Found a Lincoln Highway Marker? Post it here Link
All hail the Wiki...
The Lincoln Highway was the first road across America spanning almost 3400 miles, coast-to-coast, from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco.
Link Link Link
Some examples of what we're looking for...
Times Square, the Eastern Terminus
Vintage Motor Court east of York,PA
Monument in Princeton, NJ
The Coffee Pot lunch stand in Bedford,PA
The Preston Museum in Belle Plaine,IA
The first officially recorded mileage for the entire Lincoln Highway was 3389 miles in 1913. Over the years, as the road was improved, numerous realignments were made. Counting the original route and all of the subsequent realignments, there is a grand total of 5869 miles.
The Lincoln Highway is one of America's best-known historical roads. It was inspired by the Good Roads Movement, and in turn inspired the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, which was championed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, influenced by his experiences as a young soldier crossing the country in the 1919 Army Convoy on the Lincoln Highway.
As the first road across America, the Lincoln Highway brought great prosperity to the hundreds of cities, towns, and villages along the way.
Affectionately, the Lincoln Highway became known as "The Main Street Across America", a nickname that, even today, remains synonymous with the famous old road. Additionally, with the renewed interest in America's historic two-lane highways, and in deference to Route 66 having been nicknamed "The Mother Road" by John Steinbeck, the older and longer Lincoln Highway has become regarded as "The Father Road", a nickname used regularly by American Road magazine, and by author Michael Wallis in his recent book, The Lincoln Highway, Coast-to-Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate: the Great American Road Trip.
The Lincoln Highway Association was re-formed in 1992 with the mission, "…to identify, preserve, and improve access to the remaining portions of the Lincoln Highway and its associated historic sites." The new LHA publishes a quarterly magazine, The Lincoln Highway Forum, and holds conferences each year in cities along the route.
In 2005, Greetings from the Lincoln Highway: America’s First Coast-to-Coast Road, a comprehensive coffee table book by Brian Butko, became the first complete guide to the road, with maps, directions, photos, postcards, memorabilia, and histories of towns, people, and places.
A mix of research and on-the-road fun, the book placed the LHA's early history in the context of roadbuilding, politics, and geography, explaining why the Lincoln followed the path it did across the US, including the oft-forgotten Colorado Loop through Denver.
Butko's book also incorporated quotes from early motoring memoirs and postcard messages - sometimes funny, sometimes painfully descriptive of early motoring woes - hence the Greetings title. Butko had previously written an exhaustive guide to the Lincoln Highway in Pennsylvania in 1996, which was revised and republished in 2002 with different photos and postcard images.
In July 2007, the W.W. Norton Company published The Lincoln Highway, Coast-to-Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate: The Great American Road Trip by Michael Wallis, best-selling author of Route 66, and voice of Sheriff in the movie Cars, and Michael Williamson, twice a Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer with The Washington Post.
If you are interested in America's historic highways you also might want to look at these categories: The Dixie Highway, The Mother Road: Route 66, U.S. Route 40: The National Road, or the U.S. Route 99: The Pacific Highway.
