Victory Highway

The Victory Highway was an auto trail across the United States between New York City and San Francisco, roughly equivalent to the present U.S. Route 40.

History

The Victory Highway Association was organized in 1921 to locate and mark a transcontinental highway via St. Louis, generally south of the Lincoln Highway. [Reno Evening Gazette, May 16, 1921] The road was to be dedicated to American forces who died in World War I. By 1922 the organization had decided to run from New York City southwest to Camden, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington before turning west to San Francisco. [The Star and Sentinel, April 22, 1922] Washington was later removed from the route, which ran west from Baltimore to Cumberland, Maryland.Fact|date=July 2007 At Cumberland, it picked up the old National Road to Vandalia, Illinois, which was already marked as part of the National Old Trails Road. [Richard F. Weingroff, [http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/numbers.htm From Names to Numbers: The Origins of the U.S. Numbered Highway System] ] It continued to follow that auto trail near Fulton, Missouri, and then followed a different route across the rest of that state, passing through Jefferson City on its way to Kansas City. The highway continued west from Kansas City to Denver over the Golden Belt Highway,Fact|date=July 2007 and then ran via Salt Lake City, across the Great Salt Lake Desert and Nevada, and via Sacramento to San Francisco.Rand McNally Auto Road Atlas, 1926, accessed via the [http://www.broermapsonline.org/members/ Broer Map Library] ] [Clason Map Company, [http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/midgetmap.htm Midget Map of the Transcontinental Trails of the United States] , 1923] It crossed the Antioch Bridge and passed through the Broadway Tunnel west of Sacramento. [California Highway Commission, [http://books.google.com/books?id=XW5AAAAAIAAJ&dq=%22victory+highway%22+%22antioch+bridge&q=%22the+victory+highway+route&pgis=1#search Investigation and Report on Toll Bridges in the State of California] , 1929, p. 29]

Since it mostly overlapped the National Old Trails Road east of St. Louis, the Victory Highway was little-known there.Fact|date=July 2007 However, it took a different route through New Jersey. While the National Old Trails Road crossed the Delaware River at Trenton, []

References