Lincoln Highway across Indiana

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 &quote;Main Street of America,&quote; 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.

Jan Shupert-Arick is a public historian, an active preservationist, and a past president of the Lincoln Highway Association. Shupert-Arick has personally toured the original route of the Lincoln Highway across 10 of the 13 original Lincoln Highway states and has family connections to Indiana's early automotive history.