The Lincoln Highway across Indiana explores Indiana’s unique role in Lincoln Highway history and celebrates Indiana’s place in early automotive and road-building history. Once known as the “Main Street of America,” the Lincoln Highway route was established across northern Indiana in 1913, linking larger cities—Fort Wayne, Elkhart, Goshen, South Bend, LaPorte, and Valparaiso—to smaller communities. Most Lincoln Highway towns renamed their main streets Lincolnway in recognition of the nation’s first coast-to-coast auto road. When the Lincoln Highway Association shortened the route in 1926, the route linked Fort Wayne to Columbia City, Warsaw, and Plymouth, giving the state two Lincoln Highway routes. From Fort Wayne to the famous Ideal Section, between Dyer and Schererville, Indiana’s Lincolnway towns remain proudly connected to Lincoln Highway history. Through vintage photographs, postcards, advertisements, and other historical records, this armchair tour of the highway visits sites favored by early tourists, documents the people and places that made the highway a vital corridor, and celebrates Hoosier Carl Fisher’s leadership in the formation of the Lincoln Highway Association, as well as the people who work to preserve its legacy today.
The Ligonier Lincoln Highway consuls were W. H. Wigton, who built the
Zimmerman Block, and Walter Robinson, who owned the Lincoln Highway
Garage at the turning point of the Lincoln Highway at Cavin and Lincolnway. The
Lincoln Highway Garage was marked with huge logos and served as the control
station. Gas was available at the curb and tuneups were found inside. The
garage crew paid special attention to tourists' needs. (Courtesy of the Ligonier
Historical Society.) ...
