| Abstract |
The Lincoln Highway is a 3300-mile long road stretching across the United States from New York City to San Francisco. Its creation was the result of the first successful effort to create an all-weather transcontinental highway specifically for automobiles. The Lincoln Highway began as a miscellaneous collection of downtown streets, country lanes, and old trails marked with signs showing an "L" rectangular graphic emblazoned in red, white, and blue. By the 1920s, it had become the nation's premier cross-country thoroughfare and a testing ground for new road and bridge-building techniques. A dynamic, commercial roadside emerged along the Lincoln Highway and other roads of that era, pioneering the marketing of gas, food, lodging and other motorist services through innovative architectural form and design. Today, the roads that comprise the Lincoln Highway approximate sections of the present day Federal and State Highway System: U.S. 1, 30, 40, 50, and I-80 traversing New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. In December 2000, a bill was passed by Congress and signed by the President directing the National Park Service to coordinate a comprehensive study of the routes of the Lincoln Highway. This Special Resource Study (SRS) will evaluate the highway and related resources to present management alternatives for long-term preservation of the highway, including alternatives involving management as a unit of the National Park System, and management by state and local governments and private sector organizations. This study is being conducted cooperatively with the National Park Service's National Center for Cultural Resources, four regions of the National Park Service-- the Midwest, Intermountain, Pacific West/Great Basin, and Northeast, the Federal Highway Administration and, through cooperative agreement, with the Organization of American Historians and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. This website presents information on the study and links to related sites. |
