An authoritative look at the Lincoln Highway Across Indiana
The official car of the Lincoln Highway Association at the Indiana-Illinois state line.
I believe the car is a 1923 Studebaker Special Six 5-passenger touring car.
Images of America: The Lincoln Highway Across Indiana offers an authoritative look at the route through the Hoosier state. Through the use of vintage and contemporary photographs, postcards, advertisements, and other historical records, the reader is transported back to earlier times along America’s first coast-to-coast highway. Author Jan Shupert-Arick’s extensive research yielded a well-documented resource that sparks an interest in touring this gem of Indiana automotive heritage.
In September 1912, at an Indianapolis dinner party for automobile manufacturers, Hoosiers Carl G. Fisher and James A. Allison were the prime movers in sharing a vision for a highway spanning the continent from New York to San Francisco by 1915. After substantial pledges by Frank Seiberling of Goodyear Tire and Henry B. Joy of Packard Motor Company, the Lincoln Highway Association was created in July 1913 to commence building the route across the country.
The original Lincoln Highway route in eastern Indiana passes through a number of communities and then proceeds into Fort Wayne. Vintage photos document the Lincoln’s dedication festivities on June 21, 1915. The author offers a description of the use of highway “control points” where drivers would compare their odometer readings to listings in the Official Road Guide of the Lincoln Highway to estimate their distance between navigation features along the route. She also describes route markings on posts and adjacent buildings and their meanings at a time before the numbered route markings as we know them today.
One of the first roads in northeast Indiana was the Fort Wayne to Goshen Road, which later became the Lincoln Highway and then U.S. 33. Arick has assembled a collection of vintage and contemporary photos documenting original businesses and restaurants along the route. The Magic Wand Diner in Churubusco still offers hamburgers, apple pie, and ice cream to travelers along the road. Elkhart’s early automotive heritage is documented with a photo of the employees outside the Crow Motor Car Company.
Until I read this book, I was not aware that the Studebaker Corporation made monetary donations and furnished a car to promote the LHA. Studebaker also produced one of the first Indiana automobile road maps. The book has a great publicity photo of 1956 Studebaker and Packard cars outside of a Bonnie Doon’s drive-in restaurant location in South Bend or Mishawaka. A 1931 photograph of the largest car in the world is shown at the entrance to the 840-acre Studebaker Proving Ground, which is now Bendix Woods County Park in New Carlisle, just south of U.S. 20.
Further west in Dyer is a strip known as the “Ideal Section.” It was conceived in 1921 by the LHA as a model for highway construction. The four lane highway’s concrete was 10-inches thick and 40-feet wide along a 110-foot right-of-way with landscaping and electric lighting. A memorial for Henry C. Ostermann, long time LHA vice president and field secretary, was built along the south side of the section in 1926.
Shupert-Arick’s research, writing, and selection of photographs provide insights about the early days as well as current times along the Lincoln Highway in Indiana. Her captions involve the reader in planning a trip. My copy of the book is well annotated for my next exploration of the Lincoln Highway across Indiana.
