Review: The Lincoln Highway Across Illinois

The Lincoln Highway Across Illinois by David A. Belden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another in the series of historic snapshots books with sepia-tone photo covers. This one focuses on the Lincoln Highway through Illinois. The book generally follows the original generation of the road, passing through the Southern suburbs of Chicago, meandering Northwest to the Western suburbs, then heading along a number of state highways toward the Mississippi, where it rejoins US 30. I'm very familiar with the drive on US 30 in Illinois where it isn't called the Lincoln Highway, so this was a learning experience - I've mistakenly assumed I was driving on the Lincoln Highway for decades. But I'm also familiar with the actual route. I enjoyed the pictures and some of the description, but I found two issues. First, the descriptions were very repetitive. There were three or four places where the authors added descriptions of motor courts to go along with vintage photos of motor courts and tourist camps. The thing is that the description is almost identical. Same with some other descriptions - it seems like an editor was not involved. The second issue was the prevalence of photos from the South suburbs. The rest of the route seemed hit or miss in terms of the quantity of photos. I assume this is because the authors focused on sources local to them, and made few trips to remote locations to gather info. Nevertheless, an interesting set of photos for people interested in the history of the road and its businesses. My favorite parts were the photos and stories about the unpaved, rutted, muddy roads that made up the early highway. Some of those photos were from about 100 years ago, really not that long ago.

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