History of the Jefferson Highway
(Pine to Palm Highway)

The Jefferson Highway was named after Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States. It was he who negotiated the Louisiana Purchase which acquired, from France, the land which the Jefferson Highway is located on.

The Jefferson Highway was the first transcontinental road to traverse the North American continent North and South and possibly the First Dedicated International Highway in the world. Conceived at a meeting in New Orleans in 1915 the highway was dedicated in 1919. Its Northern end was to be in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada then running 60 miles (96 kms) to the U.S./Canadian border traveling anther 2200 miles (3540 kms) through Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and ending in New Orleans, Louisiana on the southern coast of the United States.

The Jefferson Highway only existed as a named highway for a few years until it lost it's title to the new standardized numbering system in the 1920s but now historians are bringing it back. Several societies and historical groups have kept the Jefferson Highway's name alive with museums, monuments, local automobile tours and annual celebrations. An end to end tour was completed in November 2009.

The best documentation of the history of this great highway was written by Lyell Henry. You can read it here and please do, it is extremely informative.

The Jefferson Highway was promoted by tourism agencies as the Palm to Pine Highway if you were traveling North or the Pine to Palm Highway if you were traveling South. There were two very prestigious motorcades that traveled the full 2300 miles (3680 Kms) of the highway in those early years. As reported by The Morrison County Historical Society the first one ventured from New Orleans in the summer of 1919 (no air conditioning) and the second one challenged the highway from Winnipeg in the winter of 1926 (not much heat). Those people must have been true adventurers because as tough as the trip may have been both of them had to return in the same conditions in which they came.

Two notable motorcades traversed this highway. One in 1919 traveling from New Orleans north to Winnipeg on the Palm to Pine Highway. In early 1926 a motorcade traveled the other way from Winnipeg to New Orleans on the Pine to Palm Highway in the dead of winter. This website is dedicated to the intrepid motorists who made those historic journeys.

The Times-Picayune.
New Orleans, Friday, February 5, 1926
Zero-to-Zephyrs Tourists
Finish Jefferson Highway
Trip as Guests of City

Winnipeg Motorcade Welcomed to New Orleans by O’Keefe

The "Pine-to-Palm" motorcade from Winnipeg, led by Mayor Ralph H. Webb of the Canadian city, and W. McCurd, business manager of the Winnipeg Tribune, with 132 residents of Winnipeg traveling in Thirty-two automobiles, completed their tour of the complete length of the Jefferson Highway at 8 o’clock last night when they arrived at St. Charles and Common streets and saluted the granite post marking the end of the long trail.

The visitors were greeted at Destrehan, twenty-one miles up the Jefferson Highway from New Orleans, by Acting Mayor Arthur J. O’Keefe and a delegation led by Richard Dean chairman of the good roads bureau of the Association of Commerce. They were escorted to The Roosevelt, headquarters of the motorcade in New Orleans.

At noon today there will be a reception by the acting mayor and city commissioners in the mayor’s parlor and at 6:30 o’clock tonight they will be guests at a banquet in the Louisiane.

Immediately after the arrival of the motorcade Mayor Webb, through special arrangement by The Times-Picayune with the Saenger Theater Inc. and Maison Blanche, broadcast from Station WXMB greetings to the people of New Orleans and Winnipeg. He addressed each town in which the caravan stopped on the long tour over the Jefferson Highway and expressed appreciation for it’s hospitality.

Mayor Webb or Colonel Webb, as the members of the party address him, is a hero of the World war and left a leg in France. He was one of the original Princess Pats, was in the first unit which left Canada for the war and won many decorations. After his return he moved from Eastern Canada to Winnipeg and eighteen months later that city of 285,000 people elected him mayor, and then re-elected him. Last week he was elected president of the Jefferson Highway Association at the convention in St. Joseph, Mo.

MAYOR WEBB ENTHUSIASTIC

Mayor Webb’s arrival in New Orleans found him fairly bubbling over with enthusiasm for what he described as, "the corridor of the Mississippi valley" - that stretch of country with the Jefferson Highway running down the center with New Orleans at the southern and Winnipeg at the northern end. "Orleanians should go to Winnipeg in the summer, and residents of Winnipeg should come to New Orleans in the winter for there is everything a person could possibly wish in each one," he declared.

Among the notables in the party are Hugh Shepard and Mrs. Shepard of Mason City, Ia. Mr. Shepard has just concluded his term as president of the Jefferson Highway Association.

West McCurdy, business manager of The Winnipeg Tribune, conceived the idea of the winter "Pine to Palm" tour. He rode in the administration car and is chief of the expedition.

Leaving Winnipeg in a blizzard, the motorcade held true to its schedule and came into New Orleans in regular military order. The temperature was about 25 degrees below when they left home (Note the 'Pine to Palm' sign on the side of this car).

The party arrived at Destrehan from Baton Rouge at 7 o’clock, in addition to Acting Mayor O’Keefe and the Association of Commerce and Motor League of Louisiana delegations. The party also was met at Destrehan by a squad of traffic policemen from New Orleans under command of Captains Casey and Lanute. At the parish line in Shrewsbury another detachment of motorcycle patrolmen met them and cleared the way in Canal street to The Roosevelt.

The toughest part of the trip was a 100 mile stretch through Iowa over a highway covered with three inches of ice from a sleet storm. Two of the automobiles turned over but no one was injured.

Women members of the party are nearly as numerous as the men. Mayor Webb is accompanied by his wife and daughter.

The party traveled 2194 miles over the Jefferson Highway. Eighty-five Canadians in twenty-six cars composed the original party leaving Winnipeg. There were cars from Brandon, Portage La Prairie, Victoria Beach, Neepawa, Gretna and other Manitoba cities in addition to those from Winnipeg. En route the motorcade was joined by cars from Fargo and Grand Forks, N. Dak.; Thief River Falls, Detroit Lakes, Little Falls, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minn.; Mason City, Ia.; and St, Joseph and Kansas City, Mo.

Mayor A. C. Knudson of Detroit, Minn., well over six feet tall, weight 195 pounds, joined the party when it passed through his home town and came into the lobby of The Roosevelt last night talking about "the 10,000 lakes in Minnesota." The three mayors, Webb, Knudson and O’Keefe, met at Destrehan. Here the Max-Pet band played as the officers and employees of the refinery of the Mexican Petroleum Corporation gathered to greet them.

The tourists left Alexandria yesterday morning, arriving at Baton Rouge at noon, where they stopped for lunch. Resuming their trip they followed the curving Mississippi river on the last leg of the journey.

They will leave New Orleans Sunday morning and return to Winnipeg via the Mississippi Scenic Highway, arriving at Winnipeg, February 17. (Thanks to the New Orleans public library microfilm archives and the Times Picayune)

'Pine-to-Palm' Tour in '26 Started Tourist Trek North. This is the headline from a February 18, 1950 story published by the Winnipeg Tribune recreating the 1926 motorcade.
Click here to read the full article.

(The following story is a human interest account of a long lost Winnipeg family and it illustrates the limits of communications in the early 1900's. This article also appeared on the front page of The Times Picayune February 5th, 1926.)

‘Pine-to-Palm’ Radio Reunites Brother, Sister
Search of 25 Years Ends as Wireless Message is Picked Up

The government broadcasting station at Winnipeg radioing a telegram from Mrs. G. C. Porter to her husband traveling with the "Pine-to-Palm" motorcade as the staff representative of the Winnipeg Tribune, and J. B. Reynolds listening at a receiving set in Hartsborne, Okla., served to bring together sister and brother who have been searching for each other for twenty-five years.

This was the news Mr. Porter received when he arrived in New Orleans last night with the Winnipeg motorcade. It enclosed a telegram which Mrs. Porter had received from her long-lost brother, J. R. Reynolds. It was dated January 30 and read: "Mrs. G. C. Porter, Care Tribune, Winnipeg, Man.

"Just received your address through radio station BANC, Toronto. If I am right, wire me, Have been trying to locate you for twenty-five years. Your brother, "J. B. REYNOLDS."

"This telegram causes more happiness than words can express," said Mr. Porter last night. "At the time of the Spanish-American war we were living in Toronto, while Reynolds, who is my wife’s brother, was living in St. Joseph, Mo. He enlisted in the American army and was sent to the Philippines. That was the last we heard of him. We tried unsuccessfully many years to locate him. In the meantime we had moved from Toronto to Winnipeg and he probably failed to trace us from there. Another coincidence is that the ‘Pine-to-Palm’ tour passed through Hartsborne and I was in the same town with my long-lost brother-law- without either of us knowing of the other’s presence there." (Thanks to the New Orleans public library microfilm archives and the Times Picayune)

If any of the Porter or Reynolds families mentioned in this story are still around Winnipeg I would love to hear from you. Jefferson Highway web builder

Jefferson began as nation's highway

Monday, March 19, 2007
Drew Broach
Times Picayune

At their most basic level, names are nothing but labels that human beings assign to objects and abstractions. Were that all, the current proposal to re-label Jefferson Highway as Jefferson Boulevard might pass without notice by all but those few people facing the inconvenience of changing their mailing addresses.

But on a deeper level, names are symbols with history and meaning. "Jefferson Highway," in fact, at one time was a national symbol.

In the early part of the 20th century, with the automobile still in its booming infancy, titans of commerce and local governments across the country clamored to improve the muddy tracks they inherited from their horse-and-buggy ancestors. The train had been the only viable means of long-distance travel, but the potential of the car was palpable.

Consider: Fewer than 500,000 vehicles were registered in the U.S. in 1910. A decade later, it was 10 million, a 20-fold increase.

Highway associations were formed to build interstate routes connecting hundreds of towns. More than 250 such groups signed up directors, subscribers and members at fees ranging from $5 to $1,000 to build "rock roads" such as Lincoln Highway, Dixie Highway and Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway. The name of one, Old Spanish Trail between St. Augustine, Fla., and San Diego, lives on today in the Slidell area and on the west bank of St. Charles Parish.

Another was Jefferson Highway, conceived as the grandest north-south route through the middle of the United States, connecting New Orleans with Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The name, for the third U.S. president and the architect of the Louisiana Purchase, and the terminal points were decided early on. But the exact route was a matter of great debate. Every little village in 10 states wanted to be part of it. Thus the New Orleans Association of Commerce hosted the first Jefferson Highway Association convention in November 1915. It expected 50 delegates.

Six times as many came. They included 62 of Kansas' "oratorical big guns," who set up headquarters at the DeSoto Hotel after arriving at Union Station in what The Times-Picayune described as "two Pullman sleepers representing the highest art of railroad building and insuring comfort and the opportunity for a good time on the route."

Travel pioneers such as these were about to put the Pullman company out of business. Amid cheers, songs of hometown pride, hissing and cat-calling, delegates hammered out a route for Jefferson Highway. "Never had New Orleans known the enthusiasm and pandemonium which reigned at the meeting," The Picayune said.

Over the next 11 years, well before the federal government took over the job, the Jefferson Highway Association built or connected almost 2,200 miles of road. It adopted a nickname for the route, "From Palm to Pine," and blazed it with signs: a vertical rectangle divided into three bars, blue at the top and bottom and the letters JH in the white middle.

On Feb. 4, 1926, a cavalcade of 132 people in 32 cars, most of them from Winnipeg, completed a 13-day trip to celebrate completion of the highway. The visitors saluted a granite obelisk that the Daughter of the American Revolution had erected in 1917 to mark the southern terminus of the route. A picture of New Orleans acting Mayor Arthur O'Keefe greeting Winnipeg Mayor Ralph Webb was published the next day on the front page of this newspaper.

Already, however, the end was nearing for this extraordinary period of enthusiasm that built and named roads across the United States. Within a year of the Winnipeg caravan's arrival in New Orleans, the federal government decided to start numbering highways all across the country. That deprived the named highways of much of their symbolism.

The obelisk still stands, at the intersection of St. Charles and Common streets in the Central Business District. But Jefferson Highway hereabouts became part of U.S. 90 and Louisiana 48, and it took on equally unromantic names elsewhere. The original name lives on in only a few spots along the 2,194-mile route, notably in parts of the Midwest, Baton Rouge and a faded stretch of highway hugging the Mississippi River in East Jefferson.

Drew Broach is the East Jefferson bureau chief. E-mail dbroach@timespicayune.com or call (504) 883-7059

The following is a letter that I received in November 2007 from Caddo Oklahoma, a town which was on the Jefferson Highway in 1919. This is the kind of information that helps me locate this highway.

Caddo, Oklahoma was on the Jefferson Highway. Much of Caddo still looks as it did in 1919. You can see photos of our town on the link below. I also found this item in The Caddo Herald, July 11, 1919:

"Jefferson Highway Officials Were Here

Manager Clarkson of the Jefferson Highway was the leader of the Sociability Run that came through Caddo Monday morning at 10:30. In the four other cars were Governor R. G. Pleasant of Louisiana, Mayor Behrman of New Orleans, and Duncan Buie, State Highway Commissioner of Louisiana.

They are making the run from New Orleans to Winnipeg over the Jefferson Highway to show the possibilities of the Highway for auto driving.

Being a little behind time the party stopped but a moment in Caddo."

I also noticed in the obituary for our local druggist, W. F. Dodd (1924), that he was the "president of the Jefferson Highway Association. It was largely through his efforts that the Jefferson Highway was located through Caddo and through Oklahoma. It is a memorial to his enterprise and his ability."

I am enjoying learning more about our famous road. Mary Maurer, secretary, The Town Restoration Association of Caddo.

http://www.caddo-ok-today.org