Out reconnoitering a few years ago, Jesse G. Petersen stopped at a spot near Black Rock. He knew the Lincoln Highway of the early 1900s came through here. A faint curve of the forgotten road is visible before it ducks beneath a rust-stained railroad trestle and then rolls on to Lake Point and Tooele County.
But where did the highway come in from the east?This is the narrow corridor where the Oquirrh Mountains meet the Great Salt Lake. Modern interstates and a century's smelter operations have mostly obliterated foot, horse and wagon routes used by Indians, pioneering settlers and California '49ers.
Petersen peered over a grassy pile of rubble and beyond a Kennecott fence. There it was, a ribbon of white: a concrete strip of the Lincoln Highway - part of a road proposed 85 years ago as the nation's first transcontinental automobile route, the ancestor to today's I-80.
"My wife has developed a theory that the reason I like doing this is it's investigation," said Petersen, a history buff who also happens to have been Tooele's police chief for the past 20 years. "I don't get to do this much anymore."
Petersen is not alone in his fascination with this old road, initially mapped and promoted in 1913 by the Lincoln Highway Association. An organization of manufacturers and "motor car" owners, it was a major player in America's "good roads movement."
"The government had not taken any interest in building roads since after the Revolutionary War," explained Petersen, a member of the association's national board. "Around the turn of the century we started getting all of these automobiles - and people couldn't get out of town." Within and around communities, roads were being graveled, bricked or paved. In the countryside, dust and mud flew and ruts jarred travelers. In bad weather, motorists could quickly get stuck in the muck, he said.
The Lincoln Highway Association, disbanded in the 1930s after state and federal agencies finally joined the road-building crusade, has been reconstituted as an organization of professional and amateur historians and of folks interested in classic automobiles and the roads they traveled.
The national association is holding its annual conference through Saturday in the Salt Lake Hilton, hosted by the 4-year-old Utah chapter. Speakers are recalling the road's fabled history and members plan to head out for day tours along Utah segments of the route. One is a rare chance to see the Goodyear Cut-off, a causeway across the southern salt flats that's now on the restricted Dug-way Proving Ground.
Utah was key to the highway's epic vision - and to its eventual demise.
Carl Graham Fisher, Drake Hokanson writes in "The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America," came up with the concept. "Fisher was a man of ideas, and big ideas at that. His Indianapolis Motor Speedway had become a smashing success, especially after he paved it with brick and inaugurated the Indianapolis 500 in 1911."
"He was one of America's greatest visionaries," says a younger cousin, Jerry Fisher, who will be the keynote speaker at the conference banquet Saturday. He has written a new biography, "The Pacesetter: The Untold Story of Carl G. Fisher."
Besides the Indianapolis 500 and the Lincoln Highway, Carl Fisher was behind the development of Miami Beach, Fla. Earlier, Fisher was a founder of the Prest-O-Lite Co., maker of carbide headlights. At the time, these provided the only reliable light for night driving. In 1912 he sold his interests to Union Carbide for $9 million - a huge sum for that era, Jerry Fisher noted in an interview. At its height, his wealth tallied around $50 million.
One of his biggest ideas was the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway, a basic graveled road. Carl Fisher was not the first to think of a transcontinental highway - "the AAA had suggested one as early as 1902," Hokanson writes - but he envisioned a well-marked and methodically improved road. And he convinced other auto-related businessmen, like Goodyear's Frank A. Seiberling and Henry Joy, president of the Packard Motor Car Co., to help fund its beginnings. Joy, who had suggested the patriotic tribute to Abraham Lincoln, became the association's president and, the writer said, "the spirit of the highway."
The eastern terminus was in New York City's Times Square, its western in San Francisco's Lincoln Park. The association mapped out the most direct route, just under 3,400 miles long, following the easiest terrain and employing existing roads - such as they were, and most weren't much - then set about getting portions graded and, if possible, paved.
"One arrangement was called `seedling miles,' " Petersen said. "They would go to areas that would help promote the road and pave a mile of good road." Concrete was a new concept for roadways then; asphalt as we know it was not yet available. The seedlings became tourist attractions. "People would hopefully see how good it was" and start pestering local and state governments to get on the bandwagon.
From the east, the 1913 Lincoln Highway slipped into Utah from Evanston, Wyo., followed Echo, Silver Creek and Parleys canyons and entered Salt Lake City on 2100 South, Petersen said. I-80 takes the same basic route today. The principal route turned down State Street to 3300 South, continued west to Magna and on to Grantsville, followed Skull Valley to Dugway and joined the old Pony Express and overland stage routes to Fish Springs, Callao and Ibapah.
World War I interrupted progress, but by 1919 the association wanted to make the road across the daunting Great Salt Lake Desert shorter as well as better. Shortcuts were devised: the route turned south through Tooele instead of Skull Valley, crossed Johnston's Pass, and a causeway was begun - called the Goodyear Cutoff for a Seiberling donation - straight across the southern salt flats.
William E. Oliver traveled much of "the Lincoln Way" between Salt Lake City and San Francisco in 1921, though flooding and mud diverted his party south of the west desert. "The only clue that the ruts in the sagebrush and washes were a highway," he recalled in the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1964, "was the handsome red, white and blue Lincoln Highway markers that guided us west."
Cross-country travel was a rough-and-ready adventure.
"I've had a few flat tires on the Lincoln Highway," Petersen admits - but 80 or so years ago flats were common - "and they had to break them down and repair tires" on the spot. Cars could also sputter and die in the middle of nowhere. In outback places like the mudflats, motorists had to rely upon the few inhabitants along the trail for help and repairs. Tales are told of sus-pic-ious-ly muddy patches, with a "Samaritan" within summoning distance and handy horses and tackle to pull folks out of the mess.
Still, the Lincoln Highway was a popular idea. Detailed odometer guides advised motorists - and their navigators - exactly how many miles to go from contact point to contact point, from this red barn to that railroad crossing, Petersen said. Auto clubs, notably from Utah and Southern California, put up signposts and mileage markers within the Beehive State, telling travelers how far they had to go to this place or that. Petersen has three rusted and bullet-pocked antiques in his possession for future museum display, rescued from scrap heaps and storage.
By the 1920s, the federal government was finally funding an interstate road system, but inevitable rivals to the Lincoln had sprung up. Utah was criss-crossed by, among others, the Arrowhead Trail (Los Angeles to Salt Lake City), the Zion Park Highway (essentially today's U.S. 91) and the east-west Pike's Peak, Midland and Victory trails and highways. Each had its factions, boosters and sponsoring cities. Improvement money, especially in sparsely populated Western states, was hard to come by.
The Victory Highway included a proposed alignment between Salt Lake City and Wendover, farther north and across many miles of salt and mud flats. Despite repeated washouts there - and substantial progress already made on the Lincoln - the state preferred the northern route. The federal government concurred and the Victory got the funding.
"That," said Petersen, "was the end, pretty much, of the Lincoln Highway."
The association felt betrayed. Soon, however, all "named" highways gave way to numbered ones with federal designations - U.S. 89, U.S. 40, Route 66 and so on.
"By the end of 1927," Hokanson writes, "the trail markers were coming down as fast as the new federal shields were going up." Much of the Lincoln Highway across America became U.S. 30.
The association gradually abandoned its proposal for the desert road in Utah. Its board stubbornly declined to "move" the Lincoln Highway designation north, expressing "hope that the much-fought-over Utah road would be improved eventually," Hokanson wrote. "But everyone . . . knew it never would be."
The Lincoln Highway drifted into obscurity - as did Carl Fisher, which Jerry Fisher cannot understand. The Florida hurricane of 1926 and the financial "hurricane" of 1929 swallowed the great man's wealth, he said.
"Basically I grew up hearing about Carl Fisher as a young boy, and of course I had the fortunate opportunity to have his personal papers, scrapbooks and so forth," Jerry Fisher says. As he grew up, the younger Fisher realized that his relative played important roles and knew many other famous people. Yet the man did not merit so much as a mention in any of the encyclopedias.
His new book is an attempt to rectify that, a 10-year quest that has sent him through masses of paper and into dozens of interesting, historic letters, many of which are included. Jerry Fisher sees the biography as a window upon early 20th century America, as well as an introduction to the beginnings of the Lincoln Highway.
Like most people today, Jesse Petersen said he wasn't even aware of the Lincoln Highway until about five years ago. Once he was, though, he started tracking down its remnants - a paved segment here, a variant strip of vegetation there.
One snowy day, he paused by a white house along an upper road in Lake Point, nearer the mountainsides than today's main Tooele County highway, U-36. He told an older gentleman there what he was up to - trying to figure out exactly where the old Lincoln Highway had been.
"He looked at me and said, `Well, you're standing on it.' "