What is the Lincoln Highway?
The Lincoln Highway is a 3300-mile long road stretching across the United States from New York City to San Francisco. Its creation was the result of the first successful effort to create an all-weather transcontinental highway specifically for automobiles. Carl Fisher, Prest-O-Lite headlight manufacturer, launched the idea of developing a coast to coast highway in 1913. Fisher was soon joined in the promotion of this road, named the Lincoln Highway, by a cadre of executives from the automobile, tire, and Portland cement industries who used patriotic appeal and mass marketing to mastermind a national “good roads” campaign. The Lincoln Highway began as a miscellaneous collection of downtown streets, country lanes, and old trails marked with signs showing the “L” rectangular graphic reproduced in this newsletter and emblazoned in red, white, and blue. While the confusing and haphazardly maintained condition of the early Lincoln Highway illustrated the long-neglected nature of the American
