The Lincoln Highway, the motor club, and the highway that never came

1913 – 1928

The Lincoln Highway through town: The Lincoln Highway, announced in 1913 as the first transcontinental automobile road, crossed Allen County for 33.5 miles and made Fort Wayne the largest Indiana city on its route. The Indiana Lincoln Highway Association's turn-by-turn guide brings the 1913 road in from Ohio along Wayne Trace and Maumee Avenue — originally Fletcher Avenue — and west through downtown on Washington Boulevard. One downtown turn is disputed in the record itself: the national association's mapping carries the 1913 route north on Calhoun Street, across Superior Street, and out Wells Street over the 1884 iron Wells Street bridge, while the Indiana chapter's wayfinding sign claims Harrison Street, which was the 1915 route by way of Putnam Street. Beyond downtown the road ran out Wells Street to State Street and Goshen Avenue, northwest toward South Bend on what became Indiana 2 and U.S. 33. In 1928 the alignment moved south onto today's U.S. 30, and the original route became the older road. The Visit Fort Wayne office at Harrison and Washington stands as an official Lincoln Highway Association Control Station — a checkpoint, in the association's system, on the original route.

The Dixie Highway, tested: The other famous name is sometimes attached to Fort Wayne, and it does not belong here. The Dixie Highway's Indiana routes ran through Indianapolis — the 1922 auto-trails lists carry the road from Chicago through Danville, Covington, Crawfordsville, Indianapolis, Martinsville, Bloomington, Bedford, and Paoli to New Albany, with the Indianapolis–Paoli road (later State Road 37) as a Dixie section. The Lincoln and Dixie highways intersected at South Bend, where the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker, installed in 2010, records the crossing. Fort Wayne's named highway is the Lincoln; the Dixie never came to Fort Wayne.

The club: The organised motorist arrived with the Hoosier State Automobile Association, which kept a Fort Wayne local office; the Sentinel of 2 July 1922 names its local manager, Ralph F. Markey, with Fort Wayne members motoring to Kokomo for the Haynes anniversary — a club outing to honour Elwood Haynes's Kokomo car of 1893–94, Indiana's first. The association was also a road-marking body: in 1922 it re-marked the Dixie Highway's signs in Indiana — Fort Wayne motorists' own state club maintaining a highway that passed a hundred miles from their city, which is as close as the Dixie Highway gets to this record. The good-roads work itself — the lobbying, the paving, the county road system — is the Corridors section's subject and is not retold here.

Sources:

1. Indiana Lincoln Highway Association, turn-by-turn route guide, and Lincoln Highway Association mapping — the 33.5 Allen County miles, the Wayne Trace–Maumee Avenue entry, Washington Boulevard, the disputed Calhoun-versus-Harrison downtown turn against the Indiana chapter's wayfinding sign, the Wells–State–Goshen exit, and the 1928 realignment to U.S. 30.
2. Visit Fort Wayne — the Harrison and Washington office as an official Lincoln Highway Association Control Station; Fort Wayne as the largest Indiana city on the route.
3. Indiana Historical Bureau, Lincoln Highway / Dixie Highway marker (installed 2010) — the two highways' intersection at South Bend.
4. Indiana Transportation History, quoting the Lafayette Journal and Courier's 1922 auto-trails lists — the Dixie Highway's Indiana routing through Indianapolis and the Hoosier State Automobile Association's 1922 re-marking of its signs.
5. Fort Wayne Sentinel, 2 July 1922, cataloged by ACGSI — the association's Fort Wayne office and manager Ralph F. Markey.