Lincoln Highway

Where can you walk in the footsteps of ten presidents and drive on the most storied road in American history?  The answer is the Lincoln Highway in Illinois!  The Lincoln Highway is the world’s largest memorial to any person, Abraham Lincoln.  Established in 1913 in the early days of automobiles, it is the first improved coast-to-coast highway in the United States.  The Lincoln Highway crosses through Dixon, where Lincoln lived and is the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan.  Lincoln stayed briefly in Sterling with friends at their house, now restored into a museum.  In 1919, a young soldier named Dwight Eisenhower crossed the entire Lincoln Highway in the first Army Transcontinental Convoy.  Lastly, John F. Kennedy traveled on the Lincoln Highway to give speeches at the Egyptian Theatre in DeKalb, and Presidents Lincoln, Reagan, Eisenhower, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and George H. W. Bush all travelled through Sterling.

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