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Jesse Petersen -- Tooele's police chief from 1979 to 1998 -- was on a tour of Dugway Proving Ground 11 years ago when he saw the first battered, rusty "Lincoln Highway" sign.
It marked the spot where the now-abandoned, but well-preserved, 1913-era dirt track crosses a modern Dugway road. Minutes later, Petersen saw an old bridge with a sign that identified the beat-up wooden structure as a Lincoln Highway remnant.
"Just what is this Lincoln Highway?" he asked himself.
The question led him into a decadelong search that culminated in The Lincoln Highway: Utah (The Patrice Press, Tucson, Ariz.), a modern guide to the roadway West, which Petersen and a colleague published in March.
The book documents, mile by mile, foot by foot, the route of the dirt highway -- named for President Abraham Lincoln and started in 1913 -- through the Beehive State, from just west of Evanston, Wyo., through Echo, Utah, Salt Lake City and then around the southern tip of the Great Salt Lake to Grantsville, Fish Springs and Ibapah to Ely, Nev.
This week, the now-retired Petersen is attending a Lincoln Highway Association meeting in Fort Wayne, Ind. Today, he will be appointed the association's national treasurer.
As he sought his own answers about the United States' first coast- to-coast highway, completed in a pre-asphalt era when roads were carved out of dirt and intrepid motorists had to load up on spare tires and shovels to drive cross country, Petersen, an Orem native, says he "ran into the fact that the Lincoln Highway is not well- known in Utah."
The dream for such a highway had begun in the earliest years of the 20th century. A group of auto and tire manufacturers -- driven by visions of profits from a small, but growing, motoring public -- conceived of a 3,400-mile-long "highway" from Times Square in New York City to San Francisco's Lincoln Park.
The private association led the charge because the federal government was not yet in the highway business. Road development was almost exclusively the responsibility of individual states.
Within this framework, the Lincoln Highway is generally not a road that was built from scratch like a modern-day interstate. Rather, it took shape from the cobbling together of many...