AAA Map of General map of transcontinental routes with principal connections (1918) |
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| Date: | 1918 |
| Author: | Amer Automobile Assn |
| Dwnld: | Full Size (17.05mb) |
| Source: | Library of Congress |
| Print Availability: | |
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| See our Prints Page for more details | |
I've always loved roads; and I can take it to some pretty "Rain-Man"-level extremes if I'm allowed to. I have a mildly-impressive party-trick whereby someone can name any U.S. city with more than 100k people, and I can name two U.S.- or State Highways that serve it. As with most party-tricks, it's highly dependent on the audience. With the right crowd, it's a really cool and impressive ice-breaker; with the wrong crowd I'd probably be shirtless and drunk and acting like an asshole already, anyway... so no harm done.
Now this American Automobile Association map shows what our cross-country road infrastructure looked like in 1918. Before Ike built our enormous system of Interstate Highways, we had a more fragile and dendritic network of Auto Trails; each with their own handsome crest for use in signage (which you can spot on the bottom margin of this map. Another small and incomplete collection can be found here.)
Listed at the bottom are some of the Auto Trails this map includes: the Blue Grass Trail; George Washington National Highway; Chicago, Kansas City, and Gulf; Corn Belt Route; Yellowstone Highway; Interstate Trail; Southern National Highway; Red Ball Trail; Santa Fe Trail; and Old Spanish Trail.
It didn’t go right from Auto Trails in the teens to Interstates in the 50s; there were the US Highways starting from the 20s and largely completed during the great infrastructure projects of the New Deal during the 30s. The map can be found here.
Noticed a couple odd misspellings of the Spanish placenames in the Southwest… and if you look really carefully there’s one “town” listed under the name “Palm Ave.” – that’s because there is a disconnected section of San Diego that is sandwiched between the border and the southern subrubs (next to Imperial Beach) – technically it’s part of the City of San Diego even though it’s about ten miles south of the rest of the city. Palm Avenue is the main street in that neighborhood.