Classic cars head east for Lincoln Highway’s 100th birthday

RENO — A procession of Model Ts, Model As and other cars will retrace the historic Lincoln Highway across Nevada and Utah this week to celebrate its 100th birthday.

A group of enthusiasts left San Francisco on Sunday with plans to make overnight stops in Fallon today, Ely on Tuesday and Tooele, Utah, on Wednesday before heading to points east.

The group plans to reach the midpoint of Kearney, Neb., on June 30 to celebrate the 100th year of the Lincoln Highway, considered to be the nation’s first trans- continental highway.

A similar procession began in New York and will meet the other group there. In all, about 300 people from 28 states and seven countries are participating in the tours, sponsored by the Lincoln Highway Association.

The highway, which roughly paralleled the Pony Express Trail across Nevada and much of Utah, patched existing roads together as it crossed more than 3,000 miles between New York and San Francisco. It was primitive and had surfaces of packed dirt in many places.

“We jump on Interstate 80 now and drive to Sacramento or Salt Lake City, and we do not think twice,” Mark Bassett, director of the Northern Nevada Railway Museum in Ely, told the Reno GazetteJournal. “A hundred years ago ... people were feeling out how the automobile fit into society. It was quite an adventure.”

The group’s Nevada stops will include the National Automobile Museum in Reno, the Eureka Opera House and the railway museum in Ely.

In Nevada, commemorative coffee mugs are being offered to travelers in Fernley, Dayton, Fallon, Austin, Eureka, Ely and Great Basin National Park as part of the centennial celebration. The highway in Nevada also roughly paral- lels U.S. Highway 50, called “America’s Loneliest Road.”

Many stretches of the highway remain. A few areas remain much as they did 100 years ago, such as long, unpaved stretches in the Nevada and Utah deserts.

Predating America’s highway system created in 1926, the Lincoln Highway system was a private venture proposed in 1912 by Carl Fisher — an early automobile entrepreneur and a founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway — and several other entrepreneurs tied to the fledgling automobile industry. The group incorporated the highway on July 1, 1913.