A postcard view of Warsaw, Indiana in 1911  

     IMAGINE, IF you can, travelling across a third of the continent with no interstate highways, few dependable maps, directions that might be contradictory, and it's likely that you would find your road turning into a ribbon of mud in the rain.  The car you ride in is new, but needs the oversight of someone who is inclined to be a "mechanician" (later known, perhaps, as a "gear head"), because auto technology is still relatively recent and tends to be persnickety.  Failed tires are to be expected.

          Circa 1917, an adventurous couple in their Jordan,  plying a pretty                    typical road of the era. (Shorpy)

   FINDING  GASOLINE will probably require stopping to inquire of a local resident once you've passed beyond the realm of a city: Texaco and Standard Oil have only recently begun a program to build the "corner filling station."  With each "fill-up," attendance is also made to the oil level, the water in the radiator, and the air pressure of the tires.

     There are few if any "chain" stores to rely on: certainly no Quality Inns, no Bob Evans', no Quikee Marts.  

     Where you sleep and eat, and the quality of those establishments, is entirely up in the air: one town will have a decent rooming house where you may find decent food and a bed to yourself; the next place, a day's drive away, will make sleeping in the car seem reasonable. 

 A filling station, circa 1910            

         RADIO, MADE famous by the recent Titanic disaster, is even more infant than the automobile, and it will be years yet before a driver and his or her passengers will be listening to a "car model."  This is still the era of sheet music at the parlor piano and the beginning of recorded sound.  General entertainment is still live: in theaters, bandstands, music halls, and the like; entertainment on the road comes from conversation or the thoughts in your head, and looking out the window.

     SUCH WAS the world in 1915, when author Theodore Dreiser and his friend, illustrator Franklin Booth, decided that in August of that year that they would like to remove from Manhattan and revisit their childhood homes in Indiana.  Speaking at a party at Dreiser's apartment in Greenwich Village, Booth explained that he had recently purchased a "sixty-horsepower Pathfinder" and was willing to submit the car, along with a driver/mechanic, to the journey for the cost of sharing the expenses of replacing tires which he was sure they would need to do.  Together they would produce a record of their trip to the towns of their childhood.  Booth made regular trips to Carmel, at the time a small town some miles north of Indianapolis; but Dreiser had not been back to Indiana for decades.

     The 1915 Pathfinder, "Daniel Boone" model, likely similar to the one Booth purchased and offered for the drive back to Indiana.

     A county road in Indiana: a "macadamized" surface between corn and soybeans.

     THE ROADS they drove over had been improved in some places, with the addition of brick here and there, but mostly with "macadam;" a few stretches were still just dirt.  Where those kinds of improvements had been employed helped determine where their route bent.  Dreiser had been in favor of a "just go West" approach, but anyone who knew (or claimed to know) about road conditions in Pennsylvania looked askance at that idea, reporting that the ways through the mountains were bad at best.  Instead, they took the more northerly route, bending up through western New York State and along Lake Erie.

     Macadam roads featured a layer-cake of crushed stone over a prepared surface.  Coarse stone at the bottom was followed by smaller grades of stone working toward the top, the different sizes interlocking to create an all-weather road "metal" that was a vast improvement over the wagon tracks of decades, and centuries, past.  

     Bricks, cobbles, or other hard surfaces would have been common by 1915 within a city's limits, but not beyond.  

     From Sea to Shining Sea?  Looking north along a typical Mid-Western stretch of Interstate.

     THE NOTION of "interstate" highways already existed when Dreiser & Company set out from Manhattan, but the plans that had been implemented had no co-ordination, and any signage applied along already existing roads were put up by independent traveler's groups who also published their own guidebooks with directions.  This, of course, meant that any given road might have half-a-dozen different designations, and your plans would depend on which-ever book you had in your had.

     The "Great American Interstate System" as we know it today actually saw its inception before the Second World War, but only as a grand plan.  President Eisenhower, whose name was signed on the legislation for the implementation, gets the credit for the Interstates, but he was only one more government official in a long line whose influence shaped vehicular transit today.  (There's a bit more concerning the actual surfaces of roads old and new in the Addenda).

     Warsaw, Indiana, circa 1911.

     THE TOWNS visited, linked by the macadamized roads, are getting improvements: plumbing, electricity, streetcar- and inter-urban systems have been added to (or between) many, but while solidly within the calendar of the 20th Century, they are still more reflective of life in the latter 19th Century.  Small independent businesses dominate the town centers, consumer goods are still often offered from local artisans or small, local shops such as black smiths and harness makers (horses provide a lot of motive power yet, though that won't last much longer).  For the most part, the people that reside in the small towns, or out in the surrounding counties, live and work close to home; travel and "leisure time" are little known. and likely barely imagined.

      NATIONAL RETAIL can be found, of course, via catalogs: Sears and Montgomery Ward purvey almost anything that can be imagined if one but sends in an order through the U.S. Mail.  The United States Postal Service, too, is still expanding: "rural free delivery" has only existed since 1896; mail going long distances goes by rail, and rail contracts will continue for the rail roads for another 50 or so years -- the earliest attempts at "air mail" are still several years off.  National news exists, found in magazines (delivered by that expanded USPS) and in some newspapers that have contracts with news agencies like the Associated Press, and that "national media," while only in its earliest phases, is slowly making itself felt.

     OTHER CONVENIENCES we can so breezily take for granted today had yet to "see the light of day" when Dreiser and Booth packed up and headed out.  The Pennsylvania Rail Road had, in 1915, only just recently opened the first pair of tunnels under the Hudson River to admit heavy trains into Manhattan (actually, they're still the only pair of heavy rail tunnels under the Hudson); tunnels were common on rail roads, but were still a novelty for surface roads, like the increasing numbers of automobiles were still novelties;  bridges over rivers, or even creeks, were being built, but many crossings needed to be made by ferry -- indeed, before their road trip could really even begin, the Pathfinder and its passengers were ferried across the Hudson River to New Jersey.  If I could have, I would have!

      At the foot of 42nd Street, New York City, in 2015.  In 1915, the 42nd Street Ferry would have docked just the other side of that tent (at right in frame).  Today: not so much.  There's 12th Avenue; the Hudson River Greenway, chock-a-block with pedestrians and bicyclists; pop-up retail, and a seawall, but no ferry any longer.  The advent of the vehicular tunnels and the George Washington Bridge put an end to large ferry traffic on the river.

     Part of the reason for doing this stemmed from the "intersection" of myriad interests that have been mine for some years now (more on that later), but also to simply do it.  It was an impetus to something that I could look at as "just me."  I've driven long distances in years past, but there was something or someone to reach at the other end of the drive: a new job, a new home, family or a friend to visit.  To simply pack my own automobile and head out on a "real road trip" for no better reason than I wanted to for my own enjoyment (and a little edification) was new.  "Why?"  Why not?  The main content on this website is the "chronicle," if you will,  the result of that "why not?" 

     And again "why not" a website?  Still taking the cue that spurred "my original" website several years ago ("Why don't you put your pictures up on a website?" Yeah -- why don't I?) I elected to spring for another domain name and produced -- this thing.  It has its advantages (and some disadvantages which I won't get into here), like I can just go on and on on a page to construct the narrative, include photos, and then "le poof!" put them on the "web," so that you can have a look-see.  See?

     Enjoy.

     A Continent is Bridged,  Franklin Booth's illustration of the achievement of coast-to-coast telephonic communication.  As a child on his family's farm in Carmel, Booth looked at illustrations in popular magazines and believed that they represented how drawings were made.  What he was looking at, of course, were images created by the use of steel-engraved plates, the common method of duplication for printing in the mid-19th Century.  The "look" exhibited by the steel-engravings became his own, though: as seen above, his finished work utilized varying line weight and changes in line direction to generate a finished piece.

2015: The Roadshow -- Two Lanes and Glimpses

2014: Making a Trip and a "Test Run"