The mural reads:
"In late April 1915 - not yet famous for her writings on etiquette - Emily Price Post made a decision to travel America's roads across the new Lincoln Highway and write about it for Collier's Magazine. Starting out from Grammercy Park in new York City, Ms. Post was accompanied by her son, Edwin (Ned) and her cousin, Alice Beadleston. The three travelers set out for San Francisco in a custom-made automobile - and 45 days later they arrived - though the car had to be rail-freighted to San Francisco from Arizona after a mechanical breakdown.
On May 6, 1915, Emily's group became stuck in 'A Sea of Mud' just outside of Rochelle Illinois after a very heavy spring rainfall. The group took rooms in the Collier Inn for the next two days and discovered the joys of a small midwestern hotel. Said Ms. Post, "it seemed to us as though we had found a veritable Ritz."
The Emily Post web site (
visit link) adds the following information :
"Before she was known as the ‘grande dame of etiquette,' Emily was a rather independent, adventurous woman, a published novelist and a true aficionado of the automobile. She and her sons had motored extensively in Europe, and hotly debated engine types and chassis styles. They had purchased a customized car in Europe the previous summer. Spotting an advertisement touting: “Travel luxuriously in your own car from your own front door over the world’s greatest highway to the Pacific Shore—$38,” Emily couldn’t resist!
The venture was sponsored by Collier’s magazine, and Emily’s assignment was to send back dispatches to the magazine, chronicling her adventures. Accompanied by her son, Edwin, as chauffer/mechanic and general dogsbody and her cousin, “Celia,” Emily, swathed in blue veiling and voluminous overcoat, set off from Grammercy Park in New York City, up Fifth Avenue, determined to cross the continent.
The original Lincoln Highway Commission must have been true visionaries and marketing geniuses. As Emily wrote, “…highway suggests macadam at the least. And with such titles as “Transcontinental” and “Lincoln” put before it, you dream of a wide, straight road like the Route Nationale in France…” What Emily, Ned and Celia discovered was that the highway was more dream than reality. And, as many of you know, Emily and her party were stymied in Rochelle when the rains turned the highway into a river of mud!
To her delight she found the town of Rochelle to be “…the sweetest, cleanest, newest little town imaginable. Its streets were all wide and smoothly paved with brick, and its houses, mostly white, were set each in a garden of trim and clipped green…” The local Fire Chief directed the party to the Collier Hotel, and the charming lobby, the charming proprietor and the very charming rooms – each with a new bath – sent Emily back to her companions, “grinning like a Cheshire cat…we have found a veritable Ritz!” The party spent several days in Rochelle, waiting for the road to dry out and harden up, falling in love with the “toy-land town” and its friendly, sociable people. Emily credits the gallant Fire Chief and other new friends with encouraging them to continue on when they were tempted to send the car ahead by rail. “Enthusiasm was no name for it! The town turned out to see us off; the fire chief drove out his engine in all its brass and scarlet resplendency. The ban of our cowardly leanings toward freight cars was lifted and they saw us off on our muddy way rejoicing! We are glad to have seen this little town. Maybe the contagion of its enthusiasm will remain with us permanently.”
Well, it did. Many adventures later, chronicled in her book, “By Motor to the Golden Gate,” Emily, Ned and Celia arrived in San Francisco and attended the exposition."