Miami County Historical Museum Swan River Museum Miami County Historical & Genealogy Society |
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| Jefferson began as nation's highway At their most basic level, names are nothing but labels that human beings assign to objects and abstractions. But on a deeper level, names are symbols with history and meaning. "Jefferson Highway," in fact, at one time was a national symbol. In the early part of the 20th century, with the automobile still in its booming infancy, titans of commerce and local governments across the country clamored to improve the muddy tracks they inherited from their horse-and-buggy ancestors. The train had been the only viable means of long-distance travel, but the potential of the car was palpable. Consider: Fewer than 500,000 vehicles were registered in the U.S. in 1910. A decade later, it was 10 million, a 20-fold increase. Highway associations were formed to build interstate routes connecting hundreds of towns. More than 250 such groups signed up directors, subscribers and members at fees ranging from $5 to $1,000 to build "rock roads" such as Lincoln Highway, Dixie Highway and Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway. The name of one, Old Spanish Trail between St. Augustine, Fla., and San Diego, lives on today in the Slidell area and on the west bank of St. Charles Parish. Another was Jefferson Highway, conceived as the grandest north-south route through the middle of the United States, connecting New Orleans with Winnipeg, Manitoba. The name, for the third U.S. President and the architect of the Louisiana Purchase, and the terminal points were decided early on. But the exact route was a matter of great debate. Every little village in 10 states wanted to be part of it. Thus the New Orleans Association of Commerce hosted the first Jefferson Highway Association convention in November 1915. It expected 50 delegates. Six times as many came. They included 62 of Kansas' "oratorical big guns," who set up headquarters at the DeSoto Hotel in New Orleans after arriving at Union Station in what The Times-Picayune described as "two Pullman sleepers representing the highest art of railroad building and insuring comfort and the opportunity for a good time on the route." Travel pioneers such as these were about to put the Pullman company out of business. Amid cheers, songs of hometown pride, hissing and cat-calling, delegates hammered out a route for Jefferson Highway. "Never had New Orleans known the enthusiasm and pandemonium which reigned at the meeting," The Picayune said. Over the next 11 years, well before the federal government took over the job, the Jefferson Highway Association built or connected almost 2,200 miles of road. It adopted a nickname for the route, "From Palm to Pine," and blazed it with signs: a vertical rectangle divided into three bars, blue at the top and bottom and the letters JH in the white middle. On Feb. 4, 1926, a cavalcade of 132 people in 32 cars, most of them from Winnipeg, completed a 13-day trip to celebrate completion of the highway. The visitors saluted a granite obelisk that the Daughter of the American Revolution had erected in 1917 to mark the southern terminus of the route. A picture of New Orleans acting Mayor Arthur O'Keefe greeting Winnipeg Mayor Ralph Webb was published the next day on the front page of this newspaper. Already, however, the end was nearing for this extraordinary period of enthusiasm that built and named roads across the United States. Within a year of the Winnipeg caravan's arrival in New Orleans, the federal government decided to start numbering highways all across the country. That deprived the named highways of much of their symbolism. The obelisk still stands, at the intersection of St. Charles and Common streets in the Central Business District of New Orleans. But Jefferson Highway hereabouts became part of U.S. 90 and Louisiana 48, and it took on equally unromantic names elsewhere. The original name lives on in only a few spots along the 2,194-mile route, notably in parts of the Midwest, Baton Rouge and a faded stretch of highway hugging the Mississippi River in East Jefferson. (Drew Broach of the Times Picayune newspaper of New Orleans) |
| Swan River Museum - 12 E. Peoria, P O Box 123 - Paola, KS 66071 Phone: 913-294-4940 - all rights reserved |
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