Fully revised and updated edition. Filled with all-new vintage postcards and photos. Maps for travelers following the original route.

Following the Lincoln Highway today is not too different from what pioneer motorists faced a century ago. Signs and maps can be hard to find and the route isn't always clear. This handy, indispensable glove-compartment guide is the essential key to the entire highway, from California to New York, with carefully charted maps, must-see attractions, and places to eat and sleep that are slices of pure Americana. The book covers the major thirteen states the route passes through, as well as the little-known Colorado loop and the Washington, DC feeder. More than 100 detailed maps of the highway Full-color photos from across the country Recommended stops along the route

The larger-than-life hotel shaped like a ship, once lodged in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains along the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, is one of the country's all-time favorite roadside attractions. In this fascinating book--liberally illustrated with vintage postcards, photos, and blueprints--author Brian Butko weaves together interviews and surviving documents to tell the eight-decade story of this beloved icon of the road that was also a monument to grand ideas, whimsy, and good old hucksterism.

Today American motorists can count on being able to drive to virtually any town or city in the continental United States on a hard surface. That was far from being true in the early twentieth century, when the automobile was new and railroads still dominated long-distance travel. Then, the roads confronting would-be motorists were not merely bad, they were abysmal, generally accounted to be the worst of those of all the industrialized nations. The plight of the rapidly rising numbers of early motorists soon spawned a “good roads” movement that included many efforts to build and pave long-distance, colorfully named auto trails across the length and breadth of the nation. Full of a can-do optimism, these early partisans of motoring sought to link together existing roads and then make them fit for automobile driving—blazing, marking, grading, draining, bridging, and paving them. The most famous of these named highways was the Lincoln Highway between New York City and San Francisco. By early 1916, a proposed counterpart coursing north and south from Winnipeg to New Orleans had also been laid out. Called the Jefferson Highway, it eventually followed several routes through Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The Jefferson Highway, the first book on this pioneering road, covers its origin, history, and significance, as well as its eventual fading from most memories following the replacement of names by numbers on long-distance highways after 1926. Saluting one of the most important of the early named highways on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, historian Lyell D. Henry Jr. contributes to the growing literature on the earliest days of road-building and long-distance motoring in the United States. For readers who might also want to drive the original route of the Jefferson Highway, three chapters trace that route through Iowa, pointing out many vintage features of the roadside along the way. The perfect book for a summer road trip!