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The First Transcontinental Motor Train

On July 7, 1919, a motorized column of 81 U.S. Army vehicles, with 258 enlisted men and 39 officers, departed from Milepost Zero in Washington, D.C., heading for San Francisco along the Lincoln Highway. Among the officers was 28-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Dwight David Eisenhower.

Eisenhower, in his autobiography At Ease, was to title the 3,000 mile journey, "Through Darkest America with Truck and Tank." But he acknowledged that it laid the foundation for his belief that the nation required an efficient interstate highway system.

More than 3.25 million Americans cheered the three-mile long caravan along its two-month journey. Half the trip took place on dirt roads, with one officer stating that the Lincoln Highway "existed largely in the imagination and on paper." An average day saw progress of only 58 miles.

Plus, 230 "calamities" were reported en route, from crashing through bridges—88 were destroyed by the heavy trucks—to navigating quicksand, ravines, and creeks.

On September 1, after a journey of 56 days, the expedition arrived in Oakland and was ferried across the bay to San Francisco.

Eisenhower would later write in his memoirs, "A third of a century later, after seeing the autobahns of modern Germany and knowing the asset those highways were to the Germans, I decided as President to put an emphasis on this kind of road building...the old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land."