Duncan, Nebraska: Where the Lincoln Highway Survived

Duncan is a small Nebraska community settled largely by Swiss and Polish immigrants in the late eighteen hundreds, and it holds one of the best-preserved stretches of the original Lincoln Highway in the country. When the highway was dedicated in nineteen thirteen, organizers planted hackberry trees along the route here to shade cross-country travelers. A two-point-four-mile section of that original roadbed, complete with a pony-truss bridge over Prairie Creek that was already standing when the Lincoln Highway was designated, survived intact from nineteen thirteen to nineteen twenty-eight, when the route was shifted south of the Union Pacific tracks. Today that segment is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the bridge and the old pavement preserved as a rare physical artifact of America's first transcontinental road.