When we headed out from Valparaiso we took the 1928 realignment route of the Lincoln Highway, not having the time on this trip to head up to South Bend on the original 1913 route. In 1925 Federal and State highway officials established the Joint Board of Interstate Highways, which created the US numbered system. The Lincoln Highway Association lobbied this group to ensure that the Lincoln Highway became, for the most part, US 30 between Philadelphia and Granger, Wyoming.
Plymouth and the Dixie Highway
As my family is traveling through Plymouth, in-route to Fort Wayne, I am reminded of another of Carl Fisher's projects: the Dixie Highway. In the early part of the 20th century Woodrow Wilson, himself a southerner, "expressed the hope that in the not too distant future a highway, modeled after the Lincoln Highway, might link the North and South together and make the imaginary Mason and Dixon line...once and for all a thing of the past." This was basically his endorsement of the Dixie Highway. Carl's involvement with the Dixie Highway was fairly straightforward. By 1914 when Carl first publicized the Dixie Highway as the North/South sister of the Lincoln Highway, Fisher was developing real estate in Miami Beach. There were at least two major branches of the Dixie Highway. Plymouth IN is on the western branch of the Dixie Highway. This was the longest route, but also the one that went through the major cities. There was also an eastern branch that was more direct and passed through Lima, a town I would be visiting later in the day. As I looked out the car window at all the farmland, I could imagine how difficult it might have been to convince farmers, who saw much of the road development as the pet project of "elitist" advocates, to support additional funding for a North/South Highway. The momentum in the US was to expand west, not to waste time on North/South. FORT WAYNE
Fort Wayne is the embodiment of the mid-west, the benefactor of the Erie & Walbash canals; rail lines including the Nickel Plate Mainline, the Wabash Mainline, the Fort Wayne Union Railway; and of course the Lincoln Highway. Fort Wayne was an industrial town, aka rustbelt in the 1970's, but in the time of Lincoln Highway expansion this manufacturing base gave the working man the cash to buy new luxuries like Henry Ford's Model T. In the early days of the Lincoln Highway, founder Carl Fisher had repeatedly petitioned Henry Ford to join the project and to support it financially. Fisher recalled that Henry had come up with the idea of putting a tag on every Ford; for every car sold he would contribute $5 to the Lincoln Highway project. Ford's business manager, James Couzens, talked Henry out of it, arguing the Government should be paying to build the road. Way to crush a great marketing idea, even if he was right.
Sports is important to Fort Wayne. In 1957 they lost their Fort Wayne Piston NBA franchise to Detroit, but that didn't slow them down. We stayed at a Townplace Suite just acros the street from a skating complex that was hosting the US Roller Hockey Championships. What used to be street hockey, a team of kids picking up a game at the back of a school on a summer afternoon, is now a parent supported marathon that trucks young kids all over the country.
The Fort Wayne Historical Society curates a great little museum in the City Hall. One of the exhibits shows the variety of manufacturing innovations developed in Fort Wayne. Everything from the Mattel motorized kids jeep (envy of every kid in the neighborhood) to the Vera Bradley purse (if you want to see envy, check out the mobs at their annual outlet clearance sale).
They also have a cool, rusty old jail in the basement. Perfect place to hold moldy old gangsters. Chicago got all the fame with the gangsters, but apparently if you knew where to look you might see John Dillinger playing in a pickup baseball game at the park on North Calhoun Street while he was in town hiding out from the cops.
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment