Title The Jefferson Highway : blazing the way from Winnipeg to New Orleans / Lyell D. Henry, Jr

Published Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2016] ©2016

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Description 1 online resource Series Iowa and the Midwest experience Iowa and the Midwest experience. Contents Prologue: a highway to honor Jefferson -- Founding the highway -- Promoting the highway -- Building the highway -- Marking the highway -- Looking for the highway: Minnesota border to Colo -- Looking for the highway: Colo to Des Moines -- Looking for the highway: Des Moines to the Missouri border -- Epilogue: thinking about the highway Summary 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! Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed March 28, 2016) Subject Express highways -- United States -- History Roads -- United States -- History Roads -- Manitoba -- History Automobile travel -- United States BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Industries -- Transportation. TRANSPORTATION -- Public Transportation. HISTORY -- United States -- State & Local -- Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI) Automobile travel Express highways Roads SUBJECT Jefferson Highway -- History Subject Manitoba North America -- Jefferson Highway (Manitoba and United States) United States Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781609384227 1609384229

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