Transcontinental Motor Express Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. embarked on a historic, coast-to-coast trip in September 1918 during the waning months of World War I. The Akron company established the Transcontinental Motor Express to demonstrate the potential of long-distance trucks, the need for highway improvements and the durability of pneumatic tires. Long-distance drivers plowed through muddy ravines, fast-moving streams, treacherous mountains and sweltering deserts. More than 70 percent of the roads were not paved. The Lincoln Highway was only 5 years old and vast stretches across the west were trackless, open land. Lincoln Highway Map (lincolnhighwayassoc.org) .. (LINK) (silent)
"Between 1840 and 1860, roughly 400,000 people traveled the 2,000-mile path of the Oregon Trail, encountering sickness, death, exhaustion, and other hardships. The road was long and arduous, but for these determined pioneers, life continued on and even settled into a routine. Here’s what life was really like on the Oregon Trail". Here's What It Was Really Like To Pioneer On The Oregon Trail
Register Cliff, Independence Rock, on the Oregon Trail There's even a Hart from Georgia carved there (@2:25).
The Great American Canal Era It began with the construction of the Erie Canal (1817-1825). When completed, the canal spanned 350 miles between the Great Lakes and the Hudson River in eastern New York, and opened up the unsettled northern regions of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. The Ohio & Erie canal, completed in 1832, linked the Great Lakes with the Mississippi Valley. By the end of the 1830s, the country had a complete water route from New York City to New Orleans. By 1840, over 3,000 miles of canals had been built. Within twenty years, railroads would render most of them unprofitable. Canal boat pulled by mules along a towpath on the Ohio & Erie Canal in Akron, Ohio CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE
The picture in the previous post made me curious about the mules. Where did they come from? Who did they belong to? Where did they stay? This is all I could find: "Historically mules were the preferred animals to pull canal boats. They lived in the front cabin of the boat, which was a mule stable ... For long trips there were often two teams that alternated working 6 hours shifts." I suspect there were many different arrangements, depending on the lengths of trips. Changing mule teams, circa 1900
That previous pic made me wonder if the woman guiding the mules was a typical thing for females to do in that era. Were they usually the wives of the barge owners? Did they walk the entire trip?
Apparently it was common for families to lived on their canal boat. She probably was the barge owner's wife.
The Route of the Great Big Baked Potato Condensed from: Taters and Trains: The Great Big Baked Potato and the Northern Pacific Line, by Scott Stark (see link above) The year was 1908. Hazen Titus was the new superintendent of dining cars for the Northern Pacific (NP) Railway, an empire that stretched across the northern US. 1900 map | Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society At the time, dining cars found in most passenger trains were not mere rolling cafeterias. They offered some of the finest culinary experiences around, rivaling the country’s fanciest restaurants. Passengers of means purportedly would ride simply for the meals. Titus undertook a familiarization trip across the NP line, where he overheard two farmers lamenting the potato crop coming out of their farms in Washington’s Yakima Valley. The tubers were simply too big, some tipping the scales at almost 5 pounds. When baked, such large potatoes would burn on the outside and still wouldn’t be cooked on the inside. These generously sized potatoes were destined to be sold for a pittance as hog slop. Titus obtained a bushel of these potatoes at Yakima and brought them to the NP’s commissary in Seattle where a team of cooks experimented with different cooking methods. The solution was a special rack the railway designed with a kebab-like spike that transferred heat into the potato, providing well-rounded cooking. Titus started ordering supersized potatoes in earnest, and by early February 1909, the first of these great big potatoes was served aboard the North Coast Limited at the price of 10 cents each. (photo circa 1930). | Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society The NP would never be the same. The line itself became known as “The Route of the Great Big Baked Potato.” Famous actors of the day promoted the tremendous tubers, and when an addition was built to the NP’s Seattle commissary, it was topped with a 40-foot-long light-up spud.