Image courtesy CCCA.
While known to most automotive enthusiasts as the man behind the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy 500, Carl Fisher?s greater contribution to automotive history, now largely forgotten, came a couple of years later when he built the country?s first coast-to-coast highway, the Lincoln Highway, which the Classic Car Club of America plans to traverse for its 2013 Re-Discover America CARavan.
Fisher, an automobile racer, dealer, and parts supplier, actually switched over from bicycles to automobiles around the turn of the century, as did many automotive pioneers. No doubt through his involvement with bicycles he realized the importance of building and improving roads not just within cities but all across the country, the motivation behind the Good Roads Movement. That goal became increasingly more important with the introduction of the automobile, which would require an extensive road network for Americans to adopt it ? what good is owning a car if you have nowhere to drive it? ? so not long after the inaugural Indianapolis 500, Fisher turned his attention toward building a transcontinental highway.
Basing the New York-to-San Francisco route partly on existing roads and historic trails, the Lincoln Highway Association began its publicity campaign ? which included lobbying local and state governments and even raising funds to build sections of the route itself ? in 1913. That publicity then led to a proliferation of highways across the country, all formally codified by the federal government in 1926 under the U.S. numbered highways system. Its largest impact, however, was on a young Dwight Eisenhower, who traveled the Lincoln Highway in 1919 and realized the importance of a federal highway network, leading to the introduction of the national Interstate system in 1956.
Today, much of the Lincoln Highway has been paved over or rerouted, but it will serve as a general template for the route that the CCCA will take from New York to San Francisco, traveling through a dozen states over the three-week period from May 4 to May 26. Along the way, the tour will visit museums and collections of note and include a number of scenic routes. For more information, visit ClassicCarClub.org.
If you don?t have a certified Full Classic, two other tours will celebrate the Lincoln Highway?s centennial next year. The Lincoln Highway Association has planned its tour for June 21-30, with two contingents leaving from New York City and San Francisco and meeting in the middle at Kearney, Nebraska. Then, shortly after that tour wraps up, another group open to any pre-1979 vehicle plans to traverse the highway from New York City to San Francisco from July 1-26.
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