Lincoln Highway Association to celebrate Route 206’s centenial June 22 and July 1.
By Paul A. Larson and Dennis P. Waters
We know it today as Route 206, but in years gone by it was known by many other names, from the Assunpink Trail used by the Lenni Lenape, to the King’s Highway traveled by armies in the American Revolution, to the Lincoln Highway in the early days of the automotive age.
This year we celebrate the centennial of the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway in the United States. Conceived in 1912 and formally dedicated October 31, 1913, the Lincoln Highway was America’s first national memorial to President Abraham Lincoln, predating the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. by nine years.
As the first coast-to-coast automobile road across America, the Lincoln Highway became affectionately known as “The Main Street Across America”—although in many parts of the western U.S. it barely qualified as a road, much less a highway.
As part of the primary thoroughfare connecting New York with Philadelphia, the section of the Lincoln Highway through Lawrence was among the best-maintained in the country. However, in 1913, today’s U.S. 206 was still a decade away from becoming a paved road.
The 1913 route crossed the Delaware River on the Calhoun Street Bridge built in 1884. A vintage iron marker noting the Lincoln Highway state border remains on its downstream side near the Pennsylvania abutment. In 1924, the highway was rerouted to use the lower “free” bridge, which we now know as the “Trenton Makes” bridge, as the LHA wanted no tolls along the highway.
The Lincoln Highway was marked with a variety of markers and signage, including on bridge abutments, trees, telephone posts, and concrete markers. An original example of the almost 3,000 concrete markers installed by Boy Scouts in 1928 still exists in Princeton, and may be the last remaining marker of its kind in the state of New Jersey.
By the late 1920s, the Highway’s route across the country was well established, but was no longer referred to as the “Lincoln Highway.” As the federal government became more involved in financing highway construction, it began a push to replace highway names with highway numbers. The Lincoln Highway through Lawrence became NJ-13. Later it became NJ-27 and eventually U.S. 206 in the early 1950s.
The name lives on, however. If you go online to Google Maps you will see “Lincoln Highway” as one of the several names of Route 206 through Lawrence.
Keep an eye out for vintage and classic cars on U.S. 206 on June 22 and again on July 1, as two centennial tours will be driving through Lawrence Township. The first will be part of the Lincoln Highway Association’s centennial celebration and the second part of an international centennial tour.
Both tours are starting out in New York City’s Times Square, the eastern terminus of the Lincoln Highway, and ending the first day of their respective tours in the Philadelphia area. Both tours will most likely reach Lawrence just after lunchtime.
For more information on the Lincoln Highway Centennial Tours, see Lincoln Highway Association Centennial Tours online at lincolnhighwayassoc.org/tour/2013.
The Lincoln Highway Association will host the Official Lincoln Highway Centennial Tours. The two LHA tours will start simultaneously the last week of June in New York City and San Francisco, and take one week to reach the midpoint of the Lincoln Highway in Kearney, Nebraska, where the centennial celebration will be hosted at the Great Platte River Road Museum on July 1.
The International Centennial Tour, based in Norway, is shipping classic and vintage cars from Europe and will spend a month, beginning July 1, driving the entire length of the Lincoln Highway from New York City to San Francisco, a distance of 3,389 miles. Their cars will then be shipped back to Europe from San Francisco. For more information, go online to lh2013.com.
,
