Jan Shupert-Arick - The Lincoln Highway Across Indiana

Few people possess the vision that Carl Fisher provided in the early days of the automobile industry. Fishers fortitude and ability to persuade others of the need for good roads went far beyond what most people would have dreamed possible. He had no patience to wait for the local, state, or federal government to create and implement a plan for a road system for America. He believed the private sector could move the process forward and demonstrate what good roads and transcontinental travel could mean to commerce. Fisher and his sidekick, James Allison, worked together to inspire the automobile industry to create the first coast-to-coast automobile highway. Allison provided the business skills while Fisher was the visionary. The automobile industry was a beneficiary, but the most dramatic result was that a passable route across the nation was opened up for personal travel. For the first time, tourists were able to stop where they wanted, eat when they wanted, and travel to places the trains did not go. Carl Fishers vision renewed a sense of patriotism and achievement that changed the nation.

Frank Seiberling of Goodyear Tire provided a $300,000 pledge to the Lincoln Highway Association (LHA) immediately following Carl Fisher and James Allisons invitation to dinner at the German House in Indianapolis in 1912. Fisher asked Seiberling to join the LHA board of directors in 1913. Seiberling served as president of the LHA board for two-thirds of its existence between 1913 and 1928. Goodyear printed and supplied 65,000 copies of a helpful booklet for tourists traveling the Lincoln Highway. As a board member and president, Seiberling oversaw the development and completion of the seedling mile program, the building of the Ideal Section, and the first U.S. Army transcontinental convoy along the Lincoln Highway in 1919. Seiberling sent the Goodyear band to South Bend to join the military convoy that then played all the way to San Francisco in support of the troops. Frank Seiberling financed the Goodyear Pass in the Utah desert and traveled the Lincoln Highway to assess its condition. Frank Seiberlings commitment to the Lincoln Highway was extraordinary and spanned the full term of the associations existence. From his initial pledge in 1912 to the disbanding of the LHAs office in Detroit in 1928, Seiberling was devoted to the nations first transcontinental automobile highway.

Carl Fisher was born in Greensburg in 1874. Now considered to be the father of the Lincoln Highway, Fisher became part of the automobile craze that would change the nation forever. Fishers reputation was one of automotive and promotional genius. He raced from bicycles to automobile lamps to being a founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He was the man behind both the Lincoln and the Dixie Highwaysa national system of paved roads that ran from New York to San Francisco and from north to south via Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Chicago on the Dixie Highway to Miami Beach. His roads intersected along the Lincoln in South Bend, on the 1913 original route on the Lincoln Highway in Indiana, and in Plymouth, on the later 1926 route. Fisher provided the vision that was required to create the nations first transcontinental automobile road. (Courtesy of the LHA collection/University of Michigan.)