In 1912 Carl Graham Fisher, president of the Prest-O-Lite carbide headlight manufacturing company and founder of the Indianapolis 500, had first advocated building a road that would let people drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific on a "rock highway": drive without devoting weeks to the journey, drive without choking in clouds of dust or sinking in axle-deep mud. That year the United States Congress had decided to spend $1.7 million to erect the Lincoln Memorial in Washingtona solemn and inspiring piece of symbolism, certainly, but, in Fisher's view, low on practicality. Highway promoters like Fisher and his ally Henry Joy, the Packard Motor Car Company president, insisted there was a more useful way to honor the sixteenth President. Asserted Joy: "Let good roads be built in the name of Lincoln." ("Westward on the old Lincoln Highway" By Philip Langdon in American Heritage 46:2)
Other Names:
Abraham Lincoln Memorial Highway, U.S. Highway 30
County:
Laramie; Albany; Carbon; Sweetwater; Uinta; Lincoln
Feature Category:
Manmade Features
More Reading:
Hokanson, Drake. The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America, University of Iowa Press, 1988.; Weingroff, Richard F. The LIncoln Highway. Federal Highway Administration, Highway History. fhwa.dot.gov.
