ANN ARBOR—Before sleek ribbons of concrete connecting the country from north to south and east to west, there was the Lincoln Highway traversing the country from New York City to San Francisco.

The country’s interstate highway system is celebrating its 50th anniversary. But before these coast to coast conveyances became the favored mode of travel there was the privately funded, cross-country, Lincoln Highway.

It was 1956 when major auto manufacturers lobbied for the National Interstate and Defense Highways. Backed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who as a young soldier crossed the country on the Lincoln Highway, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 passed, the first highway generally following the path of the Lincoln Highway.

The University of Michigan’s Transportation Library has an extensive archive pertaining to the Lincoln Highway and the resulting Lincoln Highway Association, formed in Detroit in 1913 by businessman Carl G. Fisher along with Frank A Seiberling (then president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co.) and Henry B. Joy, then president of Packard Motor Company. With representatives from these and the cement industries, the organization planned, funded and constructed the first transcontinental highway in North America. The route, consisting of both existing and newly-built roads followed the most direct route possible from New York to San Francisco, covering nearly 3,400 miles.

Now views of that early transcontinental highway can be viewed online.

Included in the U-M archive of materials from the Lincoln Highway Association’s central office in Detroit are letters, manuscripts, trip logs, minutes of meetings of the Board of Directors, reports, contracts, membership sales and subscription records. There are also planning documents, financial statements, press releases, publications and guides, including the 1928 logbook of Lincoln Highway markers made by local Boy Scouts. There are strip maps and a set of drawings by noted landscape architect Jens Jensen for the Indiana ” Ideal Section.”

Yet with all this, says librarian Kathleen Dow, the photographic collection seems to be of greatest interest among researchers. The photographs include views of construction underway, towns and cities, markers, bridges, cars, camp sites, scenery, and images, sometimes humorous Dow says, of Association directors and field secretaries traveling the route.

A recent gift from the Lincoln Highway Association has made it possible for the library to complete digitizing the photographic archive of the original Lincoln Highway Association, making the entire visible history of more than 3,000 images of the early days of the Lincoln Highway available to the public.

At its annual conference in June, 2006, the association also named U-M’s Special Collections Library as its official archival repository, thus continuing the relationship begun more than a half century ago.

Related Links:

• University of Michigan Libraries
• Special Collections Library
• U-M Lincoln Highway Digital Image Collection