The Jefferson Highway: Blazing the Way from Winnepeg to New Orleans
220
The Jefferson Highway: Blazing the Way from Winnepeg to New Orleans
220eBook
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Overview
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!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384227 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2016 |
| Series: | Iowa and the Midwest Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 220 |
| File size: | 36 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Jefferson Highway
Blazing the Way from Winnipeg to New Orleans
By Lyell D. Henry Jr.
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-421-0
CHAPTER 1
Founding the Highway
The campaign to build the Lincoln Highway had a stimulating effect on "good roads" enthusiasts, many of whom soon sounded calls for blazing other long-distance automobile trails. One of those so inspired was Edwin T. Meredith, a well-known publisher, politician, and good roads advocate in Des Moines, Iowa (figure 2). In Meredith's case, however, the example of the Lincoln Highway seems also to have had a transformative effect on his basic beliefs about America's road needs. Long a promoter of improved rural roads, he now saw long-distance intercity highways as a valuable means of linking up all those rural roads that he favored. Great highways stretching across the continent, Meredith now believed, could also be a powerful force for securing an improved national life and even an upgraded citizenry.
When the Lincoln Highway was announced to the world in 1913, Meredith was founder, owner, and chief executive officer of Meredith Publications, a Des Moines firm that published several magazines of which he was managing editor; the two best known were Successful Farming and a gardening journal that eventually became Better Homes and Gardens. From the pages of the former magazine came many editorials and articles detailing the economic, social, and cultural costs to farmers of being "imprisoned in mud" and calling for state and federal aid for the improvement of rural wagon roads. Several of these articles also questioned the need for long-distance highways crossing states or the nation as well as the fairness of expecting farmers to pay for improved roads that allegedly would be mainly used by city folks out for sporting drives in their new automobiles. Meredith didn't write any of these signed articles, but their publication in his magazine, along with his editorials, justifies the conclusion that his initial good roads objective was the improvement of rural roads mainly for the benefit of farmers.
In contemplation of the Lincoln Highway Meredith must have experienced an epiphany, however, because by 1915 he was expressing and acting on some completely different views about roads. Central to his thinking now was a conviction that what farmers and all other residents in the midsection of the United States needed most was a north-south counterpart of the Lincoln Highway that would run through the Mississippi Valley connecting Winnipeg and New Orleans. It made good sense, Meredith observed in February 1916, that the "trend of travel since Columbus" had been from east to west, but "the time has come to turn a part of our highway building efforts northward and southward." His projected road he proposed to call the Jefferson Highway in recognition of President Jefferson's farsightedness in acquiring the territory through which the highway would course.
In Meredith's view, the new highway would provide a means of interlinking local roads, and that would give an impetus to improvement of those roads; as he put it in an editorial in Successful Farming in January 1916, the Jefferson Highway "will be the backbone of a great system of improved roads in the great Garden of Allah — the fertile Midwestern states." In a signed article published in October that same year, Meredith expanded on the matter of improving roads through linkage: "It is of national importance for a section so covered by a network of public roads as the Mississippi Valley, to have two great national highways like the Jefferson Highway and the Lincoln Highway to give the people of these states an automobile outlet east and west, north and south." Of course, those two highways crossed in Iowa, which presumably gave the greatest benefit to that state. Meredith readily acknowledged Iowa's special good fortune but then cited Iowa as offering the best evidence for the truth of his newfound conclusion about how to obtain improved roads: "The importance of good roads is impressed upon the people of Iowa more forcibly by the Jefferson and Lincoln Highways than through any other means. The importance of having any state tapped by a national highway cannot be over-estimated."
Accompanying Meredith's emerging new views about roads — and perhaps another important factor precipitating those views — was an awareness that automobile ownership was rising fast among farmers. As a result, he claimed in an editorial published in the June 1915 issue of Successful Farming, "the good roads sentiment is spreading like hog cholera." Farmers were quickly coming around, he thought, to a realization that decent roads, usable 365 days a year, would improve their everyday lives and increasingly were ready to help pay for them. Farmers were even ready to support and patronize a long-distance highway, Meredith believed, opining in 1916 that "thousands of farmers will drive their cars to Winnipeg or New Orleans every season" as soon as the Jefferson Highway was completed. No longer held in bondage by bad roads, thanks to the salutary impact of the new highway on those roads, farmers would be able to enjoy the blessings available to city folks, including taking long vacation trips by automobile.
But all of the foregoing were only the most easily identified and mundane benefits that would derive from building the Jefferson Highway, benefits that were subsumed in the first of two "visions" that Meredith outlined in an article published in 1916 under the title "The Two Visions." The second vision laid out there was a much grander one in which the Jefferson Highway project was perceived as a stimulus to national greatness and a molder of improved citizens.
In this fascinating article, subtitled "Inspirations That Have Stimulated the Organization of the Jefferson Highway," Meredith began his explication of the second vision by identifying the Jefferson Highway as "an expression of the building spirit, the spirit of modern development that is everywhere evident in our cities and rural districts at the present time." Great public improvements take much money, time, and effort but are worth these expenditures because "most of us have an ambition to accomplish something in the world besides gratifying physical necessities." "We are all builders more or less," he continued, and we build even though we know life is short and we will soon depart these scenes. But then Meredith revealed that he was thinking not only of the building of great public projects but also of "another kind of building, a building that is invisible." He elaborated as follows: "We wish to be builders of human minds. ... And the Jefferson Highway and the cities and the towns and the hamlets and the rural districts that we build along its way, will have very much to do with the texture and the perfection of these millions of invisible buildings constituting men's minds."
In the past, Meredith went on in "The Two Visions," American cities and rural districts, as well as the activities carried on within each, had developed "without much organized human direction. ... They have been builders of fortunes and of commerce and of things, but they were not so very successful as builders of humanity." But Meredith sensed a fast-growing determination to end that era of willy-nilly development: "We mean from now on to build our cities intelligently, to build our highways in a systematic manner and to undertake all our activities with a greater promise of permanence and of human benefit." He ranked the just-completed Panama Canal, along with the Lincoln Highway and the Jefferson Highway, high on his list of great national projects that illustrated his thinking about the need for intelligent and focused citizen action that would redound to the benefit of American lives and minds.
Aware of the destructiveness of the Great War taking place in Europe as he wrote in 1916, Meredith called on his fellow citizens to cultivate a passion "for the doing of big things other than war." America, he argued, should "set an example of constructiveness ... that is not equalled anywhere else but that will be admiringly imitated on all sides." Toward that end, the US Army and Navy should be enlarged and then put to work during peacetime on a "national construction campaign" covering such things as building canals and roads and improving harbors. In this manner, the army and the navy would be "a utilized instead of an unused investment in a necessary degree of military preparedness." But more than merely greater efficiency and economy was involved: "The army should be made a school for young men," he posited, and putting both the army and the navy to constructive uses "is only right in line with modern unity of action and civic development." Once again, his second vision pointed the way not only to increased material wealth and national greatness but, of even greater moment, to improved citizen lives and minds.
Although Meredith's two visions provided an unusual context in which to embed a call to build the Jefferson Highway, his views clearly reflected important strands of thought characteristic of the Progressive Era in the early years of the twentieth century — such things as a new emphasis on improving the governance of cities and the lives of their residents; a determination to end the waste, corruption, and inefficiencies of conventional politics and policies at all levels of government; and a commitment to applying intelligence, planning, and rational organization to the solution of public problems. Meredith's ideas and actions also exuded an optimism and a sense of confidence highly characteristic of that age of reform, features that historian Walter Lord has summed up nicely as a conviction that "whatever the trouble, people were sure they could fix it." Building the Jefferson Highway, then, massive undertaking though it would be, was just one more big project that Meredith could hope would engage the can-do spirit of ebullient and forward-looking citizens, challenging them to roll up their sleeves and go to work and promising a return of benefits reaching far beyond merely the availability for vacation trips of a new long-distance highway.
That era did have, of course, plenty of citizens who would have rejected outright Meredith's pitch to pursue national greatness and uplift through expensive highway projects, holding instead to a smaller-bore vision of road making kept modest in scale and cost and under the traditional grassroots control. If some potential supporters of his highway project might be fetched by his rapturous views, a great many more were likely to be bestirred by nothing loftier than the prospect of obtaining a good road on which to drive their cars. Buoyed by his exhilarating vision of his proposed highway, however, Meredith went looking for allies to join him in pursuit of the project. His quest began in May 1915 with a letter sent on Successful Farming letterhead to editors and good roads boosters in many midwestern states soliciting their support for a highway reaching from Winnipeg to New Orleans. When in the early fall of that year he contacted the New Orleans Association of Commerce, he was delighted to find that the organization not only enthusiastically endorsed the project but immediately began to publicize it.
Support for the project followed quickly; the chair of the association's Highway Committee soon reported, for instance, that "almost daily the association receives from ten to twenty letters from all parts of the [Mississippi] Valley concerning the plan urging New Orleans to take an active interest." The steady beat persuaded him that "the people of the Mississippi Valley regard this highway as of as much importance to the North and South as the Lincoln is to the East and West." At Meredith's request, the association then called a meeting to be held in New Orleans on November 15 and 16, 1915, to organize the JHA.
Solidly backing this project, the Association of Commerce sent invitations to 750 state and local governments, good roads groups, automobile clubs, and commercial and civic organizations, and nearly three hundred people showed up. The delegates hailed from eleven states (Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas) and were overwhelmingly drawn from business, professional, and governmental callings in the cities and towns of those states. After electing Lafayette Young, a former US senator from Iowa, as presiding officer, the conference proceeded to other business, including approving a charter and bylaws for the JHA and electing officers. In recognition of his leadership on behalf of the new highway, Meredith was named JHA president.
On Meredith's recommendation, the conference's invitation had specified only that the new highway would be called the Jefferson Highway and have Winnipeg and New Orleans as end points; all further decisions, including determination of a specific route, were to be left to the new highway association. This doubtless maximized interest in the project but also assured that the conference would be contentious. According to one newspaper account, "As soon as temporary organization was effected, advocates of ... rival routes split into two factions and fought over all the convention's business." One faction favored a route to Winnipeg running through Shreveport, Fort Smith, Joplin, Kansas City, Des Moines, and St. Paul, but the other faction sought a more westerly route (the so-called Kansas plan) going through Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to Kansas City and then on to Winnipeg by way of Omaha, Fargo, and Grand Forks. The conference could, of course, have looked for a more or less objective criterion by which to make the choice between the contending routes, such as amount of financial support pledged by towns and cities on the routes, the number of people living in those towns and cities, or the amount of hard-surfacing already accomplished on the routes. In the end, all of these, as well as other proffered criteria, figured in the debate, but only as claims made by one side or the other in a process of decision making whose outcome was determined mainly by each side's respective numbers and skill at maneuvering in an essentially political process.
If Meredith had counted on having the new highway come through Des Moines, he must have been alarmed by the Kansas plan's strength at the conference; among its supporters were the largest delegations, those from Texas and Oklahoma. Following a debate sprawling over two days, however, the conference narrowly rejected the Kansas plan and instead adopted a proposal put forward by the newly installed board of directors. This proposal identified cities between Winnipeg and New Orleans that would be "cardinal points" on the Jefferson Highway and left for determination by the board the specific route that would connect them. The cities named were Minneapolis, St. Paul, Des Moines, St. Joseph, Kansas City, Joplin, Muskogee, Denison, Shreveport, Alexandria, and Baton Rouge.
Designation of this group of cities opened the way to a considerable blending of the plans pursued by the meeting's two factions, the prospect of which may be why the board was able to get a majority vote for its proposal. The selection of Des Moines as a cardinal point meant the scuttling of that part of the Kansas plan that would take the highway through Nebraska and the Dakotas, but at least the big delegations from Texas and Oklahoma were assured that the route would come through their states (and the delegates from eastern Kansas could continue to hope — and to lobby — for inclusion.) Omission of Fort Smith from the list disappointed the delegates from Arkansas, but their factional allies from Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota could be jubilant that the new highway would reach key cities in those states. The board's proposal succeeded in accommodating the claims and hopes of a majority of delegates, but much contentious fine-tuning of the route still lay ahead.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Jefferson Highway by Lyell D. Henry Jr.. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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