Lincoln Highway Heritage Byway

In the early 1900s there was no such thing as a highway across the country; a driver setting out from the East Coast faced a patchwork of unmarked, often impassable local roads. A group of automobile boosters set out to change that, proposing in 1913 a single marked route from New York to San Francisco and naming it for Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln Highway became the nation's first transcontinental road, stitching together fourteen states and giving Americans, for the first time, a route they could actually follow from one ocean to the other.

The highway did more than move cars. It seeded a whole roadside economy of gas stations, diners, motor courts, and garages, and it taught the country to think of the automobile as a way to see the land rather than just get to work. Iowa embraced it early, and the road became a source of local pride, a main street for the whole state that connected its farm towns to the wider world.

Colo earned a special place on the route because of geography. When the Jefferson Highway was laid out north to south in 1915, it crossed the east-west Lincoln Highway right here, making Colo a true crossroads of the early highway system. In 1923 a local named Charlie Reed opened a gas station at the intersection, and within a few years the site had grown into a full travelers' stop with a cafe and cabins that became a motel, run by the Reed and Niland families and open around the clock.

That cluster came to be known as the Reed/Niland Corner, and it survives as one of the most complete old one-stop travel stops left anywhere on the Lincoln Highway. Where most such places were bulldozed after the interstates pulled traffic away in the 1960s, Colo's corner still holds its historic gas station, cafe, and motor court together in one spot. It is a rare, intact snapshot of what stopping for the night looked like in the golden age of the American road.

Iowa's Lincoln Highway Heritage Byway runs clear across the state, roughly following the modern US Highway 30 corridor from the Mississippi River near Clinton to the Missouri River near Council Bluffs. Along its length the landscape shifts from Mississippi bluffs to the level plains and gentle river valleys of central Iowa to the wind-sculpted Loess Hills in the west, so the drive is more varied than the flat-Iowa cliche suggests.

The pleasure is in the stopping. Towns all along the route have worked to keep the character of the old highway, so travelers pass historic canopy gas stations, vintage cafes, roadside sculptures, and murals, along with small museums that tell the road's story. Colo makes a natural anchor near the middle of the state, close to Ames, and a good place to pick up a byway map and get your bearings before wandering east or west along the old alignment.

The Lincoln Highway is best treated as an experience rather than a single destination: give yourself an unhurried half-day, follow the brown byway signs and a route brochure, and let yourself detour into the towns that catch your eye. Part of the fun is spotting the ghosts of the old highway, a faded painted sign, a boarded filling station with its canopy still standing, a stretch of narrow original pavement running alongside the newer road.

Because it is a corridor, the individual museums and historic buildings along it keep their own hours and seasons, and warm-weather months find the most doors open. From Colo you can reach the Reed/Niland Corner on foot and then set out along the byway in either direction. Whether you drive a few miles or trace it across the state, it is a chance to travel the very beginning of the American road trip, on the same route drivers first crossed the country a century ago.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.