In 1914, Carl G. Fisher knew the time was right to promote the second transcontinental auto highway. Following the success of the Lincoln Highway, the Dixie Highway pushed the development of commerce and tourism for the southern states. The Dixie Highway system grew to include routes from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Chicago to Miami Beach. In Indiana, the Dixie Highway became parts of Indiana 933, US 31, Indiana 25, Indiana 29, US 421, Indiana 37, and US 150. The dogleg from Chicago to Indiana became part of US 136.
The Dixie Highway, once a main thoroughfare from Chicago to Miami, was part of an improved network of roads traversing the landscape of 10 states. A product of the Good Roads Movement of the early 20th century, construction on the highway in Illinois took place from 1916 to 1921. When completed in 1921, the Dixie Highway was the longest continuous paved road in the state. It ran through parts of Cook, Will, Kankakee, Iroquois, and Vermilion Counties, with service stations, roadside diners, and campgrounds sprouting up along the way. With over 200 vintage photographs, The Dixie Highway in Illinois takes readers on a tour from the Art Institute of Chicago, in the heart of the city on Michigan Avenue, to the Illinois state line east of Danville, exploring this historic highway and the communities it passes through.
Northern Kentucky's Dixie Highway is a slice of Americana pie. Known also as U.S. 25 and the Lexington-Covington Turnpike, the once-rural route connects the urban cores of Cincinnati, Covington, and Newport to Central Kentucky. Originally a buffalo trail and named in the early 1800s, the route became a paved national highway in the 1920s. The creation of the thoroughfare encouraged the growth of several communities along its route that still thrive today. Images of America: Northern Kentucky's Dixie Highway captures historic images of the people and places along the Dixie Highway beginning in Covington and heading south through Boone County. The photographs--some taken as early as the mid-1800s--depict time's influence as well as those things that remain the same. The 200 images inside offer readers a chance to revisit the friends, familiar sites, and memorable times enjoyed along Northern Kentucky's Dixie Highway.
At the turn of the twentieth century, good highways eluded most Americans and nearly all southerners. In their place, a jumble of dirt roads covered the region like a bed of briars. Introduced in 1915, the Dixie Highway changed all that by merging hundreds of short roads into dual interstate routes that looped from Michigan to Miami and back. In connecting the North and the South, the Dixie Highway helped end regional isolation and served as a model for future interstates. In this book, Tammy Ingram offers the first comprehensive study of the nation's earliest attempt to build a highway network, revealing how the modern U.S. transportation system evolved out of the hard-fought political, economic, and cultural contests that surrounded the Dixie's creation. The most visible success of the Progressive Era Good Roads Movement, the Dixie Highway also became its biggest casualty. It sparked a national dialogue about the power of federal and state agencies, the role of local government, and the influence of ordinary citizens. In the South, it caused a backlash against highway bureaucracy that stymied road building for decades. Yet Ingram shows that after the Dixie Highway, the region was never the same.
Looking beyond the Highway is an examination of road history and roadside attractions specific to the South. Focused in part on numerous aspects of thematerial culture landscape of the Dixie Highway, the essays consider the politics of roadbuilding, roadside entertainment, the buildings and businesses one might encounter along the road, and regional adaptations to the needs and desires of northern tourists. Following the Dixie Highway from southern Illinois to Florida with sidetrips down other southern roads, the essays cover a wide variety of subjects, many of which will resonate with anyone who has ever lived in or vacationed in the South: Harrison Mayes's “Get Right With God” signs; the park-and-pray craze of outdoor drive-in church services; the rise and demise of brick highways; the fierce political battle over the route of the Dixie Highway; beach music and the evolution of motel architecture in Myrtle Beach; Florida's early tourist towers; and the commercial development of Tennessee caves as tourist attractions. Covering a landscape that includes Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia, Arkansas, Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, and Illinois, the anthology shows that there was and still is a distinctive southern culture and how roads have influenced that culture. As lively as they are diverse, thearticles provide a solid background for understanding roadside ephemera that have disappeared or are quickly disappearing. Ranging from the serious to the light-hearted and including descriptions of American road and roadside icons to kitsch, the book will appeal to anyone with an interest in road history and roadside architecture.
