Military convoy to stop in Ligonier, other towns on way to San Francisco

A hundred years ago, the Army conducted a crosscountry convoy on the partially built Lincoln Highway, which turned from paved roads to dirt ones before it reached the West Coast. One person along for the ride was a young War Department observer by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

This week, about 120 members of the Military Vehicle Preservation Association will depart from its 44th annual convention in York, Pa., and again head west on U.S. Route 30 and other parts of the Lincoln Highway bound for San Francisco. They say the 3,200-mile trip will take 36 days. It’s the MVPA’s second such trip; the first one, in 2009, also came through the Pittsburgh area.

On Tuesday morning, after departing from Bedford, Pa., the convoy is to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial before arriving in Ligonier. A noon parade is planned — led by horse-drawn cannon — around the town’s Diamond. Then the 60 vehicles will park in various lots while participants lunch in the Fort Ligonier Center for History Education, tour the fort, and visit the Lincoln Highway Experience.

The Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau, one of the sponsors of this commemoration, invites the public to come have a look before 4 p.m., when the convoy heads out to Greensburg, where participants will spend the night.

“I’m also told several groups of veterans will be coming to the fort to meet the group and see the vehicles,” says Anna Weltz, the tourism agency’s director of public relations and community outreach.

Local convoy organizer and military vehicle enthusiast Walter Schroth notes that the Lincoln Highway Experience has a room dedicated to the 1919 convoy, which helped drive the creation of the country’s interstate highway system.

He says that this convoy will make hourlong stops at Rossi’s Pop-up Marketplace beside the Walmart in North Versailles at around 8 a.m. Wednesday and then at Quaker Village Shopping Center in Leetsdale around 10 a.m. Wednesday on the way to a noon arrival in East Palestine, Ohio. With a dozen trailer-towing recreational vehicles providing support, it won’t be hard to spot.

“It’s going to be quite the number of vehicles,” he says.

There’s another commemoration of that 1919 transcontinental drive happening Aug. 31-Sept. 16, organized by the Lincoln Highway Association, that also will spend a night in Greensburg. But those 45 vehicles are civilian ones, including daily drivers and rental cars.

Walter Schroth The Military Vehicle Preservation Association regularly runs convoys of vehicles on various routes, such as this one along Bankhead Highway in Alabama in 2015. A convoy of 60 military vehicles is traveling from York, Pa., to San Francisco to mark the centennial of a 1919 Army convoy on the Lincoln Highway.