LINCOLN HIGHWAY TRAVELS

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.

Across the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge into York County

The Lincoln Highway is more than just a grand project of the early 20th Century "to procure the establishment of a continuous improved highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, open to lawful traffic of all description without toll charges." More than a connector of towns, or a way to sell early automobiles and automobile headlights (as Carl saw it), it is today a pathway into history. I am reminded of that as I travel across the Columbia-Wrightsville bridge (officially the Veterans Memorial Bridge) headed west.
 

The current bridge dates back to the 1930's, but off the right side of the bridge are the remaining pylons of the previous bridge, and it is this bridge that is lodged firmly in the history books of the Civil War.
 

The 25 pylons are all that remains of the bridge the the Union forces set fire to on June 28th,1863. The conflagration forced the Confederate forces to re-consider their plan of heading east, possibly on to Harrisburg or Philadelphia, and drove them west toward fateful Gettysburg. I was fortunate enough to attend the 150th anniversary of the bridge burning. Volunteers navigating the river by boat lit bonfires on each of the remaining pylons, lighting up the night like a pathway of torches down the hallway of history. The evening was capped off by spectacular fireworks. I would have liked to wrap up the night with a visit to the excellent Burning Bridge Tavern, but the crowd was too large that night.
 

If you would like a deeper dive into the burning bridge story, and you happen to be visiting on a Sunday, retired volunteers man the Wrightsville Diorama from 1-4pm through November. It deserves a visit, if only to reward their tireless devotion.
 

While in Wrightsville, an excellent spot to view the great, wide expanse of the Susquehanna is from windows of the excellent John Wright Restaurant, just off to the right of the bridge.

So back to Carl Fisher, father of the Lincoln Highway and world class promoter. As will be repeated over and over in this blog, Fisher was a visionary and a marketing/promotional genius. And probably a bit crazy, but that goes with the territory. Unlike Henry Ford, he believed the Lincoln Highway should be funded by business and private investment. And that meant attracting attention. Carl knew how to attract attention. To sell cars he once pushed a Stoddard-Dayton off the top of a 7 story building. And that was only one stunt (more on that later).
 

Traveling the Lincoln Highway west through York County you encounter a spiritual promotional brother to Fisher in the person of one Mahlon Haines. Known as the Shoe Wizard of York, from a $127 initial consignment of shoes he built an empire of over 40 shoe stores in PA and MD. Like Carl Fisher, Haines was a promoter. He felt anyone could sell shoes if you attracted customers. His most outlandish advertising gimmick was The Shoe House, located just off to the right of the Lincoln Highway. Modeled after a high-topped work shoe, it is a wood frame structure with five different levels, three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen and living room. The door to the main entrance features a stained glass portrait of Haines displaying a pair of shoes. Honeymooning couples from any town with a Haines store were invited to spend a romantic week in the shoe, served by a live-in butler and maid.
 

Eccentric but fascinating, Haines was similar to Fisher in that they were both high energy and both had wide-ranging interests. Imagine if Haines would have invited Fisher to a dinner party at the Shoe House, both of them throwing out outlandish ideas while huddled under the cramped 5ft ceilings and myriad staircases. But no smoking in the house. Haines was an avid non-smoker, widely before the dangers of smoking were widely known, and would stop people on the streets of York and offer them cash if they would promise to quit.
 

As we continue our journey west, you are now undoubtedly in need of refreshment.
 

You don't need an energy drink, what you need is a good cup of java and a donut that tastes like a donut. Skip those bland, tasteless things you get at chains like Dunkin Donuts. What you need is a Maple Donut. This location on the Lincoln Highway is the main location where are Maple Donuts are made.
 

It all started in 1946 on Maple Street in York, but what matters is that they are still doing it today and that their original maple donut with the sweet maple icing glaze and the perfect cup of coffee is just what you need.
 

Reminds me of the Stephen King novel 11/22/63 where the guy goes back in time to the early '60's where food actually tasted better, more flavorful. To me, that is how these donuts taste--deliciously real. What better place to pick up an economic stimulus package to go.
 

With your energy restored, you head out through York city.
 

City of York

If you have time, stop in. Lots of history here, particularly since York has the distinction of serving as the temporary capital of the Continental Congress during the American Revolution. The Articles of the Confederation were drafted there. An amazing feat in an amazing time. I once heard the business guru Tom Peters point out, as historians before him have noted, how our founding fathers were not, for the most part, A and B students. And when you look at the odds, the idea that they were going to go up against the largest empire the world had ever known, you really get the picture.
 

York to Gettysburg
 

For the York to Gettysburg leg of the journey, I take a shortcut and jump off the York bypass at the Gettysburg exit and head west. For most of my PA journey, all the way out to Pittsburgh, I will actually be following Rt 30 which was built from 1953-1960 as a bypass to both the Lincoln Highway and the William Penn Highway ( US Route 22). But while the starting point of the Lincoln Highway is in Trenton, NJ, Rt 30 actually starts in West Virginia. But for my purposes today they are one and the same.

Typical of my travels, I am already hungry for lunch. So I stop in Lee's diner. My son and I stop in about 1:30pm on a Thursday, and there are not many other customers around. Joyce serves up a delicious meal, giant omelet for my son and a great tasting bacon provolone hamburger with cup of soup for me. Joyce has been at Lee's for about 18 years and although business has been decent, it has been increasingly fierce with all the nearby competition. Which is too bad. Lee's is clean, has great character and heritage and great food.

 

I am pretty sure McDonalds does not list the previous 8 owners right on the menu, starting with the founders Elmer and Grace Paxton back in 1951. Somewhere in there they used to be open all night, but those days are long gone. All this diner talk reminds me of one of my favorite novels---Nickel Mountain, by John Gardner. Highly recommended.

And who needs an I-pod when you have one of these sitting on the table. The one on our table was turned to Al Martino. Who is Al Martino? I didn't know either until I heard Volare and thought he might have appeared one of the Godfather films, which I googled and later confirmed he had been the wedding singer in the first film.

On to Abbotstown
Crossing over into Adams County, we enter the first roundabout we have encountered on our westward journey (though I think the correct American term is traffic circle). The Altland House dominates the far side of the square, which is a good place to eat (my favorite is their Underside) and has some great history. But for this trip I was thinking more of my friend and co-worker Bob Kliner who loves those German restaurants. So we had to stop by Hofbrauhaus Restaurant and Pub for a quick look, thinking about that big plate of Zigeunerschinitzel.

After that we zipped out of town passing through the "cheap side," and on our way toward New Oxford.

New Oxford
Just ten miles from the historic Gettysburg National Battlefield, New Oxford is a pretty little round-about way station of a town with some good antiquing and a couple of great small restaurants and coffee shops. New Oxford sits on the tracks of the old Philadelphia-Baltimore-Central Railroad, a booming enterprise in the late 1800's, and is also located on the Naticoke Trail, which was used by native tribes to travel between the Pocanos and Chesapeake Bay. For now, it is just a great little town to take a break.

Gettysburg
After New Oxford, you travel through a raft of fast food joints and hotels until you find yourself in the seat of historic Gettysburg.

For my part, I will just say that I was privileged to be in Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary of the conflict. Not a history book reader? Then spend some time with a re-enactor. These guys (and ladies) are amazing. Sizzling hot in July and there they are in their authentic wools and long dresses sweating away next to the cook fires.

The confederate groups camped on the west side of town. They seemed to be having a lot more fun, so that's where my son and I hung out. Confederate soldiers did not eat as well as Union soldiers, but who does not like cornbread? Skip the coffee, though. It was often brewed from anything except coffee beans.

This would be a great time to recommend a personal connection to the chronicling on the Civil War. The Civil War Times was started in 1961 by Robert Fowler to take advantage of interest in the centennial celebration of the Gettysburg Conflict,

He would later by my Sunday school teacher and would capture my imagination in such a way that I would end up in the media business. While in Gettysburg, I came across a group from the Civil War Times magazine. It is good to see that more than years later things are still going strong for the franchise

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LH Travels Illinois-Indiana

Heading East Through Indiana--On & Off the Lincoln Highway

After a brief stay in Chicago we head out toward Indiana and Ohio. When the national highway numbering system was implemented in 1926, a large portion of the Lincoln Highway became US 30. But the actual Lincoln Highway snakes on and off US 30, and just past Valparaiso University it breaks off altogether with the original 1913 route heading up toward South Bend and the 1920's version headed toward Fort Wayne. Eventually the two routes converge again in Fort Wayne. For this trip, my group decided to take the 1920's route toward Fort Wayne.

We joined the Lincoln Highway just east of Merrillvile, not far from the famous "Ideal Mile" section of the Lincoln Highway between Schereville and Dyer.These "seeding mile" projects were intended to demonstrate what a modern road could be. Earlier ones, like the one farther west near DeKalb, demonstrated the advantages of concrete vs ruts-in-the-dirt (which was the majority of the Lincoln Highway in 1914). The "Ideal Mile" section ending in Dyer was built in 1923. By this time the funding was firmly in the Feds hands--but the Lincoln Highway Association with Fisher at the lead had shown the way. The 1923 version featured improvements like:

• 40 ft wide concrete pavement 10 inches thick
• Minimum radius for curves of 1000 feet, with guardrails at all embankments
• Curves superelevated (banked) for a speed of 35 miles per hour

All the innovations that made it possible, 91 years later, for our rented Chevy Impala to zip along the highway, GPS connected and air conditioning humming.Merrillville to Valparaiso

Remember the Tim Burton version of Willi Wonka starring Johnny Depp? My family watched a snippet of that movie on tv before heading out of Chicago for our Lincoln Highway journey east. Just outside of Merrillville, IN we arrived at the Albanese Candy Factory, and short of the Wonka trademark, it seemed like we had arrived right back in the movie. You walk into an explosion of candy and color. Albanese is the largest manufactuerer of gummy bears in the mid-west. Back behind all the bins of candy, 16 flavors of gummy bears, bins of chocolates, licorice, all kinds of nuts, is a raised walkway with eight windows that peer into the factory

Remember Willie's father losing his job to the one-armed robot that did a superior job of putting the lid on the toothpaste tube? Those robots are here as well, putting gummys into boxes. Fortunately there were also plenty of white coated and hair-netted folks in evidence, but no Umpa Lumpas that I could see.I love gummy bears. When they are fresh they are superior to swedish fish, swedish worms and all that other junk. I bought several bags of gummies--Rasberry, black cherry, peach, pineapple, grapefruit, watermelon. and mango.

My family bought so much candy, not only gummy bears but all kinds of chocolates, that we realized we had a problem. It was July--the stuff was going to melt. So we hustled over to Target and bought a small cooler to store the goodies for the next few . Great ideaGummy bears were invented by a poor german confectionary worker, slaving away at a dead end job, who opened his own place and hit upon the idea of a gelatin based treat in the shape of the popular european dancing bears (a connection to John Irving fans everywhere).

Road to Valparaiso

Back on the Lincoln Highway we followed the original 1913 Route to Valparaiso. In addition to being the home of Valparaiso University, I also discovered that Valparaiso is a terminal moraine. Apparently a terminal moraine is an accumulation of soil and rock debris that forms at the snout of a glacier, marking its maximum advance. An interesting fact, given all the global warming discussions.

On the western edge of Valparaiso we made a detour off the Lincoln Highway. We wound our way through some upscale neighborhoods and found our way to Taltree Arboretum and Gardens. The center piece of this beautiful 360 acre garden is a unique railway garden. Amidst the miniature conifers is the 1:24" scale railroad world featuring 10 trains and dozens of miniature tableaus including Lincoln's funeral train (passing thorough Indiana in 1865), a West Virginia coal mine (circa 1916), a 1863 Tennessee Hills Civil War scene, and a southern Indiana Limestone quarry (circa 1910). Designed by a architect, the detail is amazing. I was fascinated by a workman's train, straight out of the Hell on Wheels tv show, a tall traveling bunkhouse structure that had to be tied down to keep from blowing away.

Dave Besterman is a train enthusiast who has been volunteering every Wednesday at the gardens since his retirement. Biggest challenge in an outdoor railway garden is the weather. If the storm moves quick enough, they don't always have time to drive all ten engines into the side rail that goes down into the basement of the welcome center. Sometimes leading in and putting cardboard boxes over the trains is all they can do. Sometimes leaping in and putting cardboard boxes over the trains is all they can do. Occasionally the trains go into the tunnels, but never come out

This is usually caused by chipmunks burrowing into the tunnels. The part that irritates Dave the most is the parents who get mad when he has to ask a kid not to touch a train. The parents might be less irritated if they knew that the display also contains several snakes, probably attracted by the chipmunks.

After visiting the railway garden we went across the parking lot to explore the Heron garden. However it was covered in algae and mosquitos seem to be emerging, so we cut that excursion short and headed back to the car.

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LH Travels Plymouth IN-Fort Wayne IN

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.

 

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