The Lincoln Highway Ideal Section

You are driving a stretch of road that was once meant to be the most perfect highway in America. This is the Ideal Section of the Lincoln Highway, built between Dyer and Schererville in nineteen twenty-two and nineteen twenty-three. The Lincoln Highway Association, which had laid out the nation's first coast to coast road, wanted to show what a modern highway could be.

They gathered seventeen of the country's leading road experts to design it. The result was a marvel for its time. A one hundred ten foot right of way.

Forty feet of pavement. Concrete ten inches thick and reinforced with steel. Underground drainage, landscaping, a pedestrian path, and electric streetlights so you could drive it safely at night.

The United States Rubber Company helped pay for it. Built to handle the traffic of the next twenty years, it became a template for the American highways that followed.