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Henry Bourne Joy and the Lincoln Highway

Location of sign -  Summit Rest Area Exit 323 on Interstate 80.

Photo taken July 2007

Photo courtesy of Jimmy Wayne

Text of sign:

This monument commemorates the Lincoln Highway, America’s first transcontinental automobile road, and Henry Bourne Joy, the 

first present of the Lincoln Highway association (1913). Joy, also president of the Packard Motor Car Company is sometimes 

called the father of the nation’s modern highway system. He said that his effort to create the Lincoln Highway was the greatest thing 

he ever did. The old Lincoln Highway passed over the crest of the hill seen beyond the monument. This was the historic “Summit” 

the highest point on the original 3500 mile route from New York to San Francisco. The coast to coast highway existed as a private 

enterprise, managed by the Lincoln Highway association and financed through memberships and donations from automobile and 

road building industries. The association lobbied state and federal governments to support road construction. In 1916, the federal 

government began granting matching funds to the states and the network of primitive dirt trails that made up the Lincoln Highway 

across Wyoming began to see some improvement. Much of the original Lincoln highway evolved into US 30 in the 1920s and 

Interstate 80 in the 1950s. The Henry B. Joy monument was originally located at the site of one of his favorite camping spots 

beside the Lincoln Highway in Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin west of Rawlins (see photo). He was camping there in 1916 when 

he saw the most beautiful sunset he had ever witnessed and expressed a desire to be buried at that site. That didn’t happen but his 

family sis provide and place the monument following his death in 1936. It was moved from that remote location in 2001 to protect 

it from increasing vandalism.

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