LINCOLN HIGHWAY NEWS IS A BLOG BY BRIAN BUTKO
Plans are underway to create a ‘gateway park” in Plainfield, Illinois, at the crossroads of the Lincoln Highway and Route 66 — now US 30 and SR 159. The Plainfield Patch reports that “Michael Bortell told the Plainfield Village Board Monday that he plans to apply for a $5,000 matching grant from the National Park Service to fund a redevelopment study for the .925-acre site, which is one of the most historic in the village.” A gas station at the triangle-shaped property was removed last year when Illinois 59 was widened. The historically significant Corbin-Bingham-Worst house would become a visitors center with parking and park land. Another house and two garages would be demolished.
Bortell says the project:
would not only celebrate the only place in the country where two of the most famous cross-county roads intersect but would preserve the land on which the village’s first industrial business, the Dillman Foundry, was built in 1848.”
As for the house, it belonged to one of the first families to settle in Plainfield within the first 20 years of the town’s establishment and was home to Plainfield’s second doctor, Oliver J. Corbin.
Bortell admits that part of his motivation is to keep yet another historic house from being torn down, with nothing built in its place.
Note that another crossroads of the two famous highways can be found in Joliet, Illinois.
Photo by Bill and Karen McKibbon from their excellent travel blog billstraveljournal.blogspot.com/.
Lincoln Highway News 