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.
| More information |
| Jefferson Highway |
| History and facts brought to you by miami-county.com |