Book Review: The Lincoln Highway in Iowa: A History

The Lincoln Highway sounds innocent enough. A nice old road. Something you learn about from a brochure while standing next to a bronze plaque. Darcy Dougherty Maulsby’s The Lincoln Highway in Iowa: A History takes that tidy idea, shakes it hard, and shows you the mess underneath.

The Lincoln Highway wasn’t some graceful ribbon of progress floating across Iowa. It was a fight. Towns clawed at each other to get on the route, knowing that a line on a map could mean survival—or a long slide into irrelevance. Meetings were held. Deals were cut. Routes shifted. Winners celebrated. Losers stewed.

 

Maulsby is especially good at showing how rough the early days really were. Before smooth concrete and reliable maps, Iowa roads were muddy traps waiting to swallow cars whole. Early motorists were gamblers. You might make it to the next town. You might not. That sense of risk hums quietly beneath the book.

 

The book really comes alive along the roadside. Gas stations, cafes, tourist cabins, motor courts—each one a small act of faith. People built their livelihoods on the hope that cars would keep coming. Some struck gold. Others watched traffic dry up when the route shifted a few miles south or a bypass cut them out entirely. Maulsby has a sharp eye for these human stories, and lets them unfold without sentimentality.

The writing is clean, confident, and refreshingly free of academic throat-clearing. It gives just enough detail to understand why the road mattered—and why it kept changing its mind about where it wanted to go.

 

The photographs, maps, and old advertisements show the Lincoln Highway as it really was: painted on barns, hyped in newspapers, and sold as a promise.

 

Maulsby doesn’t romanticize the ending. Some towns adapted. Others faded. The book treats those losses honestly, which somehow makes them hit harder.

 

The Lincoln Highway in Iowa: A History isn’t a cozy nostalgia trip. It’s a reminder that roads change lives, usually unevenly, and rarely politely. After reading it, you won’t drive Iowa highways the same way again. You’ll start wondering who got rich, who got skipped, and what used to stand where the corn is growing.