The Lincoln Highway Experience in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, offers an engaging look at America's first transcontinental road through historic artifacts, immersive exhibits, and interactive displays. Highlights of the museum include a restored 1938 diner with pie and coffee, a 1937 Packard, a period gas station façade, and a short film introducing the highway's history.
Visitors can explore roadside attractions, early tourism, the Good Roads movement, and Eisenhower's 1919 military convoy, an Army expedition that traveled over 3,250 miles from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco in 62 grueling days.
On display are convoy-issued tools, vehicle components, officers' logbooks, and striking photographs that chronicle the rigors of the journey.
Report excerpts and interpretive panels highlight how fragile bridges were repeatedly reinforced or bypassed, how trucks and trucks bogged down in "gumbo mud" and quicksand, and how an average convoy speed of just over six miles per hour underscored the urgency of road reform.
On display is also black-and-white film footage, similar to what is used in the 'After Ike' documentary.
The exhibit makes clear: this convoy was not merely a test of military mobility—it galvanized public sentiment behind the Good Roads Movement. It helped shape Eisenhower's vision of a national road system years later.