Tag Archives: Lincoln Highway

LHA 2022 Conference

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After two years of cancelations, it was sure nice to take in a historic highway conference in early June. That event was for the Jefferson Highway and now I get to do it again for the Lincoln Highway. This conference is being held in Joliet, Illinois. I drove here today from my home in Cincinnati, and am looking forward to bus tours and presentations for the next three days. Seeing familiar faces sure does a body good. 

This entry is to let blog-only subscribers know about the trip and to provide a place for comments. The journal is here.

Book Review
The Lincoln Highway
Amor Towles

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This post is a direct violation of one of the claims made on this blog’s “About” page. There the claim is made that “You will not be seeing a review of the latest novel…”. I suppose I could claim that, at the time of this review, The Lincoln Highway: A Novel is no longer the absolute latest novel, but the fact that it is a “#1 New York Times Best Seller” means it is precisely the sort of mainstream major publisher offering I had in mind when I made that claim. My primary defense is that I was tricked into reading it. Realizing that not everyone will see that as a legitimate justification, I will try to minimize the impact of the violation by not doing a very good job.

The trick I refer to is the naming of a book after what is probably the best known of American Named Auto Trails. On publication, the name got the book quite a bit of attention in historic road circles. But the excited chatter that the publication triggered was not followed by a bunch of reports from thrilled readers. I was not all that surprised. I am, after all, quite familiar with just how little The Grapes of Wrath, an older book rather popular among road fans, deals with viticulture.

I honestly had no intention of reading the book until a friend, whose opinion I trust, described it as “a very intriguing story” while confirming that it contained “not a whole lot about the highway”. At about the same time, I started noticing various accolades and warm reviews being heaped on the book. I put myself on the library’s waiting list, picked up the book when it became available, and read it in spite of — not because of — its title.

There have been other books that have taken the name of a highway for their own. I have not been particularly pleased when the name of a multi-state auto trail is used for a book that is basically about just one of those states but I’ve been tolerant. I’m not quite as tolerant when such a name is grabbed for something that isn’t really about any portion of the highway at all. I am also a bit put off by the counting down of chapters and the use of em dashes instead of established quoting conventions. I see both as gimmicks.

However, even with the gimmicks and questionable name, the tale the book tells is a damned good one. I think my buddy Dale’s one-line review sums up my view as well so I’m just going to brazenly steal it: “Not a whole lot about the highway but a very intriguing story of young men in 1954.”

The Lincoln Highway: A Novel, Amor Towles, Viking (October 5, 2021), 6.375 x 9.5 inches, 592 pages, ISBN 978-0735222359
Available through Amazon.

Celebrating

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Tuesday was my birthday, and there was a blog post that day more or less announcing it and revealing that I had removed from my body the only thing about it that was getting thinner. This post describes the far-ranging travel and wild celebration that filled the day. The party actually started in early morning when I met my buddy John for breakfast in Wilmington. I left there thinking I might follow US-22 all the way to Steubenville but a prediction of rain prompted me to switch to a shorter path using US-62 at Washington Courthouse, and congestion, as I neared Columbus, nudged me onto a faster expressway route. In fact, I gave myself up to the GPS at that point and Garmin kept me on I-71 until I reached US-30 near Mansfield.

I continued blindly following the voice in the box until a glimpse of a semi-familiar cheese shop brought me to my senses. Shisler’s Cheese House is a place I normally associate with the Lincoln Highway so, after picking up some Swiss and cheddar to munch on later, I sought out a few bits of the old road. I made a side trip in Canton but returned to the old Lincoln and the brick Baywood Street in Robertsville.

The target of my Canton excursion was Fat Head’s newest brewpub at the north edge of town. Fat Head’s started in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1992 and opened this location, their fourth, in 2018. That’s Black Knight Schwarzbier in the glass.

The place that the GPS had been leading me to was the Spread Eagle Tavern in Hanoverton. The picture at the top of this post is of the tavern’s sign. Hanoverton is a Lincoln Highway town so I’ve stopped at the Spread Eagle several times. I have eaten there once but had never stayed there. I corrected that by spending Tuesday night in the Van Buren Room. It’s the inn’s smallest in both space and price but was more than adequate for me.

Between check-in and dinner, I was able to see familiar rooms empty for the first time and make first-time visits to some other spaces. This second group included the lower level rathskeller which is currently open only on Fridays and Saturdays. The tavern first opened in 1837 but had fallen into disrepair until a major restoration took place in the late 1980s. Additions and improvements (such as converting the dirt-floored basement to the brick-lined rathskeller) happened, but all materials came from either the tavern itself or other badly neglected buildings from the same period.

I ate dinner at a table just out of frame on the left side of this picture and breakfast just out of frame on the right. I failed to get a picture of breakfast which is truly sad because it was one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had and it was included with the room. I was just too busy chatting with Kim, my server, about the building and other topics both related and not. I had been better prepared at dinner and did get a snapshot of my wonderful walleye by candlelight. 

PA Cars

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I pieced together a trip from odds and ends and leftovers then slapped on the name PA Cars because it includes a couple of Pennsylvania car museums. I’m going to learn to drive a Model T at one of them. The first day’s journal has just been posted despite it being the end of the trip’s fourth day in real life.

This entry is to let blog only subscribers know about the trip and to provide a place for comments. The journal is here.

Trip Peek #106
Trip #79
Lincoln Highway West

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This picture is from my 2009 Lincoln Highway West trip. The last part of the trip would be my third caravan to the National Corvette Museum for an anniversary celebration. In 1999 and 2003, I drove Historic Route 66 to join a caravan in Los Angeles. This time I would join a caravan in San Francisco. I had previously driven the Lincoln Highway east of the IN-IL border in piecemeal fashion and would pick it up there to drive the western bits. My oldest son lived in San Francisco at the time and joined me for the first part of the caravan east.

The Lincoln Highway portion of the trip allowed me to see in person things I’d only read about or seen in videos. As I looked over the journal in preparing this post, I was saddened to see that some of those things were already gone. Among them is the fellow cleaning my windshield in the accompanying photo. Dick Grudzinski died in 2016. Kensinger Service and Supply lives on, however, with Dick’s grandson Joe managing, pumping gas, and washing windshields.

The sixth day of this trip coincided with the tenth anniversary of the first ever live post to this website. From that day forward, a sidebar in the trip journal paid homage to the events of ten years before.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Trip Peek #98
Trip #152
Dirk and Lincoln

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This picture is from the 2018 trip I called Dirk and Lincoln. The purpose of the trip was to see Dirk Hamilton performing at a venue he played at frequently in the 1980s with the musicians he played with there. That was all I needed to justify the trip, but the venue was in California and there was no reason not to hang around a few days. That’s where the Lincoln part comes in. I flew to Sacramento then drove to Stockton for the show. I drove down to the bizarre Winchester Mystery House the next morning and picked up some Lincoln Highway on the way back. The rest of the trip was spent following a sort of Lincoln Highway loop to the east through Carson City, Reno, and Donner Pass then back to Sacramento for a night that included a visit to the Delta King.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Free? Advertising on the Dixie

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Seeing things like signs, banners, and menus for local businesses bearing the logo of some large corporation is quite common. Details vary but the basic model is that the big corporation shoulders some or all of the cost and the small business gets some advertising for little or nothing. The idea is hardly new and the concept has never been restricted to purely commercial enterprises. During the last half of the 1920s, a pairing of this sort existed between a major highway and an American hereditary association. The major highway was, of course, the Dixie Highway. The hereditary association was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

The UDC was the “advertiser” in this instance. Between 1926 and 1935 the organization was responsible for at least ten plaques being erected beside the highway. It’s unclear whether or not the Dixie Highway Association was an active participant in this arrangement. Because the 1926 creation of the United States Numbered Highway System brought an end to all of the named auto trails, the DHA was not very active at this point.

Combined, the previous picture and the one at right show the ten plaques in north to south sequence. The northernmost marker is in Ohio, the southernmost is in Florida, the one preceding it is in South Carolina, and the others are in North Carolina. Except for the date erected, eight of the plaques are identical. The one in Florida contains the same text as those eight but has a different image of Lee. The one in South Carolina contains different text but has the same image as the bulk of the plaques.

The South Carolina plaque is the bigger oddity. All the others were erected in 1926, ’27, or ’28. It was erected in 1935. One of the differences in its text is its specific identification of the Greenville and Fort Sumter Chapters of the UDC as being responsible for erecting the marker. All others simply identify the overall UDC. The Florida marker was erected in 1927 ahead of at least three others. None of the other nine markers uses this image of General Lee.

Eight of the plaques essentially look just like this one which happens to be in Ohio. All plaques follow this general format even when some details vary. Approximately the top one-third is occupied by an image of General Lee on horseback. His name appears below the image in large letters. A bit farther down is the name of the auto trail. The letters in DIXIE HIGHWAY are larger than the general text but smaller than the letters in Lee’s name.

Maybe what I’ve written so far will help explain how I’m currently thinking about these markers. My first contact with the markers was in 2008 when I stumbled upon the one in Marshall, NC. After I learned there were others, I made a point of visiting them all and accomplished that in early 2015. At the time I thought of them as something similar to the Madonna of the Trail markers on the National Old Trails Road. That’s pretty much how I saw them until the summer of 2017.

Streets, parks, and statues honoring military and civilian leaders of the Confederate States of America had been drawing more and more attention. In August of 2017, the death of a counterprotester at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, cranked that attention up several notches. There was now enough attention for some of it to fall on one of those UDC plaques less than twenty miles from my home. Within days of the events in Charlottesville, a group in Dayton, OH, announced plans for a protest at the plaque near Franklin, OH. Plans to protest the protesters formed almost as quickly. City officials made a preemptive strike by removing and hiding the marker in the middle of the night. It didn’t make anybody happy but it didn’t make anybody dead, either.

Some news crews and some of those not happy people made it to the site on the morning following the removal. I made it, too, in the role of curious bystander. I chatted casually with a couple of the reporters and tried to defend the Dixie Highway a bit. I’d been calling the plaques and their mountings Dixie-Lee markers. Everyone else was calling the Franklin marker a Robert E. Lee monument and occasionally mentioning that it was on the Dixie Highway. It slowly sunk in that, for the reasons above, they were right. The monuments were not primarily concerned with marking a road like the Madonnas of the Trail or the concrete posts along the Lincoln Highway. I found myself explaining that the Dixie Highway was not associated with the Confederacy and asking that they not tie it too closely to Lee. For the first time, I compared the markers to a big branded beer sign with “Bob’s Bar” at its bottom. Learning that the brand on the sign was run by crooks, doesn’t automatically mean that Bob is a crook.

The plaque has been pried from the stone at the NC-SC border. It is lost or possibly destroyed. The marker in downtown Asheville has been attacked and damaged twice. The Franklin, OH, marker is back at roadside but is now on private property. That’s it in the picture at left. It’s even been buffed up and polished a bit. I want all the markers to stay. I deplore the vandalism that has occurred in the Carolinas but I don’t consider it an attack on the Dixie Highway. I now see that those markers really are what others have called them, Robert E. Lee monuments that happen to be on the Dixie Highway.

This topic came to me as I was writing last week’s post about the name of the Dixie Highway. I initially thought of it as a paragraph or two tacked onto that post. The length of the Dixie name post left no room to tack on anything and it is now quite obvious that a paragraph or two wouldn’t have been nearly enough. But it’s also pretty obvious that the two belong together. Again, I want all the markers to stay. But I don’t want them to stay at the expense of the Dixie Highway. Controversy will continue to swirl around statues, flags, and other items legitimately tied to the Confederacy. The Dixie Highway should not be part of that. Saying, as I have, that neither the word Dixie nor the Dixie Highway is inherently racist loses some sincerity if defending the road includes defending these markers.

A Dixie by Any Other Name

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If something called a dixie existed, I have little doubt that we could refer to it differently without changing its aroma, but the word “dixie” doesn’t really identify anything. It is not, in other words, a common noun. As a proper noun — with a capital ‘D’ — it is used as both a surname and a given name and to identify a wide variety of things including a region of our country. People with a first, last, or nickname of Dixie surely outnumber things bearing the name but there are certainly plenty of those. It has been used to identify buildings, songs, currency, music groups, towns, counties, movies, beer, boats, ships, taverns, race tracks, waterways, restaurants, mountain ranges, athletic conferences, grocery stores, airports, schools, universities, and much more. With an ‘X’ made of a stylized flower, Dixie is a registered trademark of Georgia-Pacific for a brand of paper products.

In the 1960s, an all-girl singing group borrowed the name — without the flowery ‘X’ — of those familiar disposable cups and topped the charts with hits like “Chapel of Love” and “Iko Iko”. Near the end of the twentieth century, another all-girl group hit the charts with a name containing the word “dixie”. That group, the Dixie Chicks, generated some controversy, but it came from political statements and not from their name. I’m not aware of any controversy at all associated with the Dixie Cups, and I’m guessing that they didn’t consider the word “dixie” to be racist.

But recently the word has been associated with racism by some. The Dixie Highway has been included in some of these claims which naturally caused me to take notice. It is an outgrowth of the rise of controversy and confrontation over Confederate monuments and streets named after Confederate generals. If the move to change a roughly six-mile-long street from Hood to Hope was complicated, renaming a piece of the nearly 6,000-mile-long Dixie Highway must be at least three orders of magnitude more so.

The aforementioned Hood Street was in Hollywood, FL, where three streets (Hood, Lee, and Forest) were renamed (Hope, Liberty, and Freedom) in November 2017. In Riviera Beach, FL, a couple of miles of Old Dixie Highway were renamed President Barack Obama Highway in 2015. The picture at left was taken between the two, near Boyton Beach. Of course, the word “dixie” had nothing to do with the renamings in Hollywood. The generals after which the streets were named had clearly been chosen because of their roles in the Confederacy. The word didn’t have much to do with the name change in Riviera Beach, either. Residents cited the role of the street as a dividing line between black and white and the site of KKK cross burnings.

Although I’d have preferred it hadn’t happened, I have no serious objection to the Riviera Beach action. It was based on specific and painful memories. That doesn’t always appear to be the case when replacing the Dixie Highway name is proposed. Published reports of these proposals have occasionally prompted me to send emails to people connected with them. It is not done to protest but to inform. We road fans often comment — and sometimes laugh or cry — about people being completely oblivious to a major historic highway running right by their door. Knowing how common that is with “celebrities” like the Lincoln Highway and Route 66, we shouldn’t be surprised that it is even more often the case with the lesser known and more complex Dixie Highway. Not knowing just how important or far-reaching all the roads in your neighborhood once were is a pretty natural situation.

It seems that even we fans don’t always consider that “far-reaching” bit. It’s OK to be saddened by a name change, but there is no reason to verbally abuse, as I’ve seen too many times, those backing a change. Removing the name Dixie Highway from a few miles of Florida — or other — roadway is not going to affect all those other miles any more than Cheyenne, WY, (The first town to do so.) changing its Main Street to Lincoln Way impacted the rest of the continent crossing highway. The Dixie Highway, as well as every other named auto trail, was never labeled with its name in every jurisdiction it passed through. Numbered US and state highways utilize streets and roads with all sorts of names. Not one inch of US-66 officially exists at present yet people follow it every day. The Adairsville, GA, pavement in the picture at left is officially named and signed Main Street but that doesn’t change its past as a part of the Dixie Highway or prevent it being unofficially marked as such.

Most of the talk about renaming sections of the Dixie Highway has originated in Florida. In some sense, that’s ironic since the Dixie Highway was a major factor in the development of the state. On the other hand, development is rarely 100% beneficial to all and I’ve no doubt that many were negatively impacted by the development and the road that helped it along. Plus, as those Riviera Beach memories show, experiences generate stronger feelings than a name or a physical path ever could. About two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article based on discussions in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. Its audience was almost certainly wider than that of similar articles publishes by Florida based news organizations. One indication of that was a small but obvious two-day blip in visits to an eight-year-old Dixie Highway related post on this blog. Maybe that’s somehow fitting since I’ve often quoted the Times when trying to convey that the Dixie Highway is not inherently evil. In 1915, the paper referred to the route as “The Dixie Peaceway” when it reported the formation of the Dixie Highway Association. It described the road as “a monument to celebrate the half-century of peace within the Union”. Maybe that was hyperbole or maybe it really reflected the feelings of the time. If so, it seems extra sad that so many see it as something entirely different today.

Those people who found this site after reading the New York Times article didn’t learn a whole lot during their visit but they were obviously curious. They were brought by search engines which may have also taken them to other sites where they learned much more. Whether curiosity was their only reason for visiting or they were decision-makers gathering background, I’ll never know. Regardless, I suspect we will see a few more miles of Dixie Highway get renamed before it’s all over. That’s unfortunate but hardly a disaster. No matter the name, it will still smell like a rose — or maybe an orange blossom — with strong undertones of asphalt and Model T brake bands.

ADDENDUM 9-Feb-2020: Some thoughts on the markers placed along the Dixie Highway by the United Daughters of the Confederacy were considered for this post but have been given their own post instead. Free? Advertising on the Dixie

Book Review
After Ike
Michael S. Owen

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There are things that fans of old roads or of transportation history in general falsely assume that everyone knows about. One such item is the continent crossing Motor Transport Corps convoy of 1919. In the summer following the end of the first World War, a group of military personnel and vehicles set off from Washington, DC, to test the nation’s roads all the way to San Francisco. Although he was primarily an observer on the trip, his future accomplishments make Dwight Eisenhower the member of the convoy best-known today. Michael Owen uses the future president’s nickname in naming this telling of his own retracing of the 3,250-mile-long path that some 300 men and 81 vehicles of all shapes and sizes followed a century ago.

As one might expect, Owen mixes lots of information about the military convoy’s trip with the description of his own journey. Much less expected is the fact that he is not one of those long-time fans of old roads or transportation history that I mentioned earlier. As a US Ambassador, he spent considerable time in Africa and Asia. Now retired, he is happily becoming better acquainted with the roads and attractions of his homeland.

On his coast to coast drive, Owen is part researching author and part curious tourist. He often spends multiple days in one place and digs into local history and points of interest. Some of what he finds relates to the convoy and some is simply interesting on its own. A sampling includes a stop at Carnegie-Mellon to talk with a professor about autonomous vehicles and a visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame which provides an opportunity to talk about Ike’s time as running back at West Point. He visits several museums including the Studebaker museum in South Bend, IN, and the El Dorado County Historical Museum in Placerville, CA. He spends time in small libraries and chatting with locals.

Much of the convoy related information Owen shares comes from journals and official reports written by the participants but local newspaper archives are also used extensively. The motorized convoy was a major event in those early days of the automobile and much attention was focused on its progress. Communities along the route often vied with each other to host the convoy and the dinners, dances, and demonstrations were documented by the local press. More or less typical is the South Bend [Indiana] News-Times report of the convoy’s arrival and departure that included the observation that “…lemonade was given to them in abundance by the Chamber of Commerce.” In Austin, NV, the Reese River Reveille reported that officials “…placed shower baths in the four cells of the jail…” for use by the soldiers.

Some non-convoy related items Owen finds in those old newspapers are used to provide a peek at the world of 1919. A headline from that South Bend News-Times issue reads “Seven Women Take Aeroplane Rides!” From the DeKalb [Illinois] Daily Chronicle, he quotes an article about the convoy’s “3,000,000 candle power searchlight” followed by quotes from an advertisement for the latest Thor Electric Washing Machine. In writing about his modern-day travels, Owen uses signs he sees in a manner similar to the way he uses those period newspaper items. It’s kind of like having a passenger who reads signs aloud; Signs like “Farm fresh eggs! Laid by Happy Chickens”, “Food! Liquor! Wine! Beauty Products!”, and “Gardening for God Brings Peas of Mind”.

Eighteen pages of black and white photos are placed just past the book midpoint. All were taken by the author. Readers familiar with the Lincoln Highway and the modern Lincoln Highway Association will find some familiar places and faces.

The book cover bio says Owen has “driven over the Lincoln Highway several times” but he doesn’t come across as a seasoned road tripper. On one hand, that brings some freshness to the writing. Things like reading aloud signs about eggs bring a sense of sharing the surprises to the reporting. On the other, it may be responsible for allowing a few minor errors to slip in. Early in the book, Owen notes his awareness of “America’s penchant for superlatives: biggest, oldest, first, fastest, best.” He does not list “only” and does pass along a couple of not quite true “only” claims. Qualifying it with the word “purportedly”, he writes that the bust of Lincoln at Wyoming’s Sherman Hill is “…the only statue of Lincoln on the entire Lincoln Highway” and says that the rotary jail in Council Bluffs, IA, “…is the only one of its kind in the US”. Regarding Lincoln statues on the LH, those in Jefferson, IA, and Fremont, NE, come immediately to mind. As for rotating “squirrel cage” jails, the one in Crawfordsville, IN, is not only standing but operational. These errors, and a few others, are not terribly significant but I couldn’t just ignore them.

After Ike is an enjoyable read that delivers an overview of an important event in US transportation history along with a sense of what a modern-day long and leisurely road trip is like. Owen’s fresh eyes and all those signs make it a bit unlike many travelogues.

After Ike: On the Trail of the Century-Old Journey that Changed America, Michael S. Owen, Dog Ear Publishing, LLC, July 22, 2019, 9 x 6 inches, 224 pages, ISBN 978-1457570421
Available through Amazon.

Trip Peek #87
Trip #141
Lincoln Highway Conference 2017

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This picture is from my 2017 Lincoln Highway Association Conference trip. The conference was in Denison, Iowa. The photo was taken during a bus tour stop at Lions Club Tree Park near Grand Junction, Iowa, where bridges from three different periods can be viewed. I made it to the conference in a little more than a day by sticking mostly to expressways. My drive home was a bit more leisurely as I revisited some of the same areas that conference bus tours had covered only I did in on narrow — and sometimes dirt — old alignments that the busses had not been able to follow.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.