make a circle of the Lower Forty-eight, first on the old Lincoln Highway, America's Main Street, a ribbon of pavement twisting through twelve states, New York at one end, San Francisco at the other, few big cities

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Lincoln Memorial then contemplated in Washington. No surprise, then, that not far into 1913, the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway acquired a new name. The Lincoln Highway Association incorporated in June 1913, with its offices in Detroit, Joy as its president, and Fisher as a vice president. Joy wasn't in town

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rope. Their preparations aroused tremendous excitement in the newspapers, and even more among western city and state officials who assumed their route marked the future Lincoln Highway—and who knew that (a) a place on such a main route was a ticket to prosperity, while (b) the Plains were dotted with the

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the trip without the loss of a single car—without any mechanical trouble, really, except blown tires. All of America was now talking about the Lincoln Highway. In terms of publicity, the Hoosier tour could scarcely have gone better. For all of that, Fisher had to confront some hard realities on his

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. One such town was Jefferson, Iowa, where the speakers included a stiff, serious young state highway engineer by the name of Thomas Harris MacDonald. The Lincoln Highway would be a fine asset, MacDonald said, but its greatest value lay in its status as a starting point, as " the first outlet for the

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, motor tourists, and leaders of the AAA, all of whom favored long-distance highways. In the months before Carl Fisher unveiled his proposal for the Lincoln Highway, Capitol Hill had witnessed the introduction of sixty separate bills proposing solutions of great variety—for Federal Aid, for federal construction of post roads, for

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group's executive committee was the tense, unsmiling Iowa engineer who'd spoken at the Lincoln's dedication: Thomas MacDonald. By its first anniversary, the Lincoln Highway's secretary, A. R. Pardington, boasted that it was " the longest road in the world," and " the most traveled road in the world," and " the

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modest, thirty-five-room hotel, named, again, for Lincoln. And he envisioned an artery to supply his venture with auto tourists, a tributary of the Lincoln Highway that would connect the industrial Midwest with Miami Beach. He initially called it the " Hoosier Land to Dixie Highway," envisioned it starting in Indianapolis and

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and culverts, drained surfaces, shiftless beds, and few sharp curves or steep grades. " The hills are being cut off and dumped into the valleys," the Lincoln Highway's Henry Joy said of the work. " Oftentimes the cuts are thirty feet deep." He'd accomplished this with next to nothing. For most of

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be so determined as to join with the primary system of the bordering counties" to form " the great trans-state roads" he mentioned at the Lincoln Highway dedication. When Iowa reorganized its highway commission in 1913, Mac­Donald, now the state highway engineer, started to assemble the system of primary roads he

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will be coming to the people of Iowa during generations to come." The second half of his note was devoted to an aside about the Lincoln Highway. " You may be amused that I am trying to bring about a trip to the Pacific coast of an Army Truck Train," he wrote,

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a convoy of its trucks across the country, from Washington to San Francisco, on the Lincoln Highway that summer. Among the officers assigned to the mission was a young lieutenant colonel named Eisenhower. PART II Connecting the Dots 4 DWIGHT EISENHOWER ENJOYED little promise of a great military future when, in the first days of July 1919

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by a flock of civilian hangers-on. It took seven hours to reach Frederick, where Eisenhower reported for duty, ready, he admitted later, for a summertime lark. Instead he got " a genuine adventure." The convoy joined the Lincoln Highway in Gettysburg and grunted up its twisting, steeply graded path over the Alleghenies. The greenhorn

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route had a downside: it added miles to the desert crossing, miles that translated to hours spent under a broiling, potentially lethal sun. So the Lincoln Highway Association had committed to trimming the route. In November 1916, Carl Fisher had donated $25,000 of his own money toward a shortcut through a

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flat stood in the way. Still, Conley's was not a lone voice in the proverbial desert. The following year, Dwight Eisenhower had noted a sharpening dispute " between the Lincoln Highway Association and some of the people in the section west of Salt Lake City" in his after-action report. If the bureau

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such talk, it was passing. Decisions on location and routing belonged to the states; only a flagrantly unsound choice would provoke MacDonald's intercession. The Lincoln Highway Association didn't seem overly worried about the grousing, either, perhaps because its existing route had been suggested by Utah's own governor in 1913

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later he informed Wallace that they'd formally rejected his suggestion. " We do not desire to differ," he explained. " Facts compel it." With that, the Lincoln Highway hewed to a line that doomed it. For the first time in its history, the association had chosen a route that was bound to be

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curves, its lighting, its capacity. The first tentative step toward building some unity of thought came not from AASHO or the bureau, but from the Lincoln Highway Association. While debate over the Townsend bill was still going strong, the Lincoln's leaders decided to build a section of ideal road—a combination

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: Use the smallest quantity of water that will produce a plastic or workable concrete." This was still very fresh news when, two years later, the Lincoln Highway Association approached the Chief about serving on its committee. Which is to say that the roads on which American motorists traveled—or some of them

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as he mentioned it, James later wrote, " Sargent said he was with the whole idea." His next stop was Detroit, and the offices of the Lincoln Highway Association, where he " laid [his] scheme before them, very frankly telling them that it would mean the end of the

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Lincoln Highway Association, the Dixie, and all others." Privately, the association's leaders weren't thrilled with the idea. " In the factory, a motor car model might

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it all; said they were for a big plan for roads across the U.S.; would be with my scheme if I would give the Lincoln Highway recognition so far as possible in the No. 30," James wrote. " I agreed to do all I could to put it across, and so

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closer to matching the coarse desert floor, the bare palisades that form the northern rim of its valley, a little closer to vanishing altogether. The Lincoln Highway's end came just a year after the new numbers became official. Traffic crossing the desert was shifting more every year to the Wendover Road

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made a most disastrous move" and promised that if " we, with our great intelligence, are to put on the map of the United States a Lincoln Highway with such a ‘broken back' in the middle of it, then I will regret all my life that I ever started the work, or ever

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to us all." He wrote more, a lot more, but it didn't sway the others to revisit the decision. With the new year, the Lincoln Highway Association closed its Detroit office and assigned Gael Hoag, its field secretary, the task of distributing the concrete markers, each adorned with the highway's

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out-of-towners merely passing through. The new U.S. 30, for instance, drilled straight through the heart of most towns it encountered, following the Lincoln Highway's lead. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, it met U.S. 15 in the town square; at Pittsburgh it twisted and turned through the central business district

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behind." In fact, the surveys showed that there was precious little demand for the open roads that politicians and automakers had pushed for since the Lincoln Highway's debut. Americans seldom drove long distances; journeys of 29.9 miles and less accounted for 88 percent of all trips. Those of more than

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. I-10 would stretch from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida; and I-80, from San Francisco to New York, for the most part shadowing the Lincoln Highway. A fourth, I-40, would come close to going the distance, beginning a couple of hours northeast of L.A. in the desert outpost of

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station on U.S. 80 in east Texas lost 80 percent of his business immediately after I-20 opened nearby. A long stretch of the Lincoln Highway in Nebraska saw three-quarters of its traffic evaporate after I-80 opened a little to the south. Connecticut's neon-lined Berlin Turnpike, packed

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a 500"; Borgeson, The Golden Age of the American Racing Car. [>] "Three of us drove out nine miles...": D. R. Lane and Gael Hoag, The Lincoln Highway: The Story of a Crusade That Made Transportation History (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1935). [>] Alongside passenger cars came the first trucks ...: "A Broad Road

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. Fisher, The Pacesetter: The Untold Story of Carl G. Fisher (Fort Bragg, CA: Lost Coast Press, 1998). [>] Four nights later ...: Ibid.; Lane and Hoag, The Lincoln Highway; NYT, September 15, 1912. [>] Joy brought field expertise ...: Henry Joy, "Transcontinental Trails: Their Development and What They Mean to This Country," Scribner's, February 1914

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the highway swing through Washington, D.C. Joy refused the request (Bentley). [>] One such town was Jefferson ...: Jefferson Bee, November 5, 1913; Richard Weingroff, "The Lincoln Highway," http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/lincoln.cfm; Farwell T. Brown, Ames in Word and Picture (Ames, IA: Heuss Printing Inc., 1999). [>] The federal government

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5, 1914. [>]Farther west, little had changed ...: Mark Twain, Roughing It. [>] That was the nature of the West ...: Lincoln Highway Official Guidebook of 1915, reissued by the modern association. I bought my copy at Lincoln Highway Association (LHA) headquarters in Franklin Grove, IL. [>] A. L. Westgard, the AAA's field agent ...: A. L. Westgard

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, "Motor Routes to the California Expositions," Motor, March 1915; Henry Joy, "Seeing America and the Lincoln Highway," Scientific American, January 1, 1916. [>] Others had attempted ...: Fisher biographies. [>] And he envisioned an artery ...: Ibid.; Claudette Stager and Martha Carver, eds., Looking beyond the

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Act ...: Transcript of the August 15, 1916, session (Archives). [>] And while its people might gush ...: F. H. Trego, Hints to Transcontinental Tourists Traveling on the Lincoln Highway, originally published in 1914 and reissued by the modern-day LHA. Trego's advice on firearms was the conventional wisdom of early autoists—see "A

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Joy's February 18, 1927, letter to U.S. Sen. Tasker Oddie (Joy papers, Bentley). [>] But in September 1919 ...: My account of the Wendover Road controversy was informed by documents preserved in the Lincoln Highway and Federal Aid-Utah files at the Archives: L. I. Hewes's letter to his Utah district engineer

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of October 18, 1921; "The Lincoln Highway," an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1922; "Nevada Urges Utah's Governor to Complete Lincoln Way," a news release containing an April

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7, 1922, letter from Nevada officials to Utah governor Charles R. Mabey; Gael Hoag, June 8, 1922, report to the Lincoln Highway board; Hoag's July 25, 1922, report to the BPR on "Primary East and West Highways in Utah & Nevada"; undated BPR "Memorandum re Federal Aid

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Highway?" editorial, Scientific American, December 1922. I also relied on the Fisher biographies and Davies, American Road. [>] Newspapers throughout the West ...: "Statement of Facts on Lincoln Highway," Ely Daily Times, February 3, 1922; editorial in the Mountain Democrat of El Dorado County, CA, quoted in "Broken Faith," editorial, Salt Lake Citizen, March

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...: The LHA's efforts to build its "Ideal Section" are detailed in its survey results, titled "An Ideal Section: The Lincoln Highway" (Archives); "Minutes of Meetings of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Lincoln Highway Association, held at the Yale Club, New York City, on Friday and Saturday, December 18 and 19, 1920" (Archives

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); "Resolutions Passed by the Technical Committee" (Archives); "Plan Ideal Motor Road," NYT, January 2, 1921; and W. G. Thompson, "Design Features of Lincoln Highway 'Ideal Section,'" ENR, June 15, 1922. [>] Finally, its surface...: MacDonald's views on surfacing materials dominate his correspondence with the LHA from March 1920 to

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and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); notes from my visit to the town site in July 2006. [>] The Lincoln Highway's end...: The association's internal struggle over the road's final route in Utah and Nevada and its concurrent decision to disband are chronicled

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in letters filed in Henry Joy's papers at the Bentley. [>] At a busy intersection...: "A Safety Intersection on the Lincoln Highway," TAC, January 1930. [>] In September 1925...: Fisher biographies; "Carl G. Fisher Buys on Montauk Point," NYT, September 22, 1925; "Florida Resorts Boom Long Island," NYT

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relied on Yankee ingenuity. Its particulars, they said, were inspired by or borrowed from Robert Moses's New York parkways, the Woodbridge cloverleaf on the Lincoln Highway, and consultations with the bureau and state highway officials. This became a popular view immediately after the war, when there weren't many German engineers

Parks Directory of the United States

by Darren L. Smith and Kay Gill  · 1 Jan 2004

Pulaski counties, ending at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers at Cairo. Time to Allow: 4 hours (Illinois section). ★1168★ LINCOLN HIGHWAY Illinois Lincoln Highway Coalition 200 South State St Belvidere, IL 61008 Web: www.lincolnhwyil.com Phone: 866-455-4249 Length: 179 miles. Designation/Year: National Scenic

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Byway (2000). Description: The historic byway follows the original alignment of the Lincoln Highway, the first paved, transcontinental highway in the United States. It was the site of the first ‘‘seedling mile’’ of paved roadway, conceived and

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kancamagus Scenic Byway (NH) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail (OH). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lake Tahoe Eastshore Drive (NV) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lakes to Locks Passage (NY) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Las Vegas Strip (NV) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lincoln Highway (IL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Dixie Highway of the Great River Road (MO) . . . . . . . . . Loess Hills Scenic Byway (IA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Logan Canyon Scenic Byway (UT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . McKenzie Pass-Santiam Pass Scenic

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4756 Lincoln (Abraham): DC 113, 224; IL 1165, 2206, 2262; IN 1172, 2345; KY 2, 2494; MD 5239; PA 150; SD 252 Lincoln Highway: IL 1168; UT 736 Lincoln (Nancy Hanks): IN 222; KY 2494; MO 3023; TN 332 Lincoln Park Conservatory: IL 4830; MO 3023 Lincoln Park

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Le-Aqua-Na State Recreation Area. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2258 Lake Murphysboro State Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2259 LaSalle Lake State Fish & Wildlife Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2260 Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .★1062 Lincoln Highway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1168 Lincoln Home National Historic Site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 Lincoln Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4830 Lincoln Trail Homestead State Memorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2261 Lincoln Trail State Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Kiln Point State Park (WA). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4598 Limekiln State Park (CA). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1633 Lincoln (Abraham) Birthplace National Historic Site (KY) . . . . . . . 2 Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial (IN). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 Lincoln Highway (IL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1168 Lincoln Home National Historic Site (IL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 Lincoln Homestead State Park (KY) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2494 Lincoln Memorial (DC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 Lincoln National Forest (NM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism

by Joyce Appleby  · 22 Dec 2009  · 540pp  · 168,921 words

and sometimes required oxen to pull the trucks out of the mud. The new interstate highway system followed the same route, the old Lincoln Highway, as the army convoy of 1919.18 Organized labor became a force in the American economy after passage of the Wagner Act, formally known as the National Labor Relations

The Great Air Race: Glory, Tragedy, and the Dawn of American Aviation

by John Lancaster  · 15 Nov 2022  · 446pp  · 118,445 words

of the nation’s road network, he persuaded friends in the industry to join him on a project of spectacular ambition. They called it the Lincoln Highway. It would span the breadth of the country, running for 3,239 miles from New York’s Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco

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. Henry Joy, the president of the Packard Motor Car Company, took charge of fund-raising and a spirited publicity campaign, under the banner of the Lincoln Highway Association. Besides stoking newspaper coverage and distributing pennants, stationery, and radiator badges, the group published guidebooks for intrepid motorists—something of a leap of faith

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motorists came to appreciate their benefits. In the meantime, though, driving the Lincoln Highway was not for the faint of heart—as the Army was among the first to discover. On the morning of July 7, 1919, a convoy of eighty-one military vehicles—trucks, kitchen trailers, touring cars, motorcycles, ambulances, and a massive, tractor

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-like wrecker called a Militor—rumbled out of downtown Washington, D.C., and snaked along country roads through Maryland to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There it joined the Lincoln Highway and set out for

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with tanks. The memory stayed with him. As president in 1956, Eisenhower would sign the bill creating the Interstate Highway System, having learned better than most the value of good roads. As for the Lincoln Highway, it was quickly forgotten, subsumed by the network of numbered state highways—some built

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with federal funds—that followed the first national highway bill passed by Congress in 1921. But the Lincoln Highway had served its purpose. And now the U.S. Post Office was poised to play a similar pioneering role by opening an air route across

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the early 1900s, he arguably had done as much to promote the automobile as Henry Ford or any of the movers and shakers behind the Lincoln Highway. Now, at sixty-two, he was determined to do the same for the airplane. Glidden built his fortune on another modern marvel. A native of

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more than eighty saloons. By 1919, however, Sidney had mostly shed its brawling, disreputable image. It was now a prosperous farming and ranching community of about 2,800 people, with a new high school and a handsome public library built by the Carnegie Corporation. The Lincoln Highway had arrived in 1913, followed by

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been passing,” Goodall wrote in a letter to one of Menoher’s aides that included a rough map. “It is located just south of the Lincoln Highway, and north of the south Plate [sic] river and Union Pacific Railway, one mile and a quarter due west of Ogallala.” A hangar already had

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Aerodrome, 36 Lee, Arthur Gould, 102 Leidos Flight Service, 262, 264 Leonardo da Vinci, 101 Lewis, Meriwether, 46 Library of Congress, xvi Lincoln Highway, 47–49, 57, 68–69, 239 Lincoln Highway Association, 47 Lindbergh, Charles A., xv, 42, 235, 246 Lipsner, Benjamin, 52, 53, 54 localizers (radio direction finders), 237 Locklear, Ormer, 99

The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar  · 9 Jun 2014  · 523pp  · 159,884 words

automotive industry, began to consider building a transcontinental road. In 1919, a military convoy traveled from coast to coast using the partly completed road known as the Lincoln Highway and took sixty days to make the journey. It was led by Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was so appalled at the poor condition of the

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roads that, when he was president in the 1950s, he launched the program to build the interstate network that would have such a devastating effect on the railroads (see next chapter). The thirty-three-hundred-mile Lincoln Highway, mostly called

The Man Who Invented the Computer

by Jane Smiley  · 18 Oct 2010  · 253pp  · 80,074 words

back to his office in the physics building, but that was no good, either. So he jumped in his new car and headed for the Lincoln Highway—the two-lane road that was the first highway to connect the East Coast with the West Coast (Times Square in New York with Lincoln

Turing's Cathedral

by George Dyson  · 6 Mar 2012

end of 1928. In 1913 the former Lenni Lenape footpath through Princeton had become part of the first transcontinental motorway across the United States. The Lincoln Highway, beginning at Times Square in New York City and terminating at an overlook above Point Lobos in San Francisco, followed the route of the old

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth

by Jeremy Rifkin  · 9 Sep 2019  · 327pp  · 84,627 words

System. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was keen on erecting a vast interstate highway system, in part because of his own personal experience in the military. In 1919, when he was a young colonel in the army, he participated in a motor convoy across the continental United States on the historic Lincoln Highway—at that time the

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

by Parag Khanna  · 18 Apr 2016  · 497pp  · 144,283 words

better example than America’s own Interstate Highway System, ushered in by President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. Having participated in an exhausting cross-country convoy from Washington to San Francisco in 1919 along the degraded, muddy, and potholed Lincoln Highway (America’s first transcontinental road) and then witnessed the advantages of Germany’s sturdy

Southwest USA Travel Guide

by Lonely Planet

National Park and the Nevada state line, remote Highway 50 follows some of Americas most iconic routes – the Pony Express, the Overland Stagecoach and the Lincoln Highway – across the heart of the state. Why Go? Why would you drive the Loneliest Road in America? As mountaineer George Mallory said about Everest: ‘Because