GREEN RIVER — A Lincoln Highway documentary on Wyoming PBS showcases Sweetwater County locations, according to the Sweetwater County Historical Museum.

The “100 Years on the Lincoln Highway” documentary is the story of America’s coast-to-coast highway, 3,389 miles from New York to San Francisco, established in 1913.

The museum says the term “highway” was little more than a euphemism. At first, merely a sequence of primitive dirt roads and even rutted two-track routes, the Lincoln Highway improved as the years passed. The route runs across Wyoming from Pine Bluffs in Laramie County through Rock Springs and Green River in Sweetwater County, then west to Evanston. With the adoption of the numbered highway system in 1926, most of the route became U.S. Highway 30, followed decades later by Interstate 80.

The car that put America on the road was the Ford Model T. Prior to its introduction in 1908, cars were highly expensive luxury items owned mostly by the wealthy, who rarely took them out of cities. Rugged, reliable, and affordable thanks to Ford’s innovative mass production manufacturing techniques, the Model T at first cost $850, which was reduced over the years to $260. By 1915, 1 million had been produced and by the time production ceased in 1927, that number had risen to 15 million. 

Affordable cars like the Model T led directly to the creation of and the ongoing improvements to the Lincoln Highway. Guidebooks were published, including “The Complete Official Road Guide to the Lincoln Highway, (1918),” which can be found online.

Other guidebooks, which focused on the Lincoln Highway in Wyoming, were written by a Lincoln Highway pioneer named Ezra Emery, known as “Good Roads Emery.” He was a civil engineer who mapped out an automobile roadway across southern Wyoming from Cheyenne, to Ogden, Utah in 1911 and 1912 along the corridor of the Union Pacific railroad line. What he called the “Transcontinental Highway” became the Lincoln Highway.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1866, Emery began his career as a Union Pacific civic engineer and soon moved to Wyoming. A tireless advocate of automobile transportation, he served as City Treasurer of Rock Springs from 1896 to 1899 and from 1900 to 1904 he was Rock Springs City Engineer. He went on to serve as Wyoming Assistant Commissioner of Public Lands, Chief Clerk of the Wyoming State Senate, and Field Superintendent of the Intermountain Good Roads Department, National Highway Association. At the time of his death in 1924, he and his family were living in Reliance.

Stretches of the original Lincoln Highway / Highway 30 still exist across Wyoming, including the roadway from Rock Springs to Green River, north of Interstate 80. However, the Sweetwater County Historical Museum does not recommend driving it due to its poor condition.

“100 Years on the Lincoln Highway” can be found here.