Iowa Nearly Destroyed America's First Cross-country Highway

(Denison Review. May 19, 1915)

The first time America built a road across the country, Iowa nearly swallowed it whole.

Cars got buried in mud. Bridges collapsed. Drivers slept beside the road. Men with horses and shovels fought rain, dust, heat, and freezing weather to carve a highway through the middle of Iowa. Some never made it home.

Today, you can fly across Iowa on Interstate 80 without thinking twice. Air conditioning blasting. Cruise control on. Coffee in the cupholder.

The Lincoln Highway opened in 1913. The idea sounded ridiculous at the time — one road running across the country from New York to California. Most Americans had never traveled farther than the next town over. Many Iowa farmers still trusted horses more than automobiles.

When the highway opened, people started talking about driving across the country.

It crossed Iowa from Clinton to Council Bluffs through De Witt, Cedar Rapids, Tama, Marshalltown, Ames, Jefferson, Denison, and Logan. Towns fought to get the route. Some celebrated when they won. Others got bitter when they lost. A highway meant money rolling through town. Hotels wanted travelers. Cafes wanted hungry people. Garage owners wanted cars breaking down in front of their shops instead of somebody else’s.

(Des Moines Register. September 14, 1913)

And cars broke down constantly.

The funny part is that the Lincoln Highway barely looked like a highway. Much of it was just dirt and gravel roads tied together and given a fancy name. Some stretches looked like wagon tracks cutting through the middle of nowhere.

Rain was the real enemy.

A storm could wreck everything. Iowa mud was thick black gumbo that grabbed tires and refused to let go. Cars sank clear to the axles. Drivers spun tires until mud sprayed over everybody standing nearby. People pushed. Horses pulled. Tempers flared.

Some travelers packed boards to shove under the tires for traction. Others carried ropes, chains, lanterns, spare tires, food, water, tools, and extra gas cans because there was always a chance they’d spend the night stranded by the roadside.

And they did.

There are stories about travelers sleeping beside the road, waiting for the mud to dry enough to move again the next morning. One motorist said the state had “roads at both ends and mud in the middle.”

That pretty much summed it up.

Western Iowa could get ugly in spring. Wagons carved deep ruts in the roads. Cars made them worse. Then the sun baked those ruts hard enough to break wheels and axles. Then another rainstorm rolled through and turned everything into soup again.

Farmers got used to seeing city people stuck in the mud. Some helped pull cars out for a few bucks. Others just stood there grinning while rich tourists from Chicago tried to figure out why their expensive automobile was buried in a ditch.

The men building the road had it rougher than anybody.

Most crews were local laborers, immigrants, railroad workers, and farmhands picking up extra money. This was years before modern road equipment. Men worked with picks, shovels, horse-drawn graders, and steam-powered machines that rattled and smoked like monsters.

The work was brutal.

Summer heat could bake a man flat. Dust got everywhere—in your eyes, mouth, and all over your clothes. Mosquitoes swarmed creek bottoms so thick that workers wrapped rags around their necks and faces.

Then came the accidents.

Steam rollers overturned. Chains snapped loose. Wagons flipped. Men got crushed under equipment or injured handling blasting powder. Safety rules were nonexistent, so if somebody got hurt, the rest of the crew usually kept working.

(Muscatine Journal. June 24, 1919)

Some men died building the road. Others jumped in to replace them.

Still, the road slowly improved.

One of the biggest moments came in 1918 near Mount Vernon with the Seedling Mile. The idea was simple. Build one perfect mile of concrete so people could see what a modern road looked like.

It’s hard to believe now, but most people had never seen a paved rural road before.

Drivers rolled off muddy dirt and onto smooth concrete and probably thought they’d entered the future. Cars handled better. Trips got shorter. Dust disappeared.

That little mile sold people on paved highways faster than speeches ever could.

In 1919, the Army sent a convoy of trucks across the country to test America’s roads. Dwight D. Eisenhower admitted Iowa beat the hell out of that convoy.

Trucks bogged down in the mud. Bridges cracked. Soldiers spent hours dragging vehicles from ditches. Some days they were lucky to make a mile.

Army trucks stuck in road. (Evening Times-Republican. July 25, 1919)

When Eisenhower became president, he backed the interstate highway system because he knew how awful cross-country travel was.

So yeah, Iowa mud helped create Interstate 80.

By the 1920s, the Lincoln Highway started looking more like a highway. Greene County was the first county in Iowa to pave its section. Gas stations popped up. Tourist cabins appeared outside towns. Cafes stayed open later, hoping travelers would stop for coffee and pie.

It changed small-town Iowa fast.

Before the road, some towns felt isolated. Then suddenly tourists from New York and California were driving through asking for directions or looking for somebody to patch a tire.

Kids ran outside just to watch the traffic go by.

Even after improvements, the road could still be miserable. Dust storms blinded drivers during dry summers. Winter storms stranded people for days. Narrow bridges scared motorists. Flat tires happened so often people almost expected them.

But Americans loved the road, anyway. That’s what made the Lincoln Highway different.

It made people think bigger. Before the Lincoln Highway, most people stayed close to home. After it was built, families loaded tents into Model Ts and headed west just because they could.

And Iowa sat right in the middle of it.

You can still find pieces of the old highway today if you know where to look. Old concrete and faded Lincoln Highway markers.

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