Lincoln Highway Travels

The Beginning

And so begins my first voyage on what I hope will be a long pilgrimage across the US on the Lincoln Highway. 

For years my travels on the Lincoln Highway (Rt 30) have been primarily confined to the chunk that exists in Lancaster County, PA. Around here, we think of it as the road to the outlet malls, or to Dutch Wonderland, or to get a bite to eat, or even to begin a trip to the Jersey Shore. Just another road. Good enough for me. My background is in marketing and publishing, not engineering or architecture. I admire great bridges and other amazing engineering feats from afar, then move on.
 One day I read that the Lincoln Highway stretches from New York to San Francisco and was the nation’s first transcontinental highway. 
 That seemed unlikely to me. This road, a road packed with old diners and old motels, this road that in Southern Lancaster County is backed-up for miles with shoppers anxious to get a great deal at the outlet malls, this is the road that became the nation’s first transcontinental highway stretching from New York to San Francisco? 
 The story of the Lincoln Highway begins in 1912, not with a construction or engineering blueprint, but with a marketing plan. Carl Fisher, founder of the Prest-O-Lite Company, had an idea. He was the maker of the first dependable automobile headlight. He reasoned that since the nation already had a transcontinental railway, what it needed to move it into the modern age was a transcontinental highway. What a great idea, not to mention a great way to sell more headlights.
 I can imagine Carl laying out those big scrolling maps and connecting the dots of every little town and village and city. That Carl was a smart one. He later developed and paved the Indianapolis Speedway with bricks and turned swampland in Florida into Miami.
 What a great story. And I have always been amazed at what a great story and some roadside advertising can do.
 So I decided to start out from Lancaster County and head west on the Lincoln Highway to see what I could see.
 Not all at once, don’t have time for that—I still have to earn a living. No, piece by piece is what I have in mind.