Starting in 1913, the Lincoln Highway Association worked to link California roads along with roads across the United States to form a cross country route from New York to San Francisco. Some of the roads that would become a part of the historic Lincoln Highway can be found in Hamilton's guide.
For more information on the Lincoln Highway, see the Lincoln Highway Association web site.
Click here to see select pages inside book
Around 1910, “Hamilton’s
Illustrated Auto Road Map Company”
published their first edition of an auto guide with nearly 200
route maps that
included helpful notes and small photos of landmarks along the way. The cover
of their road atlas boasted the book had maps, “Showing actual photos of the
location of turns, forks, crossroads, landmarks, hotels, resorts, Inns, garages
and points of interest, with much supplementary information to motorist and
tourist.” Most of these landmarks are gone, long since covered by urban
development, while a few, such as historic Missions and some hotels can still be
found.
The roads on these maps pre-date the
California highway system and are long before the first freeways. Some of
the routes follow today's freeways and others are roads that have long since
been abandoned. It is fun to follow some of these routes and try to
find the old roads. In some cases, you can even find some of the
landmarks! The maps have
a charming quality with their descriptive notes and photos. With
instructions like "white
fence at fork in road" or "don't turn at water tower", they
document a simpler time when much of
California was rural.
Ninety years before
Google gave us maps with street level views, some early
publishers of auto road guides attempted to do the same thing with
thumbnail photos on maps. Hamilton's Illustrated Auto Road Map from 1914
is one such guide. It is a fascinating piece of automobile history, providing a glimpse of what life was
like for motorists in the first couple of decades of auto travel.
In
the early days of auto travel in California, motorists had few maps to help them
find their way on the state’s very poor roads. There were few road signs and
early publishers of maps and guides used a variety of descriptions and photos to
help travelers choose the right fork in the road. The Automobile Club of
Southern California published their first tour book and strip maps in 1912.
