Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books, offers more than 33,000 free ebooks of previously published titles, all digitized with the help of thousands of volunteers. Now available is an early road book, Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway by Effie Price Gladding. Other ebook sites have already taken the file and reposted it but without the images (or I assume permission), and PG warns that these are most likely spammers. You’ll find the safe original here: www.gutenberg.org/files/33320/33320-h/33320-h.htm
As I wrote in my Greetings from the Lincoln Highway book:
Effie Gladding had just returned from three years touring the world when she departed San Francisco on April 21, 1914. She and her husband Thomas first drove the El Camino Real 600 miles south before turning and meeting the Lincoln at Stockton. In a 262-page book she titled Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway, she doesn’t reach the focus of her title till page 108, then detours off it for another 47 pages near the end, skipping most of Ohio and Pennsylvania. But it was the first full-size hardback to discuss transcontinental travel, as well as the first to mention the Lincoln Highway.
Click the link above or go to Project Gutenberg’s main page for the book for other ways to download the text and images.
Books by Brian Butko 
> skipping most of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
yeah, she probably gave up & hopped a train, waited for the car @ the destination;-)
It’s good to see this. I’ve long wanted to read the book and can now do it free.
Brian may have been showing his understandable Lincoln Highway bias when he used the word “skipping”. Effie didn’t hop a train but drove a non-LH route through “most of Ohio and Pennsylvania” (and WV, too). From Zanesville, Ohio, to somewhere in Maryland, she followed the National Road though she found the Ohio portion “rather poor”.
On a similar note, I recently read Emily Post’s “By Motor to the Golden Gate” and found that her shipping the car west from Winslow was not, as I had assumed, because of the writer’s wimpiness but because of the beating the car had endured getting to that point. Emily was actually quite the trooper and toured the west coast after the car was repaired in Los Angeles.
Thanks Denny. Sorry for the confusion, but I thought it was clear — I say she detours off it, and since the focus of Greetings from the LH was the LH, I was simply saying she was not on the LH in the most word-efficient manner. And her book was called Across the Continent by the LH….! ;)
It (usually) takes more that that to confuse me:-) You said pretty much what I’d expect to be said in a book TRULY about the Lincoln Highway. I just didn’t want Tom to think Effie had “wimped out” as I erroneously thought Emily had.
No problem my friend, thanks for your continued help and support, I appreciate it!