The Lincoln Highway Footprint

Around nineteen twenty-nine, according to local lore, workers were paving the Lincoln Highway through Ogden, Iowa, one of America's first coast-to-coast automobile roads. According to local lore, someone came upon a freshly poured stretch of concrete shortly after the crew had moved on. The mix was still soft. The person hesitated, then decided to cross as fast as possible, leaving a trail of footprints pressed into what would become a permanent record of that moment.

The Lincoln Highway had been designated in nineteen thirteen, connecting New York City to San Francisco through thirteen states. Iowa got an early and significant stretch of it. The footprints in the concrete at Ogden have survived nearly a century. They are a small, accidental monument to the era when paved roads were brand new, the automobile was still a novelty to most Americans, and the idea of driving across the country in one journey was beginning, for the first time, to seem possible.