The Lincoln Highway and the numbered roads

THE TRANSPORT TRILOGY, THIRD BEAT

The automobile road inherited the survey of 1833: the Lincoln Highway, laid out in 1913 as the first transcontinental motor road, entered St. Joseph County along the county line and followed the old Vistula Road into Osceola — the same south-bank course the state commissioners had located eighty years before — though the highway had to bend where a dam project — dated to 1903 by the road guides alone; the dam is undated and unproven on the record reached (The Land, whole) — had raised Baugo Bay across the old roadbed at the creek's mouth. Through town the highway is Lincolnway, and the street name is the highway's fossil: Osceola's main street is Lincolnway West and East because the Lincoln Highway ran on it. The numbered era renamed the pavement without moving it: the Lincolnway through Osceola carried U.S. 33 until 1988, when the Indiana Department of Transportation truncated that highway at U.S. 20 in Elkhart, and the town's street stands today as State Road 933 — "S.R. 933 (Lincolnway)," in the town's own welcome. The Goshen Road diagonal of 1832 survives in the U.S. 33 corridor south of town. A motorist crossing Osceola today drives, in order, a state road location of 1833, a named highway of 1913 and a state number of the modern map — the trilogy in one street. Since the fall of 2009 the Interurban Trolley's Bittersweet/Mishawaka route has tied the town back into the region's transit, connecting Osceola to Mishawaka and Elkhart with a transfer to South Bend's Transpo — a bus wearing an interurban's name on a corridor the interurban trolleys once ran. Corridors and Transit own the detail.