This book has thousands of words, many with multiple syllables, and dozens of pictures in 50+ shades of grey. It tells the story of an old man in an old car on an old road and is available here and at Amazon, including Amazon UK and Europe, on an old medium — paper.
By Mopar to the Golden Gate, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, 2013, paperback, 9 x 6 inches, 140 pages, ISBN 978-0615921990.
Carl Fisher was a busy man in 1913. His Prest-O-Lite Company and his automobile dealership were both going great guns, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway he co-founded looked like it might amount to something, the Ocean-to-Ocean Rock Highway he had proposed in September of 1912 was taking off, and then there was the Indiana Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.
In the early years of the industry, Indiana was second only to Michigan in number of automobile manufacturers. Several of them cooperated in a 1911 four state promotional tour that was so successful they organized the IAMA and another four state tour in 1912. In 1913 they were ready for something bigger. The result was the Indiana-Pacific Tour that went from Indianapolis to San Francisco then down the coast to end at Los Angeles. Carl Fisher was part of the tour that left Indianapolis on July 1, 1913, the same day that the Lincoln Highway Association, which is what his Rock Highway proposal had led to, was incorporated. That coincidence of dates and a connection with the troublesome Colorado loop of the Lincoln Highway were essentially the only details of the IAMA tour I knew of. Now, thanks to Dennis and Terri Horvath, I know a lot more.
Hoosier Tour: A 1913 Indiana to Pacific Journey is not filled with flowery prose or lots of humor. That’s not how the Horvaths write. Neither is it filled with terse sentences and clipped descriptions. It is filled with an enjoyable and accurate account of the complete tour and the lead up to it. It tells of the men and machines on the tour and gives a hint of the tour’s impact on the acceptance of automobiles and the Good Roads Movement.
After a couple of chapters describing the IAMA and its planning for the tour, Hoosier Tour follows the Indiana vehicles across the country. Though not organized as such, the book is something of a group diary in that a day’s beginning and end points are usually mentioned along with highlights and lowlights.
This was a huge event in its day. It included eighteen cars and two trucks from fourteen manufacturers. Several journalists and a former Indianapolis mayor rode along. One car was driven by the winner of the inaugural Indianapolis 500, Ray Harroun. Several governors climbed aboard when the tour entered their state and rode along until it exited. Virtually every cluster of building on the route demanded a visit and presented the participants with gifts ranging from watermelons to free gas.
As an advertisement for Indiana built automobiles, the tour was a complete success. Not one car dropped out for mechanical reasons. It also performed well in regards to another stated purpose, boosting the Good Roads Movement. Aside from the high profile tour raising awareness considerably, it triggered improvement along the route it followed. Every locale wanted to make a good impression and the book tells of many improvements made just days ahead of the tour’s arrival.
One reason to impress was the belief, held by many, that Fisher was using the tour to evaluate the intended route of the Lincoln Highway. He denied any official connection between the route of the Indiana-Pacific Tour and the Lincoln Highway and much of the tour route was not even close to the path that would be announced in September but the belief was not totally without merit. Those familiar with Lincoln Highway history may know that the highway, as originally announced, did not enter Colorado but that a “Colorado Loop” was quickly added in response to pressure from the state. After reading the Horvaths’ account of the tour’s visit to Denver, which included a parade and a real brass band, it is rather easy to see why Colorado had expectations.
Even though the Indiana-Pacific Tour would continue on to Los Angeles, reaching San Francisco made good the title and there were great celebrations. A parade greeted them on arrival though the Horvaths do not say whether or not it included another brass band. Banquets, tours of the recently rebuilt city, and a stop at Cliff House kept the tourists busy for about three days. The book follows them down the coast to Los Angeles where most of the tourists boarded a train for the trip home. With the tourists back in Indianapolis, the final chapter touches on what followed for the Indiana automotive industry. Next are several pages of photos from the tour and appendices listing the tour’s people and vehicles.
There is little question that the Indiana-Pacific Tour should be better known than it is. It demonstrated the ability of automobiles, particularly Indiana built automobiles, to travel long distances and it brought nationwide attention to the value of good roads. It deserves to be more than a footnote to the Lincoln Highway and this book should help with that.
A lot has changed in one hundred years. It is a little sad that we can no longer purchase an Indiana built Stutz Bearcat but it is a good thing that we no longer have to dodge thrown ears of corn as the driver of the Stutz on the tour had to do after frightening a farmer’s horses.
Hoosier Tour: A 1913 Indiana to Pacific Journey, Dennis E. Horvath and Terri Horvath, AGG Publishing, 2013, paperback, 5 x 8 inches, 114 pages, ISBN 978-1490403267
Available through Amazon.
I was hesitant to post a review of this book because some of those “Photos Through Time” are mine but I decided that it would be a bad thing only if I rave about how marvelous the book is. No harm in simply describing it, right? So here are the facts.
The Lincoln Highway: Photos Through Time was created for the Lincoln Highway Association as part of its centennial celebration. One of the most visible parts of that celebration was the pair of car tours traveling the Lincoln Highway from its two ends to a meeting in the middle. A copy of the book was part of the tour package and it is also available for sale exclusively through the Lincoln Highway Trading Post.
It’s a sampler. Its purpose is to give an overview of a century of Lincoln Highway. It is not a guide book or a scholarly history book. It does not contain pictures of every scenic spot along the road or every notable building or every key association member. It does, however, contain a whole bunch of each of those.
It is organized neither geographically nor chronologically. The first section following the foreword is titled “History”. Here, among pictures of collectibles and artifacts, Butko gives a very brief history of the road’s birth and short life. It is enough to give someone who knows little or nothing about the Lincoln Highway a starting point and someone who knows everything a quick refresher on key dates and events. It is a stripped down but adequate introduction to the pictures that follow.
Those pictures are organized by their subjects. Butko identifies ten things that comprise the Lincoln Highway and gives each one a chapter. They are “People”, “Gas”, “Food”, “Lodging”, “Vehicles”, “Attractions”, “Signs”, “Markers”, “Bridges”, and “Roads”. The chapters are themselves samplers. Historic images from postcards and other sources are combined with modern photographs. Images of things along the road, which is every chapter other than “People”, are from locations spread over the road’s entire length.
The sources of the photos are pretty diverse, too. Butko lists more than fifty contributors. He supplied a large number of images himself and, at a presentation at the Centennial Celebration in Kearney, Nebraska, he singled out Russell Rein, Jeff Blair, and me as next in number of contributions. Many of the historic images came from Russell’s huge collection. Jeff and I are both amateurs who happened to be the the right place fairly often but our pictures get to appear alongside stuff from real pros like Michael Williamson, Drake Hokanson, Rick Pisio, Shellee Graham, and Jim Ross and Brian has made sure they all look as good as possible.
I described the “History” chapter of having value for two very different audiences. Maybe that’s true of the whole book. Most of its first recipients, members of those centennial tours, are probably somewhat familiar with almost everything in the book. For them and others like them, the book might be a memory booster or a chance to see an image of something they’ve only heard about. On the other hand, there is a large group of people who ask “What’s that?” when hearing of the Lincoln Highway. Flipping through the pages provides glimpses of what’s there today and some of what was there in times long past. Turn the pages slowly and read all the captions for an even better answer to the question.
The Lincoln Highway, Photos Through Time, Brian Butko, Lincoln Highway Association, 2013, paperback, 10 x 8 inches, 136 pages, ISBN 978-0989208000
Available at Lincoln Highway Trading Post.
This picture is from the my 2010 Ohio Lincoln Highway League Meeting road trip. The meeting was near Findlay so I booked a room there and made a leisurely two day trip out of attending. The first day was spent getting there on US-42 and US-68 and the second involved traveling west on the Lincoln Highway to cross the Dixie Highway and head home through Lima, Ohio. There was sightseeing and an interesting restaurant on each day and a museum visit on the first. The meeting itself had some interesting presentations and was followed by the pictured dedication of a reconstructed brick pillar.
Trip Pic Peek #7 — Trip #59 — Thanksgiving 2007
Trip Pic 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 trip journal it is from.
I live a little over eight miles from Cozaddale, Ohio, and have driven through it numerous times. The most recent was June 9 when I took the first picture at right. I live a little over eight hundred miles from Cozad, Nebraska, and have driven through it exactly twice. The most recent was Friday when I took the second picture at right. As you might suspect from the names, there is more to connect these two towns than my visits. Both were named for, or more accurately by, the same man.
John Jackson Cozad was born in 1830 near Allensville, Ohio, but he didn’t stick around long. He ran away at the age of twelve and before long found his way onto riverboats plying the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. He also found his way into a successful career as a faro dealer. I’ve found no indication that his success came from anything other than a carefully developed ability to read the faces of opponents, but I did find a claim that this ability led to him being barred from riverboats and other gambling operations.
Although he never completely gave up cards, Cozad moved into real estate speculation/development around 1870. He laid out an eight street village on land he owned along the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad and formed a building association. Things began well enough and a few buildings were completed in this place he called Cozaddale before some “trouble” (of which I’ve found no details) brought about the end of the association and Cozad’s development of his first town.
Horace Greeley may or may not have said “go west, young man” a few years earlier but John J Cozad probably didn’t need any such encouragement anyway. Nebraska had become a state in 1867 and, apparently while still postmaster of Cozaddale, Cozad went to look it over in 1872. The way railroad section boss John Cusack tells the story, he was checking track on a handcar headed west when he spotted Cozad, in top hat and tails, walking east. The Ohioan had been on a westbound train when he spotted a 100th meridian sign and left the train at the next stop. Inspired by the sign, Cozad developed an almost instant vision for a town that he described to Cusack. After hitching a ride on the handcar, Cozad returned to Ohio, bought 40,000 acres of Nebraska, then came back with about thirty others to build a namesake town at the 100th meridian.
Cozad, the town, grew and Cozad, the man, became a “hay tycoon”. As a big time farmer in cattle country, Cozad, the man, had his share of conflicts with ranchers. One such conflict was with an Alfred Pearson. Some reports say Pearson pulled a knife and some reports say Cozad thought Pearson reached for a knife. All reports say that Cozad pulled a gun and fired. Pearson died of his wounds a couple of months later and Cozad the man left Cozad the town almost immediately. Teresa Cozad, John’s wife, stayed around long enough to dispose of the family’s holdings then, with their two sons, she too vamoosed.
To most people, the Cozad clan seemed to have simply disappeared then, in the 1950s, a descendant revealed some of the missing bits of the story. Using the name Richard Henry Lee, John Cozad opened a place called Lee’s Pier on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Son Johnny posed as a brother-in-law using the name Frank Southern and son Robert posed as a nephew or foster son named Robert Henry. Perhaps not surprisingly, Richard Lee managed to stir up things in Atlantic City, too. In a conflict with the city over selling his property, Lee/Cozad built a barricade across the boardwalk that earned his place the name “Fort Lee”. He eventually lost but it took the state legislature to beat him.
John A. Cozad, a.k.a. Frank Southern, eventually went back to his real first name and became, as Dr. John Southern, a well respected physician in Philadelphia. Robert Henry Cozad retained a slightly modified version of his Atlantic City alias and went on to great fame as an artist. His childhood home in the second town his dad founded is now the Robert Henri Museum. At left is a portrait that Robert Henri painted of his father, John J. Cozad, in 1903.
This is obviously one of those pre-written pieces but, unlike most of the My Gear and My Wheels sorts of things, this one is tied ever so slightly to real-time. I suppose it was sometime after I drove through Cozad, Nebraska, in 2009 that I discovered the connection between there and Cozaddale, Ohio. When I realized that I would be passing through Cozad again this year, I thought it might be cute to get a picture of the Cozaddale limits sign and do something with it in my journal entry when I again reached Cozad. I did a couple of searches hoping to find something interesting to say and the wild stories just kept tumbling out of the internet. It was soon apparent that it would take much more than a journal panel to do the John Cozad story anything near justice. Knowing I would be using several canned entries during the Lincoln Highway drive, I decided that this, with a single new picture, would be one of them. It was primarily constructed with information from here, here (via WayBackMachine), and here. Those three sources don’t agree on everything and there are other, slightly different, versions out there, too. That certainly doesn’t surprise me. I’ve a feeling that John J himself couldn’t get his life story completely right even if he was trying to be entirely honest and I also have a feeling that being entirely honest wouldn’t come easy to him.
On June 30, two groups of cars will converge on Kearney, Nebraska, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Lincoln Highway Association on July 1. I will be part of the one coming from the east. The launch from Times Square is still two days away on Saturday but I left home Wednesday in order to make it in time. The groups will follow, as close as practical, the original Lincoln Highway route and, if all goes well, I will continue west on the route following the celebration and conference in Kearney.
The journal for the trip is here. This will be the only blog entry related to the trip and will serve to hold any and all comments.
The Lincoln Highway turns a hundred this year. Brian Butko’s Greetings from the Lincoln Highway turns eight. At first glance, the 2013 Greetings… looks an awful lot like the 2005 Greetings… with a soft cover and a “Centennial Edition” banner on the front and it’s a fact that, in many ways, it is the same. It has the same organization with an introductory chapter and a chapter, with map, for each state the highway passed through and a very high percentage of the words and pictures in those chapters are the same, too. Another thing that remains the same and which accounts for the small in percentage but large in number changes is the care and attention to detail. Butko probably didn’t catch everything in the book that the passage of time has altered but he sure tried and he sure got a lot.
Most of changes are tiny and hard to spot. A lot are downers; Diners and motels that were operating in 2005 but have been closed or worse. Some, like the growth of Pennsylvania’s Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor from 140 to 200 miles, are positive. A few changed words handle the bulk of these updates though some are more involved and a few include a photo change. New photographs are easier to spot than new words and I suppose a larger fraction of photos than words were changed but that’s just because the word count is higher that the picture count. The majority of the book’s graphics remain the same. Though I in no way benefit from the sale of this book, in the interest of full disclosure I need to say that I contributed a half dozen or so of the new photos.
Aside from the occasional new photo, the most visible changes may be in the statistics and maps at the front of each state chapter. Here population numbers from the 2010 census replace those from the 2000 census and the maps get a line for the Proclamation Route. The Lincoln Highway Proclamation Route was a list of cities published by the Lincoln Highway Association on September 14, 1913. Shifts started happening almost immediately and a detailed route was never signed or published that matched the September 14 announcement. But several of the cities dropped in 1913 fought unsuccessfully to return and many have fought more recently and more successfully to be recognized. Butko acknowledges that by including the ephemeral route. All of the quotes from postcards and other period communication that appeared in the margins of the original are still there and a few more have been added.
Greetings from the Lincoln Highway is almost universally accepted as the best book available for anyone wanting to travel or otherwise interact with the Lincoln Highway of today. And it’s more. That’s something I had forgotten. “The Good, the Bad and the Muddy”, the book’s opening chapter, not only introduces the Lincoln Highway, it provides a nice overview of the early days of motoring. When the book moves on to the individual states and a more concentrated Lincoln Highway focus, it offers both history and guidance. It is not a lay-in-your-lap turn-by-turn guide book but the text and maps contain most of what is needed to travel any alignment of any segment. Doing it for real is certainly best but there are enough pictures that doing it in an easy chair ain’t too bad.
Greetings from the Lincoln Highway — Centennial Edition, Brian Butko, Stackpole Books, 2013, paperback, 11 x 8.5 inches, 288 pages, ISBN 978-0811711746
Available through Amazon.
I’m reading this book for the third time. I read it around 2005 when I was dabbling with short drives on the Lincoln Highway to my east. I reread it in 2009 when I was getting ready to drive the Lincoln from the east edge of Illinois to the west coast. My current read is in anticipation of another long, hopefully full length, drive of what Drake Hokanson calls Main Street across America. I never read the original, only the pictured Tenth Anniversary Edition which is now fifteen years old itself.
I’m reading the book primarily because Hokanson’s appreciation of the road puts me in just the right mood to appreciate it myself but there are other reasons, too. One is that, like Butko’s book above, much of the original remained in the anniversary edition and provides its own glimpses of the highway when it was only three-quarters, rather than a full, century old. Lastly, it’s a chance to appreciate Drake Hokanson. It you think the Lincoln Highway is largely forgotten now, imagine what it was like in 1988. Hokanson didn’t invent a new road like Carl Fisher and his buddies but he did kind of invent the remembering of it. And that’s pretty cool.
The Lincoln Highway — Main Street across America — Tenth Anniversary Edition, Drake Hokanson, University Of Iowa Press, 1999, paperback, 10.6 x 9.4 inches, 256 pages, ISBN 978-0877456766
Available through Amazon.
This is another short Lincoln Highway related trip that begins with music. Actually, it’s all about music. The reason for the trip is this afternoon’s Cece Otto American Songline concert in Hayesville, Ohio, and it started yesterday with a Carey Murdock concert in Van Wert. The journal for the trip is here. This will be the only blog entry related to the trip and will serve to hold any and all comments.
It didn’t start off exactly as planned but it did start and I’m on my way to the 2013 Ohio Lincoln Highway League meeting in Mifflin. The journal for the trip, which started in Columbus and will include a stop at Grant’s boyhood home in Georgetown, is here. This will be the only blog entry related to this trip and will serve to hold any and all comments.
The Lincoln Highway Association was incorporated in Michigan in July of 1913 but the meeting that got things rolling was held in September of 1912 in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was held in the building pictured to the right which was then called Das Deutshe Haus and now known as the Athenaeum. I am now off to a recreation of that meeting in that same building as part of the Indiana LHA centennial kickoff. There will be bus tours before and after the recreation plus I’ve got to get there and back.
The journal for the trip is here.
This blog entry exists as a place for comments on the trip.