Lincoln Highway: The Road My Father Traveled

LINCOLN HIGHWAY, THE ROAD MY FATHER TRAVELED, is about the first coast-to-coast highway and the lives of the people along that highway in the 1915 era, the year of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. This book opens a small window through which can be seen the lifestyles, values, ambitions, and even the warts of those ordinary, and in many cases extraordinary, people strung along a narrow path from the Atlantic to the Pacific--the Lincoln Highway.
Frank C. Nissley grew up on a farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In 1903, at age twenty-one, he traded his pitch fork for a camera, and left home to seek his fortune by viewing children through the lens of his camera.
Thousands of baby pictures later, in 1915, he bought a Little Giant truck in Philadelphia and pointed it westward toward San Francisco, California. He joined the thousands of others heading west along the Lincoln, mesmerized by those new "machines" which promised unprecedented vistas and adventure.
A small stained brown leather diary provided the impulse to write Lincoln Highway, The Road My Father Traveled, highlighting the towns and ranches he visited, and where the children of the Lincoln provided a ready source of revenue to finance his excursion.
The 213 pages and 400 photographs cover eleven of the thirteen states intersected by this historic highway.
by D. Lowell Nissley