Cruising With the USS Montgomery-- Part 3: The Lincoln Highway and National Road

Beside Route 66, Illinois is fortunate to have two other major old roads going through it.

One is the first paved transcontinental highway across the United States, the Lincoln Highway.  It ran from New York City to San Francisco.

And, a part of it went down DeKalb, Illinois' Main Street, called, get this, Lincoln Highway.  My wife and I often did something called the Lincoln Crawl back when we were students at Northern Illinois University.  That is where you went to as many bars along the road as you could.  NIU is located along this great road, but we sure didn't know the history of this road as students.

Plus, Illinois also has the western extremity of the old National Road.   This was the first major improved road built in the country by the federal government.  It was built between 1811 and 1837 heading westward out of Cumberland, Maryland, and eventually to Vandalia, then capital of Illinois.  This road was a major path for Americans moving into the Old Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin).

I have driven long segments of both these roads as well as all of Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Old B-Runner