The main east–west route through Pennsylvania Dutch Country, US-30 is also one of the best-preserved stretches of the old Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental route. Planned and named in 1915, linking New York City’s Times Square with the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the Lincoln Highway followed over 3,000 miles of country road across 12 states. A thousand miles of the original “highway” were little more than muddy tracks, scarcely more visible on the ground than they were on the still-nonexistent road maps, but by the early 1930s the road was finally fully paved, following present-day US-30 as far as Wyoming, then bending south to follow what’s now US-50, “The Loneliest Road in America,” along the route of the Pony Express across Nevada and most of California.
Originally marked by telephone poles brightly painted with red, white, and blue stripes and a large letter “L,” in 1928 the Lincoln Highway was blazed by more discreet concrete mileposts carrying a small bust of Lincoln; 3,000 of these were placed, one every mile, by Boy Scout troops across the land, but only around a dozen still stand. As with the later Route 66, the Lincoln Highway was replaced by the interstates, but it does live on, in folk memory as well as the innumerable “Lincoln Cafes” and “Lincoln Motels” along its original route, much of which still bears the name “Lincolnway.”
For an overall discussion of this old road’s significance and legacy, read Drake Hokansen’s excellent Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America (University of Iowa Press, 1987), and become a member of the Lincoln Highway Association (PO Box 8117, St. Louis, MO 63156; 630/466-4382), whose top-quality quarterly magazine is well worth the annual dues. For help finding the many roadside landmarks that survive in the Keystone State, pick up a copy of Pennsylvania Traveler’s Guide to the Lincoln Highway by Brian A. Butko (Stackpole Books, 1996). And if you like what you see here, take a trip west to Iowa, another state with substantial reminders of the Lincoln Highway heyday.
