Lincoln Highway gets its due in a new book

Published 12:15 pm Friday, August 10, 2007

Singers croon about “getting their kicks” on Route 66, not the Lincoln Highway. TV execs never made a show about two guys cruising the Lincoln in a Corvette convertible. Yet Route 66 expert Michael Wallis considers the lesser-known Lincoln Highway a crucial part of American automobile lore.

“Route 66 happens to be more famous. But the Lincoln is equally important,” says Wallis, who parlayed a consultant’s job on the 2006 animated movie “Cars” into a role in the film as the town’s sheriff. “We could have easily done that movie on the Lincoln Highway.”

That’s because the Lincoln predated Route 66 as the nation’s first transcontinental road – a 3,389-mile route that connected the lights of New York’s Broadway with the foggy San Francisco coastline. The Lincoln Highway bisected 13 states, and passed by countless historical markers and roadside attractions. Sections of the road are still navigable today.

Wallis chronicles the road’s history in a new book, “The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast From Times Square to the Golden Gate” (W.W. Norton, $39.95). Illustrated with images by Michael Williamson, the book is an affectionate portrait of a bygone route and a fading way of life.

“The highway itself is a museum,” says Wallis by phone from a book-tour stop in East Liverpool, Ohio, which lies, not coincidentally, on the old Lincoln Highway. Wallis is retracing the route on a three-week tour that combines the old (visits to museums) with the new (a road-trip blog, accessible at www.lincolnhighwaybook.com). “To me, there are no state boundaries on the old road. I look at it all as one linear village.”

The Lincoln Highway was conceived in 1912 by Carl Fisher, an Indiana businessman and founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home to the Indy 500. Planned as a memorial to Abraham Lincoln, the road followed Indian paths, pioneer trails and stagecoach routes on its way West. Meandering, ever-realigning and never completely paved, it was dedicated in 1913 with speeches, parades and fireworks along the route, known then as the “Main Street Across America.”

By the late 1920s, the federal government converted named highways to numbered ones, and the Lincoln began fading from national consciousness. Eventually it was eclipsed in fame by the more southerly, faster and fully paved Route 66.

As you might guess, Wallis is not a fan of interstates, or “slabs of monotony,” as he calls them, with their chain motels, chain restaurants and emphasis on speed over sightseeing. He believes that Americans, despite today’s hurry-up culture, are growing nostalgic for the leisurely pleasures and kitschy attractions of back highways. There’s even a name for this movement: “heritage tourism,” or “shunpiking,” as in shunning turnpikes.

“The Golden Arches are the same in Provo as they are in Sacramento as they are in Tallahassee. When you walk into a McDonald’s, you know what you’re going to get,” Wallis says. “But … People have learned that life begins at the offramp, when you get off the superslab and go back to the old roads. You’re getting authentic America.”

Wallis knows time-pressed travelers will always prefer interstates to back roads. But he remains an unabashed booster of America’s faded highways, with their historic sites and tourist traps.

“There’s more to driving these roads than just nostalgia. These are still viable roads. I want to make these the roads of the future. I know we can’t save all of them. But we can save some,” he says.

Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service