Cross-Country, by a Road Less Traveled Rebecca Flint Marx for The New York Times The Lincoln Highway stretches from New York to San Francisco, crossing states that include Iowa, Nebraska and Nevada along the way. Hidden amid the flash of 42nd Street in Manhattan, like a tarnished penny on the floor of a nightclub, is a small brown sign bearing the words "Lincoln Highway." To those who notice it at all, it's a random curiosity, a beacon without context. It betrays no indication that it points the way to a road that once stretched across the continent, one that traced the trails forged by early pioneers and augured the future of car travel in this country. Like its Times Square signage, the Lincoln Highway is all but hidden in plain sight, accessible only to those who seek it out. When it was born a century ago this year, it became the country's first transcontinental automobile highway, stretching across 13 states from Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. Today, however, the road once called Main Street Across America is all but forgotten by most citizens under the age of 80, a victim of the 1926 switch to the United States Numbered Highway System. It does, though, have an enthusiastic cult following; in late June, the Lincoln Highway Association held a centennial tour beginning from both coasts and terminating at the highway's midpoint in Kearney, Neb. In 1912, when the entrepreneur Carl Fisher hatched his idea for the highway, car travel was a dusty, muddy affair. Fisher, who three years earlier helped create the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, sensed an opportunity in the sorry state of the nation's roadways, and dreamed up the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway, a $10 million gravel road to be financed by automobile manufacturers and suppliers. Fisher received major assistance from Frank Seiberling, the president of Goodyear, and Henry Joy, the president of the Packard Motor Company. Joy suggested naming the road after the 16th president, and it was officially incorporated on July 1, 1913. Using two books as our guides - one by a world traveler, the other, less predictably, by a famed etiquette expert - I set out with my traveling companion, Mark, from New York City with few expectations but plenty of questions. Technology and modern conveniences aside, would our experience and observations differ that greatly from those of the highway's first travelers? Would we feel the same thrill of discovery, the same sense of accomplishment in traversing a road that then, as now, seemed less like a highway than a fragmented ghost trail? The first of our guides was one of the highway's first travelers. In 1915, years before she achieved column-writing stardom, Emily Post, on assignment for Collier's Weekly, drove part of the Lincoln, her son and cousin in tow; in 1916, she published "By Motor to the Golden Gate." A year before Post hit the road, Effie Price Gladding, who had just spent three years traveling the world, traveled the highway in the opposite direction. In 1915, Gladding published "Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway," an account of her own excursion. As we prepared for the trip, it was clear that at least one thing had changed: recommended attire. Post suggested "an orange-colored chiffon veil" for "the woman who minds getting sunburnt," along with "a coat and pleated skirt of a material that does not show creases." Chances are she wouldn't have approved the increasingly dirty jeans and Converse All-Stars I wore across three time zones. Though today romanticism surrounds the Great American Road Trip, few people spend 11 days driving a back road at an average of 55 m.p.h. And to be fair, the industrial northern New Jersey stretch of the Lincoln didn't exactly make us thrill to Gladding's description of the highway as "a golden road of pleasure and usefulness ... destined to inspire a great patriotism." Beginning in Pennsylvania, though, the Lincoln began to show its allure, winding through meadows, across streams and alongside barns emblazoned with Lincoln Highway-themed murals. Passing through both Gettysburg and the United Airlines Flight 93 crash site in Shanksville, the route provided a haunting and evocative link between two of the country's greatest traumas, 138 years apart. But for both Post and Gladding, the Lincoln's greatest charms were found in the West, and so it was for Mark and me. "It was the West, the real great, free, open West we had come to see," Post wrote. Ranches, cowboys, Indians, not little cities like sample New Yorks. After we crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa, the sky and road widened, and we discovered scraps of the old Lincoln: the perfectly preserved bridge in the tiny town of Tama; the cheerful red, white and blue concrete highway markers placed by Boy Scouts in the late 1920s. Because the Lincoln follows the same routes taken by the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails and the Pony Express, and parallels the Union Pacific tracks, driving it across the Western plains offers the spine-tickling sensation of traveling among phantoms, of being pulled along by some promise of Manifest Destiny.