When Ella Munch, my great-grandmother's cousin, moved out to Tacoma to live, she came by car along auto trails, starting in Illinois on the Egyptian Trail. Auto trails were just dirt roads with painted stones and marked posts pointing the way. Ella told me it was slow going and there were constant flat tires. She didn't elaborate. Ella was kinda quiet, like me.
More Loquacious Accounts
"Before the Interstates in 1956, before the coming of the US Highways in 1926, there were the Auto Trails. These routes were designated with names—sometimes fanciful, oftentimes utilitarian or descriptive—and marked with colored bands on telephone and electric poles. According to some sources, the first Auto Trail had its beginning in 1911 in Iowa and spread rapidly from there. Within only a few years, the proliferation of "marked" highways was reaching crisis proportions. Countless automobile clubs, tire companies, oil companies and tourist associations erected signs along randomly-chosen routes. Sometimes these routes would veer far from the best or most direct path only to pass through a city which paid a fee to have the marked route run though the center of town." www.michiganhighways.org
"When the first autos came to Kimnundy there were no roads except dirt ones. After the fall rains started, you put your car up on wooden jacks in the garage (it was still called the barn) and you left it there till next summer. Dr. Miller and Dr. Camerer each had cars about 1912, the kind you cranked. These models had acetylene lamps which had to be lit with a match at dusk. It was a long trip to Centralia and a real journey to St. Louis, and Chicago. There were no marked routes and it was easy to loose your way in strange territory. Then two men in a buggy came along one day. down the road from Effingham and painted black and orange triangles on every other telephone pole. This marked the Egyptian trail which became Route 37 in 1931."
"When the first autos came to Kimnundy there were no roads except dirt ones. After the fall rains started, you put your car up on wooden jacks in the garage (it was still called the barn) and you left it there till next summer. Dr. Miller and Dr. Camerer each had cars about 1912, the kind you cranked. These models had acetylene lamps which had to be lit with a match at dusk. It was a long trip to Centralia and a real journey to St. Louis, and Chicago. There were no marked routes and it was easy to loose your way in strange territory. Then two men in a buggy came along one day. down the road from Effingham and painted black and orange triangles on every other telephone pole. This marked the Egyptian trail which became Route 37 in 1931."
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