On the Lincoln Highway: A photographer’s journal

For years I avoided doing a project on the Lincoln Highway. It had been the domain of my former colleague, Eric Mencher, and his wife, Kass, who traveled the roadway coast-to-coast between 1997 and 2009 and published a wonderful book of photography, Almost Heaven. I thought I had a different perspective to offer, having lived most of my life in Pennsylvania, but I did not intrude.

But, on an early June evening this year, my wife, Theresa, and I were driving through Lancaster County on the Lincoln Highway. I was recovering from a rotator cuff injury and hadn’t taken a single photograph in over two months. When we drove by the Dutch Haven, the closed shoofly pie bakery with a giant windmill on top, I decided that Eric wasn’t the first photographer to do a Lincoln Highway project and I wouldn’t be the last.

I have two distinct memories from the summer of 1969, when I was 9 years old: listening to “Sugar, Sugar,” the hit song by the Archies, and the murder of Lillie Belle Allen during the race riots in York. The murder has stayed with me for over 50 years. My family had spent a lot of time in York County that summer. It was the first time I felt the outside world invade my sheltered childhood, and so I knew York was a necessary stop on the first day of the trip.

As if it were preordained, Bob Mann arrived at the memorial for Lillie Belle and York Police Officer Henry Schaad minutes after I had. He was making his daily stop in Farquhar Park to make sure the flowers were fresh and to clean the granite benches of the memorial. It was the 1,452nd consecutive day he had done this. “They hold a special place in my heart. ... I don’t want these people to be forgotten,” said Mann, who witnessed the gang shooting of Lillie Belle as a 14-year-old.

In many ways, that chance meeting changed the tone for the trip. It became less about the Haines Shoe House, the Coffee Pot, and other unusual roadside oddities and more about remembrances and memorials. There were the obvious ones, the Gettysburg battlefield monuments, the Flight 93 National Memorial, and Patriot Park. There were the recent passings of Lincoln Highway icons, Jack Dunkle of Dunkle’s Gulf and Ed Gotwalt of Mister Ed’s Elephant Museum & Candy Emporium. And there were individuals like Scott Brozovich and Donna Miller, who used the highway as a vehicle to remember loved ones who had died. Maybe because the road had been created as a memorial for Abraham Lincoln, the assassinated 16th president, “the mystic chords of memory” Lincoln spoke of were instilled in its asphalt.

Brozovich, 40, of Pittsburgh, epitomizes the highway’s ability to produce reflections on life. He regularly stops at the site near his hometown of Bedford, where the ship-shaped S.S. Grand View Point Hotel once stood, not to remember one of the highway’s most famous icons but to honor his friend, Danny Devine, who died from post-COVID complications in June 2021 at the age of 41. At that location, Devine had spray-painted his name on the guardrail in his signature style. “I think that spot and everything with Danny just helps me to stop and relax for a second and take those things in and appreciate life,” said Brozovich. “I’m here in the moment, appreciating the beauty in this spot and everything all at once, like the love that we both shared for Route 30 and our love for each other. … I don’t always think of it as me grieving. But I think it is a big part of my grieving process.”

On the opposite side of the guardrail, Brozovich, a mural artist, has written his own message: “I love you Danny! A true friend. Scott”

Like many, I have a personal connection to the roadway. My ancestors, the Hersheys, arrived in 1717 — Swiss Mennonites trying to escape the persecution they had suffered as Anabaptists in their homeland. The Lincoln Highway, Route 452, cuts west through what was once the land they farmed in Lancaster. Living near the Conestoga Indians, they epitomized the “holy experiment” William Penn envisioned. On Dec. 27, 1763, the Paxton Boys, a renegade group, massacred the 14 remaining Conestoga at what is now the intersection of King and Water Streets. Two individuals, known only as Michael and Mary, would survive. They had been living on the farm of Christian Hershey, my first relative born on American shores. Hershey hid Michael and Mary in the basement of his Manheim Township home as the Paxton Boys roamed the area on horseback with scalps in hand in search of more tribal members. For months, the two friends remained hidden in an act of courage and friendship. I remain humbled by his actions.

In Gillian Welch’s epic 14-minute song, “I Dream a Highway,” she describes a highway as “a silver vision” that, depending on the changing refrain, can rest, arrest, molest, and bless the soul. The Lincoln Highway achieves all four in a way the bleached concrete of an interstate will never achieve.