Click to enlarge: Aunt Annie next to the car that made the 3,500-mile trip in 1924. Hard to complain about modern conveniences when considering how that generation traveled. Photo courtesy Steve Ellis.
Here are the 1924 camps (and one cafe) along the Lincoln Highway that Steve Ellis would like to search for in a few weeks. They are not named but may have been the only camp in some towns. Can anyone provide info as to what might survive at any of the locations?
Camped at Wheatland, Iowa.
Had lunch at Tama in tourist camp.
Camped in tourist park at Jefferson, Iowa.
dinner in tourist park in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (on top of hill overlooking the Missouri R.)
Camped at Columbus, Neb. Nice tourist camp.
Central Café in Kearney, Neb.
Camped in Big Springs. Good tourist camp.
Camped at Laramie [WY].
camped at Rock Springs, Wyo., bum camp too.
Salt Lake City. Camped in park.
NOTE: Above quotes taken from the diary – see full text in my blog post Road trip from 1924 family diary: part 2/4.
Steve Ellis brings his family story full circle:
“About 1990, when she was in a nursing home and well into her nineties, I went to visit poor old Aunt Annie, my grandma’s much older sister. She still had a couple of years to live, but her mind was going. She’d say something rather silly sometimes and then she would say something really sensible. Well, once without our even asking her about it, Aunt Annie got a far off look in her eye, a look of longing and, just as if the event had happened the previous week she remarked of ‘going alllll the way across the country on dirt roads in an old tin Lizzie’ and how ‘It was a hundred degrees in ‘IOWAY’ when we went through it.’ If you look at the journal, you’ll see her mention the heat in both Nebraska and also near Cheyenne; I doubt Iowa would have been much different. At that time, I didn’t have the journal or know about it, but I was aware of the trip she took.”
And so ends Annie’s story. Steve’s Lincoln Highway adventures will continue in May.
Lincoln Highway News 
April 30, 2008 at 5:19 pm |
This feature is great! My grandparents were from Fort Wayne, Indiana and drove to Maine on one trip and Florida on another in the early 1930s when my father was an infant, often camping along the way in a farmer’s field if nothing better came along. Not sure if they were on the Lincoln Highway, but if it goes through Ft. Wayne, I’ll bet they were on it at some point. When I was a kid I saw snapshots they took along the way but haven’t seen them in some time. I take cross-country trips now and find it hard to believe the distances they went back then under cruder conditions.
Gunnar Johnson