by Earl Swift
Even a short journey threw up obstacles, as Fisher recalled years later:
Three of us drove out nine miles from Indianapolis and being delayed, were overtaken by darkness on the return trip. To complicate matters, it began to rain pretty hard, and you know automobiles didn't have any tops on them in those days, so we all three got pretty wet.
We guessed our way along as well as we could, until we came to a place where the road forked three ways. It was black as the inside of your pocket. We couldn't see any light from the city, and none of us could remember which of the three roads we had followed in driving out; if, indeed, we had come that way at all.
So we stopped and held a consultation. Presently, by the light of our headlamps, reflected up in the rain, one of us thought he saw a sign on a pole. It was too high up to read and we had no means of throwing a light on it, so there was nothing to be done but climb the pole in the wet and darkness to see if we could make out some road direction on the sign.
We matched to see who should climb. I lost. I was halfway up the pole when I remembered that my matches were inside my overcoat and I couldn't reach them. So down I had to come, dig out the matches, put them in my hat, and climb up again.
Eventually, by hard climbing, I got up to the sign. I scratched a match and before the wind blew it out I read the sign. It said: " Chew Battle-Ax Plug."
The cars kept flying out of Fisher's dealership. Motoring filled magazines and the lyrics of popular songs and new, fat sections of the Sunday papers. Americans who'd shied away from the noisy machines in their early days had since become, or planned to become, purchasers themselves—especially after Henry Ford introduced a stiff-backed little runabout in 1908 that could be serviced with simple hand tools and tough out even the goopiest farm road, and after the electric starter spelled the end of hand-cranking engines to life, an advance that boosted motoring's appeal to women. Nationwide, vehicle registrations were on the brink of topping a million in 1912, having doubled in two years, tripled in three, quadrupled in four.
The machines promised a freedom previously unknown: to truly roam, independent of rails or stage routes; to venture into the country without a care about schedule; to throw off the shackles of the horse. And you can bet those shackles weighed heavily. For one thing, horses were slow; movie westerns have filled our heads with images of cowboys on horseback galloping across the prairie, but real horses can't keep that up for long and need frequent rest, food, water. Even the most spartan automobiles of 1912 made better time across long distances.
Alongside passenger cars came the first trucks. Production in 1911 amounted to 13,319 vehicles, more than in all the previous years combined, and the 56,000 turned out two years later were again more than all those built to that point. Such geometric growth, impressive as it was, marked just the beginning of a tectonic shift in urban commerce. " Manufacturers of trucks," the Times observed, " are just now looking into the future of the use of commercial vehicles on a scale that would startle the general public if the plans were made known."
The horse was in its twilight. In the fifteen years since the first American auto sale, in the ten years since the first transcontinental road trip, the automobile had " changed conditions of life in every phase," the Times marveled. " We move faster, get our mail and freight more quickly, buy and sell our products more surely, and we even scorn the handicaps that once were put upon our business or pleasure travel by storm and snowdrift."
It may seem counterintuitive, but part of the motorcar's appeal came down to money, because while buggies might be cheaper to buy, their drive trains were mighty expensive to maintain. Horses required stabling, feed, and health care, which nationally amounted to $2 billion a year, or as much as it cost to maintain all of America's railroads. Feeding the typical horse consumed five acres of tillable land per annum; devoted to food for people, the nation's feed-producing cropland could support millions.
Then there was the question of health, especially in the cities. " All wars together have not caused half the deaths that may be traced to the horse," one motoring advocate claimed. " Business, humanity and public health demand that the horse be eliminated from urban civilization." Motor vehicles, said the industry's boosters, polluted far less noxiously.
City and country alike were changing to accommodate the new technology—filling stations now dotted the roadside by the thousands—except in a key respect: the roads themselves. " Hard roads, smooth roads, and, above all, lasting roads," the Times reported, " are now the cry from every section of the country."
No one cried louder than Fisher. He had little faith that government would fill the need; the feds were building scattered demonstration roads but left the real work to states and localities, most of which, it seemed to him, didn't know what they were doing. " The highways of America are built chiefly of politics," he wrote to a friend, " whereas the proper material is crushed rock or concrete."
It was up to the industry to get things started, to provide an example of what could be accomplished with imagination and will, to inspire others. So in the late summer of 1912, Carl Fisher began talking up a new project, a transcontinental highway, a rock road stretching across a dozen states or more, from New York to California. A highway built to a standard unseen in the United States—dry, smooth, safe, not just passable but comfortable in the rainy seasons. A road built for the automobile. For the future.
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CARL FISHER WAS NOT alone in calling for a big interstate highway. Even as he refined his proposal, others were going public with similar visions. Earlier in the year, good roads advocates meeting in Kansas City had created the National Old Trails Road Association, backing an auto road from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles. In June, Scientific American carried a letter from C. Francis Jenkins, an inventor and motorist, arguing that an ocean-to-ocean highway would open the West to economic development.
But Fisher brought a unique blend of traits and skills to the proposition. Through Prest-O-Lite, he'd become close friends with the chiefs of the auto industry, men with money and smarts and influence unequaled outside the White House. He was tight with the press; few men could excite newspaper reporters like Fisher, a walking quote machine whose every deed made good copy. Not least, the Hoosier had energy to burn.
So with Allison's help, he studied the cost of building such a road and devised a plan to raise the cash. He laid out their findings in a September 6, 1912, letter to Henry Ford. The highway would follow existing roads for most of its length, new construction fusing just those stretches that failed to connect. Over time, the daisy chain of existing and new roads would be upgraded to a uniform standard, broadened and straightened and beautified to meet the rising demands of traffic.
They proposed that the industry supply the materials for the job.and the public the muscle. The manufacturers and dealers of cars and accessories would kick in a small fraction of their gross receipts(one-third of 1 persont for three years,or one-fifth of 1 percent for five) to-ward the purchase of rock,cement,and asphalt,to the tune of $5,000 per mile;volunteers and governments along the toute would actually do the necessary work.
Four nights later, he and Allison unveiled their proposal at a dinner in Indianapolis for fifty-odd industry leaders. Fisher urged that work start without delay so that the " Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway," as he called it, would be finished by May 1, 1915; a convoy of twenty-five thousand automobiles would then take it to a world's fair planned for that summer in San Francisco. " It can be done," Fisher cried. " Let's build it before we are too old to enjoy it."
By evening's end, pledges were rolling in. Goodyear president Frank Seiberling promised $300,000 without consulting his company's directors, calling the pledge " a movement on which we will expect to realize dividends." Over the next few days, Fisher received commitments totaling twice again as much.
Ford showed no interest, despite Fisher's persistent entreaties—believing, as one of the automaker's lieutenants explained, that " as long as private intere
sts are willing to build good roads for the general public, the general public will not be very interested in building good roads for itself." But he was a rare holdout. Roy Chapin, the former Oldsmobile test driver, now had his own company, Hudson, and backed the highway with time and money. Fellow automaker John D. Willys and cement magnate A. Y. Gowen did likewise, and Packard president Henry B. Joy emerged as the most impassioned cheerleader of all.
With the project gathering momentum, Fisher now did something out of character for a showman: he abdicated his starring role. He worried, he said, over " the idea that this road plan is mine," and that " if any particular noise is made for any particular person or small clique of persons, this plan is going to suffer."
He remained a guiding influence but passed the top post to Joy, whom he'd known since Prest-O-Lite headlights had become standard equipment on Packards in 1904. Joy proved an inspired choice. A Detroit native, Yale graduate, and navy veteran of the Spanish-American War, he'd organized a takeover of Packard after driving one of its early runabouts and had turned it into the country's foremost luxury brand. Its motto reflected his cool confidence: " Ask the man who owns one."
Joy brought field expertise along with his business acumen. He'd sent his cars on annual overland expeditions since 1903 and had completed eleven transcontinental trips himself; when he wrote in a magazine piece that " a 'good' road here would, as a rule, be a disgrace in a foreign country," it wasn't just rhetoric.
He also boasted an interesting family history. His father, a railroad lawyer, had been close to Abraham Lincoln, and Joy inherited a fierce admiration for the late president. Even before Fisher handed over the reins, Joy observed that a highway was a more fitting monument than the Lincoln Memorial then contemplated in Washington. No surprise, then, that not far into 1913, the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway acquired a new name.
The Lincoln Highway Association incorporated in June 1913, with its offices in Detroit, Joy as its president, and Fisher as a vice president. Joy wasn't in town when the papers were filed; he was headed west to reconnoiter possible routes. His Packard took him across the Midwest and into Nebraska and Wyoming. He cut to the southwest from Salt Lake City, following the old Pony Express trail south of the Great Salt Lake and across the alkali wastes of the Utah desert, and crossed central Nevada from Ely to Carson City. The 2,753-mile trek took 151/2 days.
The going wasn't much improved from Joy's first long road trip a decade before, on which he'd asked a Packard agent in Omaha how to get to the road west and was told there wasn't one; the agent had led him out of town to a wire fence and told him to take it down and drive on, and at the next fence do the same, and likewise at the next. Soon enough, the fences had given way to open prairie, and Joy had found himself surrounded by broken planks and rusting bits of iron, fossils of the previous century's wagon trains.
In 1913, Nebraska's chief east-west highway remained a simple dirt track, the sort you might find created by tractors at the fringe of a modern-day cornfield. Even so, Joy predicted that by 1915, " motorists should have no difficulty in making the trip from New York to San Francisco in eleven days. By that time many miles of good roads will have been completed and good sign posts will mark the transcontinental route."
While Joy was on the road, Fisher was in Indianapolis, getting up a tour of his own: a convoy of seventeen Indiana-built cars and two supply trucks, bound for San Francisco via a more southerly route—through St. Louis, Kansas City, Colorado Springs, and Denver, over the Rockies to Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction, and on to Salt Lake City. The Hoosier Trailblazers, as this seventy-member expedition called itself, included reporters, photographers, telegraph operators, an AAA rep, factory drivers, speedway veterans, and passengers handpicked for their strength and fortitude. All had to pass a physical, and each car was loaded with survival gear—water bags, block and tackle, six hundred feet of rope. Their preparations aroused tremendous excitement in the newspapers, and even more among western city and state officials who assumed their route marked the future Lincoln Highway—and who knew that (a) a place on such a main route was a ticket to prosperity, while (b) the Plains were dotted with the ruins of once-promising towns that had withered after railroads passed them by. Hundreds of telegrams rained on Fisher and his associates, pitching the benefits of running the highway through one town or other. Delegations turned up from a thousand miles off to plead their cases. New road was laid and bridges were built to entice them. Colorado remade the winding path through Berthoud Pass, west of Denver; Nevada's legislators passed an emergency appropriation to fix a trail spanning the entire state.
Under way, Fisher enjoyed royal treatment wherever he went. Kansas governor George H. Hodges met him at the Missouri line and traveled with the convoy clear to Colorado, and his colleagues to the west rode along, too. California governor Hiram Johnson promised that his state would finance every foot of the Lincoln within its borders. The travelers were feted by crowds, brass bands, and automobile escorts by day and treated to lavish dinners at night. Weary, sunburned, and overfed, they reached San Francisco after thirty-four days, then drove south to Los Angeles, finishing the trip without the loss of a single car—without any mechanical trouble, really, except blown tires.
All of America was now talking about the Lincoln Highway. In terms of publicity, the Hoosier tour could scarcely have gone better. For all of that, Fisher had to confront some hard realities on his return to Indianapolis. After a fast start, pledges had dwindled; they didn't amount to even half the association's goal. Second, there now waited the touchy business of settling on the highway's route.
East of Chicago, it was fairly straightforward. The Lincoln would cross New Jersey on a plank road first cut by Dutch colonists of the seventeenth century, and much of Pennsylvania on the descendant of a British trail dating to the French and Indian War. It would pass through Pittsburgh, span Ohio's middle, and curve across Indiana to the Chicago suburbs, all on well-established, commonsense paths. West of the Mississippi, however, the going was less certain. The highway might follow three general paths, each offering advantages: southwest from Missouri to Arizona, and on to Southern California; the Hoosier tour's route west through the Colorado Rockies; or to San Francisco via Wyoming and Salt Lake City.
The last seemed the most fitting to Joy, who had a single criterion for the highway's path: it had to be the most direct possible. He was backed up by a Packard colleague, Sidney D. Waldon, who analyzed the corridors according to which was available, weather-wise, to the greatest number of users for the greatest part of the year. " There are no two questions in my mind about the Omaha-Cheyenne-Salt Lake City route being the shortest and offering the least possible trouble to the tourist," he concluded. " All parts of the line will be in condition for travel at about the same time."
And so the Lincoln followed the Platte River across Nebraska, skirting Buffalo Bill's ranch and the Sand Hills; crossed the Continental Divide just east of Laramie; thumped over single-track through Medicine Bow, Rawlins, and Green River; and traversed the Wasatch Mountains into Salt Lake City. And so it took the Pony Express trail across the Great Salt Lake Desert, dusty, empty, and sun-bleached, to Nevada.
If the association took care in unveiling the route, it might well prompt enough excitement to solve the money shortage. And Fisher believed an opportunity now loomed to accomplish this second objective. A governors' conference was scheduled for late that summer in Colorado Springs, and Fisher told his fellow directors that if they revealed the Lincoln's path there, they might convince the affected state executives to get " three or four million dollars spent next year."
Off went Fisher and Joy to Colorado Springs, and there they announced the Lincoln's route on August 26, 1913. The governors embraced it with gusto, save for Hodges of Kansas and E.M. Ammons of Colorado; both had assumed that the Hoosier Tour had taken the chosen path.
Their heated reactions aside, the visit was a huge success. On the train ride back east, the Lincoln men prepared a pub
lic proclamation for the papers in which they made clear what they expected of their fellow citizens: "Upon all the people, and especially upon the officials of each state and county and upon the inhabitants thereof . . . does rest the patriotic burden of establishing, broadening, straightening, maintaining, and beautifying such highway to the end that it may become an appropriate memorial to the Great Martyred Patriot whose name it bears." The emphasis is theirs.
That launched a publicity offensive. The association mailed posters bearing the proclamation to politicians, business leaders, and auto dealerships in the states the highway would cross, a gesture that required a corps of one hundred stenographers to address the mailing tubes. It issued an " Appeal to Patriots," urging Americans to " See America First" on the Lincoln, rather than vacation in Europe.
And on Halloween it formally dedicated this " lasting monument to the automobile industry, and one of the greatest developments ever made in this country," in the words of the San Francisco Examiner, with fireworks and parades, dances and speeches in " every city, town and hamlet" along the route.
One such town was Jefferson, Iowa, where the speakers included a stiff, serious young state highway engineer by the name of Thomas Harris MacDonald. The Lincoln Highway would be a fine asset, MacDonald said, but its greatest value lay in its status as a starting point, as " the first outlet for the road-building energies of this community." After the Lincoln, he predicted, would come a system of connected radials branching from the cities through which it passed, and in time, " great transcontinental highways."
