Articles
June 10, 2003
Highway Route Leads Into Utah History
By John Keahey
© 2003, The Salt Lake Tribune
Jesse Petersen -- Tooele's police chief from 1979 to 1998 -- was on a tour of Dugway Proving Ground 11 years ago when he saw the first battered, rusty "Lincoln Highway" sign. It marked the spot where the now-abandoned, but well-preserved, 1913-era dirt track crosses a modern Dugway road.
Minutes later, Petersen saw an old bridge with a sign that identified the beat-up wooden structure as a Lincoln Highway remnant.
"Just what is this Lincoln Highway?" he asked himself.
The question led him into a decadelong search that culminated in The Lincoln Highway: Utah (The Patrice Press, Tucson, Ariz.), a modern guide to the roadway West, which Petersen and a colleague published in March.
The book documents, mile by mile, foot by foot, the route of the dirt highway -- named for President Abraham Lincoln and started in 1913 -- through the Beehive State, from just west of Evanston, Wyo., through Echo, Utah, Salt Lake City and then around the southern tip of the Great Salt Lake to Grantsville, Fish Springs and Ibapah to Ely, Nev.
This week, the now-retired Petersen is attending a Lincoln Highway Association meeting in Fort Wayne, Ind. Today, he will be appointed the association's national treasurer.
As he sought his own answers about the United States' first coast-to-coast highway, completed in a pre-asphalt era when roads were carved out of dirt and intrepid motorists had to load up on spare tires and shovels to drive cross country, Petersen, an Orem native, says he "ran into the fact that the Lincoln Highway is not well-known in Utah."
The dream for such a highway had begun in the earliest years of the 20th century. A group of auto and tire manufacturers -- driven by visions of profits from a small, but growing, motoring public -- conceived of a 3,400-mile-long "highway" from Times Square in New York City to San Francisco's Lincoln Park.
The private association led the charge because the federal government was not yet in the highway business. Road development was almost exclusively the responsibility of individual states.
Within this framework, the Lincoln Highway is generally not a road that was built from scratch like a modern-day interstate. Rather, it took shape from the cobbling together of many roads, mule tracts and other trails that had developed over the years.
To make all of this work, the association's deep-pocketed manufacturers provided funds to smooth out some of the rutted tracks, and to build connecting roadways.
They also created a guidebook that took travelers mile by mile along the route.
Within a few decades of the 1913 launch, the Lincoln Highway route through Utah's west-central desert was superseded by a new two-lane blacktop path from Salt Lake City to Wendover, called the Victory Highway. That route now is followed by Interstate 80, which runs 40 miles north of the more remote Lincoln Highway route through central Utah and central Nevada.
But back in an earlier era, "It was the guidebook that tied it all together," said Jay Banta, another Lincoln Highway aficionado. Banta is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's manager at remote Fish Springs, which in an earlier incarnation was one of the Lincoln Highway's rest stops deep in Utah's west desert.
Banta has been at Fish Springs for 12 years. His interest in Lincoln Highway lore has grown parallel with Petersen's.
But Petersen, says Banta, "is the true scholar; I am a mere student."
Petersen's work involved finding sections of the original road that hadn't been plowed under or built over. Some modern roads follow Lincoln Highway's route precisely. In other places, the narrow, faintly visible dirt track runs parallel to modern roads, weaving in and out of modern rights of way.
Petersen says one of the greatest moments he experienced in his search for pieces of the original Lincoln Highway roadway came in the late 1990s.
"One day, out by Lake Point, I was trying to figure out what one of the earliest [Lincoln Highway] road guides was telling me. I was on state Route 201, where it hits the freeway bridge near the Kennecott smelter.
"Off to the south was an old railroad trestle. It was mentioned in the guide. I walked up over this berm, and stretched out in front of me was the old concrete road. It ran west straight into Kennecott's new smoke stack.
"That was a great moment," he said. The stretch Petersen saw was a dirt Lincoln Highway track that in later years was cemented over.
One of the more dramatic, original dirt stretches, which has never been paved over, runs across Dugway Proving Ground. It is inaccessible to the curious public, but it spits out of Dugway's south boundary and heads across open rangeland to the south.
There, it becomes part of the old Pony Express route between Salt Lake City and Ely, Nev.
The trail was used by Pony Express riders for only 18 months in 1860-1861, but it also was part of the Overland Stage route that tied the continent together in the mid- to late 1800s. Earlier it had been a trail forged by mule trains.
Over the years, the Lincoln Highway Association altered the route through Utah as it sought to shorten various segments.
The late Utah historian Harold Schindler, writing in The Salt Lake Tribune in 1993, said:
"Old wagon roads were all but untouched by improvements; in some places, the ruts made by Overland stages were still evident and could tear the undercarriage from an auto in one scraping wrench. There was little reason to spend money on the roads (horses could avoid the rough spots), but after motorists began chugging along the trails, the Utah section got worse rather than better."
But until the so-called Victory Highway section from Lake Point to Wendover was built in the 1920s, remote Fish Springs remained a major refueling and layover point for motorists, just as it had been when Overland stages stopped there decades before with such illustrious passengers as novelist Mark Twain and New York City newspaperman Horace Greeley (of "Go West, young man" fame).
This is where Fish Springs manager Banta's historical knowledge reigns supreme.
He has conducted extensive research on rancher John Thomas, a Lehi native who, in the 1880s, built a ranch near what is now the Fish Springs Refuge offices and shops.
Thomas provided food and lodging for Overland Stage passengers -- Twain and Greeley slept at his guest house -- and later it was a major stop for Lincoln Highway travelers.
"Some folks like to think of Thomas as a 'highway robber,' " said Banta. He charged exorbitant prices, particularly to well-heeled travelers, and there are some who believe Thomas diverted a spring to create muddy conditions along the desolate road. Motorists would get stuck and Thomas would charge them $1 a foot to tow them out, Banta says.
One of the early Lincoln Highway guidebooks says that if motorists get stuck or experience a breakdown near Fish Springs, they should set fire to piles of tumbleweeds, which Thomas could see from as far as 20 miles away.
The enterprising rancher/way station host -- Banta likes to think of Thomas not as a highway robber but as the "west desert's first entrepreneur" -- would then dispatch a team of horses to aid the stranded motorist.
Banta says his dream for retirement is to purchase a vintage Model A pickup truck -- they can be had for about $8,000, he says -- so he and his wife can drive from Times Square to Lincoln Park.
"We'll leave Times Square about 4 in the morning, of course, to avoid [New York City] traffic," he said.
"There is still a lot of adventure to be had on the Lincoln Highway," Banta said. "And if I get into trouble anywhere along the route, there are Lincoln Highway Association members within a few miles who are more than willing to help out."
He says he has made the trip from Fish Springs to Ely on the original route at least 10 times.
"It's still as enjoyable today as it was the first time. But talk about lonely!"
© 2011 John Keahey