Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway

by Effie Price Gladding

Carroll is a pleasant little town, with fine street lamps, and with a green park around its Courthouse. We were surprised to find so good a hotel as Burke's Hotel in a small town. Its landlady and proprietor has recently made extensive improvements in it, and it is a place of vantage on the Highway. The country around Carroll is very fine, being rolling and beautifully cultivated.

We reached Carroll very late in the day and were obliged to take our supper at a restaurant near the hotel. We were interested in a party of four young people who were evidently out for a good time. The two young gentlemen, by a liberal use of twenty-five cent pieces, kept the mechanical piano pounding out music all through their meal. They were both guiltless of coats and waist-coats. We had seen all through the West men in all sorts of public assemblies, more or less formal, wearing only their shirts and trousers. So we had become somewhat accustomed to what we called the shirt-waist habit.

Many customs of the West strike the eye of the Easterner with astonishment. This custom which permits men to be at ease in public places and in the presence of ladies without coat or waist-coat in hot weather; the custom which permits ladies to sit in church without their hats; these and others which belong to the free West, the Easterner has to become accustomed to and to take kindly. Several times in California, and in Nevada, when we asked a question we received the cheerful, if unconventional response, "You bet!" "Will you please bring me a glass of water?" "You bet!" "We're on the Lincoln Highway, are we not?" "You bet!" These somewhat startling responses simply indicated a most cheerful spirit and a hearty readiness to do you any favor possible.

Leaving Carroll, we come on through Ames, Jefferson, Marshalltown, and Belle Plain, into Cedar Rapids. Out from Carroll we have rather bumpy roads for some time. Then the road improves and is excellent from Ames on until we near Cedar Rapids. But all along work is being done on the roads and their improvement is a matter of great local interest. We pass a point in Marshall County where they are working with a new machine for cutting down the road. I call it a dirt-eating machine. The commissioner is extremely proud of it, and calls our attention to the immense amount of work it can do, and to the huge mouthfuls of earth which it bites out from the bank, through which the wider road is to run. We are charmed with the lovely country around Marshalltown, and with the very beautiful country between Belle Plain and Cedar Rapids. We drive through the campus and past the buildings of the State Agricultural College at Ames as we come into the town.

We are passing beautiful farms. Here we see a group of splendid dappled grey Percheron draught horses, the pride of a stock-farm. There we pass reddish-yellow shocks of oats. The country is more wooded now. We see maples, oaks, ash, willows, and black walnuts. Here and there are yellow wild flowers, somewhat like black-eyed Susans. One thing we remark in all these Middle Western farms. There seem to be almost no flowers around the farm houses. An English farmhouse or a French farmhouse would have a riot of flowers growing all about and making a mass of color. We miss this in our Western farms and wonder why it is that we see so little color. We see practically no orchards, and very few grape-vines. This is the country of wheat and oats. We have left the orchards and the vineyards far behind us in lovely California.

Cedar Rapids is a busy city with several hotels. Leaving the city on the morning of July 21st, we drive first through quite heavily wooded country. Then the view opens out and we are once more driving over beautiful, undulating country with rich crops of oats and corn. The perfume of the corn, standing tall and green, is delicious. When we pass through Mt. Vernon, we take a look at the buildings of Wesleyan College, which stands on a high ridge commanding a fine view. All the way to Clinton the country is attractive. After luncheon at the pleasant town of Clinton, we cross the broad Mississippi, looking up and down its green shores with delight. We are in Illinois now, and find Sterling and Dixon attractive towns on the Rock River, a stream dotted with green islands. The country is very open, with long stretches of prairie, green with standing corn or red-yellow with shocks of oats. We spend the night in De Kalb at a funny old hotel, built, they tell us, by Mr. Glidden, the "barbed-wire king." The hotel is called "The Glidden." Its ceilings are twenty feet high and we feel ourselves to be in "a banquet hall deserted." From De Kalb we make a short detour into Chicago, returning to the Highway at Joliet.

Joliet is a smoky city, full of factories and busy with the world's work. It is late afternoon when we reach Joliet, and we drive on to Elkhart, where we put up at a beautiful hotel with every modern convenience. The Indiana roads are in excellent condition and take us through a lovely rolling country of oaks and beech forests, and of fields of grain breathing pastoral peace and prosperity.

All along through the Middle West we have been pleased to see the immense interest taken in the Lincoln Highway. Everywhere one sees the Lincoln Highway signs used in abundance on the streets through which the Highway passes. The telephone poles, the garages, and sometimes the shops, all are marked with the familiar red, white, and blue. They tell us of a Western town whose citizens were so anxious to have their town on the Highway that they of their own responsibility painted red, white, and blue signs on the telephone poles leading into and through the town. Later they were reluctantly obliged to paint out these signs, as the Highway was not taken through their town.

The names of the farms in the Middle West are many of them very interesting; as "Rolling Prairie Farm," "Round Prairie Farm," "Burr Oak Valley Farm," "Hickory Grove Farm," and "Hill Brook Farm."

At the entrance to a farm in Illinois a farmer has nailed a shelf to a telephone pole near his gate, and on this shelf he has placed a small bust of Lincoln. I fancy this is a prophecy of many monuments that we shall see along the Lincoln Highway in days to come.