Lincoln Highway: America's First Coast-to-Coast Road
Near York, Pennsylvania
The road running through here was once the most ambitious highway project in American history. In nineteen thirteen, the Lincoln Highway Association stitched together existing local roads and improved stretches to create the first continuous automobile route across the continent, running from New York City all the way to San Francisco. Pennsylvania sits near the eastern end of that route, and passing through Lancaster County meant navigating some of the highway's earliest paved sections.
Gas stations, tourist cabins, and roadside restaurants sprang up along the corridor almost immediately, inventing the American road-trip economy decades before the Interstate System existed. In nineteen twenty-six, most of the Pennsylvania route was absorbed into Route Thirty, but the Lincoln Highway name and its legacy as the road that taught Americans to drive across their own country never faded.
