Rest area outside of Laramie, Wyoming on Interstate 80 heading west
Henry Bourne Joy and the Lincoln Highway
This monument commemorates the Lincoln Highway, America's first transcontinental automobile road, and Henry Bourne Joy, the first president of the Lincoln Highway Association(1913). Joy, also the president of the Packard Motor Car Company, is sometimes called the father of the nation's modern highway system. He said that his effort to create the Lincoln Highway was "the greatest thing I ever did."
The old Lincoln Highway passed over the crest of the hill seen beyond the monument. This was the historic "Summit," the highest point on the original highway's 3,500-mile route from New York to San Francisco. The coast-to-coast highway existed as a private enterprise, managed by the Lincoln Highway Association and financed through memberships and donations from automobile and road building industries.
The Association lobbied state and federal governments to support road construction. In 1916, the federal government began granting matching funds to the states and the network of private dirt trails that made up the Lincoln Highway across Wyoming began to see some improvement. Much of the original Lincoln Highway evolved into US 30 in the 1920s and Interstate 80 in the 1950s.
The Henry B. Joy Monument was originally located at the site of one of his favorite camping spots beside the Lincoln Highway in Wyoming's Great Divide Basin west of Rawlins (see photo). He was camping there in 1916 when he saw the most beautiful sunset he had ever witnessed and expressed a desire to be buried at that site. That didn't happen, but his family did provide and place the monument following his death in 1936. It was moved from that remote location in 2001 to protect it from increasing vandelism.
