Lincoln Highway News

LINCOLN HIGHWAY NEWS IS A BLOG BY BRIAN BUTKO
A new poster commemoratees the forthcoming centennial of the Lincoln Highway in 2013. The Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society Museum of Merrilville, Indiana, commissioned Mitch Markovitz to create the evocative image.

An article at nwitimes.com explains:

“We started this project more than a year ago,” said Dan Kleine, the project manager for the poster commissioning and a member of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society board. “The whole idea was to build awareness that the Old Lincoln Highway is 73rd Avenue, just outside the museum’s front door.”

In his oil-on-canvas painting that is reproduced as a poster, Markovitz of Knox, creates a scene from 1929 when the Lincoln Highway was a major thoroughfare that led to Broadway and then north to Gary and Chicago….

Jeff Blair, Indiana’s national director on the Lincoln Highway Association, traveled from Leesburg, Ind., to witness the poster’s unveiling.

“Last year, I walked the Lincoln Highway west from Ohio to Illinois for charity. Next May, I’m going to walk east from Illinois to Ohio and I’ll pass right by here on the first day,” Blair said.

The article claims that the poster shows a 1929 Ford Model T, which is impossible. More likely it’s a Model A, though just as perplexing is why the image is said to portray the LH in 1929, a year after the LHA ceased active operations. Perhaps it was to include a 1928 concrete post, but that too is in an incorrect orientation, i.e., not facing the road.