Judge Allison and the Dixie Highway

Before the Interstate Highway System existed, before Route Sixty-Six captured the American imagination, there was the Dixie Highway. Organized in nineteen fourteen and fifteen, it was one of the first long-distance named auto routes in the United States, linking the Great Lakes to Miami along two main branches that converged and diverged across the South.

Judge M. M. Allison of Chattanooga served as president of the Dixie Highway Association from its founding and became the driving force behind its development. The association lobbied state governments, negotiated alignments, and promoted the idea that paved roads could transform rural communities, extend tourist travel, and bind the nation together after decades of sectional tension.

The Dixie Highway was not federally funded or uniformly paved, but its promotional success helped prove the public appetite for a national road system, adding to the push for a national road system that led to the numbered highway system in the nineteen twenties. This memorial near Chattanooga honors the man who championed the concept through the association's earliest and most politically difficult years.