Content area
Full Text
In the general order of things, the American frontier was pushed back by pioneers who first followed game trails, then Indian trails, trappers' trails, and finally wagon roads to settle the way west.
And when wagon roads were unsuitable for horseless carriages, the next step forward was the automobile highway.
For many years, as Noble Warrum Sr., editorial writer for The Salt Lake Tribune, phrased it in 1919, the only highways in Utah were those following "the lines of least resistance" winding through woods and along canyons between settlements.
But in some seasons, those roads became impassable as washouts, landslides and flooding exacted a toll.
It was difficult enough for wagons and animals, but after the first decade of this century, a "good roads" movement gained momentum across the country, as the motoring public demanded better highways.
Automobiles were the dream of the future, but limitations on water, fuel, tires and mechanical repairs contained the dream to a mild sigh.
Rallying cry: Still, America envisioned an ocean-to-ocean highway, just as the railroad a half-century earlier had pushed across the continent. New York to San Francisco was a rallying cry that would not be denied.
Most prominent and the most vocal of booster groups was the Lincoln Highway Association; it certainly had the greatest effect on Utah. Yet because of misunderstandings, the state came away with a sour reputation at a critical time in highway expansion.
And it began with the Lincoln Highway.
Eighty years ago last September, the Lincoln Highway Association organized and proposed a route -- named in honor of Abraham Lincoln -- across America through South Pass on the Continental Divide, stretching from New York to San Francisco, from Times Square to Lincoln Park.
And in a modern reflection of that 1913 LHA meeting, a 1993 Lincoln Highway Association has been created, organized to preserve and restore what the earlier group helped build. (Rusty W. Andrus is president; Jesse Petersen and Alan Stockland vice presidents of the new Utah Chapter.)
Because it was then anticipated to be the most difficult terrain, the proposed 1913 segment through Utah was carefully defined. From Evanston, Wyo., it would cross the line to Castle Rock, then Echo, Coalville and Wanship to Salt Lake City; then westward...