U-M library is repository for records of first highway

Before sleek ribbons of concrete connecting the country from north to south and east to west, there was the Lincoln Highway traversing the country from New York City to San Francisco.

A 5 1/2-mile stretch of new bituminous macadam (top) on the Ridge Road portion of the Lincoln Highway in Van Wert, Ohio, was completed in 1918. Below is a warning sign for the top of a steep downgrade in Ohio. Bottom, a Stoney Indian astride a horse pauses next to the Lincoln Highway Packard automobile, near Banff, Alberta, Canada. Other photographs at the Transportation Library include views of construction under way, towns and cities, markers, bridges, cars, campsites and scenery. All photos courtesy U-M Transportation Library, Lincoln Highway Collection.

The country's interstate highway system is celebrating its 50th anniversary. But before these coast-to-coast routes became the favored mode of travel, there was the privately funded, cross-country Lincoln Highway.

It was 1956 when major auto manufacturers lobbied for the National Interstate and Defense Highways. Backed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who as a young soldier crossed the country on the Lincoln Highway, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 passed. The first highway generally followed the path of the Lincoln Highway.

The University's Transportation Library has an extensive archive pertaining to the Lincoln Highway and the resulting Lincoln Highway Association, formed in Detroit in 1913 by businessman Carl Fisher along with Frank Seiberling (then president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co.) and Henry Joy, then president of Packard Motor Co. With representatives from these and the cement industries, the organization planned, funded and constructed the first transcontinental highway in North America.

The route, consisting of both existing and newly built roads, followed the most direct route possible from New York to San Francisco, covering nearly 3,400 miles.

Now, views of that early transcontinental highway can be viewed on line at images.umdl.umich.edu
/cgi/i/image/image-idx?c=linchigh&page=index. Included in the U-M archive of materials from the Lincoln Highway Association's central office in Detroit are letters, manuscripts, trip logs, minutes of meetings of the Board of Directors, reports, contracts, membership sales and subscription records.

There are also planning documents, financial statements, press releases, publications and guides, including the 1928 logbook of Lincoln Highway markers made by local Boy Scouts. There are strip maps and a set of drawings by noted landscape architect Jens Jensen for the Indiana "Ideal Section."

Yet with all this, says librarian Kathleen Dow, the photographic collection seems to be of greatest interest among researchers. The photographs include views of construction under way, towns and cities, markers, bridges, cars, campsites, scenery and images—sometimes humorous, Dow says—of association directors and field secretaries traveling the route.

A recent gift from the Lincoln Highway Association has made it possible for the library to complete digitizing the photographic archive of the original association, making the entire visible history of more than 3,000 images of the early days of the Lincoln Highway available to the public. At its annual conference in June, the association also named U-M's Special Collections Library as its official archival repository, thus continuing the relationship begun more than a half century ago.