Fellow author and blogger Jason Togyer writes that while digging up material about his forthcoming book on the G.C. Murphy Company, he spotted this cartoon in the Friday, Oct. 17, 1930, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph.
The reference here is to the rerouting of the Lincoln Highway through West Virginia, changing the route west of Pittsburgh, PA. The original routing along the Ohio River to East Liverpool, Ohio, had long been congested and waiting to be bypassed. But that’s the odd thing — the LH came through Pittsburgh in 1913. The LHA board of directors officially changed the route in December 1927 to what was named US 30 through Crafton, Clinton, and Imperial, into through Chester, WV, and across the Ohio River to East Liverpool). So why was a cartoonist welcoming the road to the city in 1930?
Lincoln Highway News 
August 26, 2008 at 8:28 pm |
Could this cartoon be referring to Route 30 rather than the old Lincoln Highway, as the label suggests?
According to http://www.pahighways.com/us/US30.html, the sections of Route 30 from Clinton to Imperial and Moon Run to Crafton were completed in 1930. That would seem to connect Ohio and the western edge of PA to Pittsburgh long before the parkway and Fort Pitt Tunnels were in existence. I’m sure folks called 30 the Lincoln Highway even after the numbered signs went up; sort of like my dad still referring to his refrigerator as an “ice box.”