Lincoln Highway at Elkhorn

The bricks are still here because people kept choosing them. The Douglas County Board resolved in 1975 to maintain and preserve the road, and five reproduction Lincoln Highway markers went up along it in 1976. When plans to pave it over with asphalt came out in the 1980s, preservationists pushed for restoration instead, and an Elkhorn Diamond Jubilee committee raised a monument in 1987. Vehicles of six tons or more are banned. The National Park Service calls the stretch between 174th and 192nd streets the only known rural piece of Nebraska's Lincoln Highway that keeps its 1920s character.

What the plaque says

The Lincoln Highway at Elkhorn This three-mile brick segment of roadway was once the route of the Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln Highway Association was founded by private interests in 1913 to develop a paved, toll-free, transcontinental highway from New York City to San Francisco. Its work was part of a national movement to improve the nation's highway system, then in its infancy. This section of the Lincoln Highway, mapped in 1913 to connect Omaha and Elkhorn, was originally unpaved. In 1920, as part of a broader initiative to improve the entire highway across the state, it was paved using concrete underlayment with brick surfacing providing two, eight-foot lanes. In 1930 the official route of the Lincoln Highway (now U.S. 30) was relocated to provide a shorter route from a new Missouri River toll bridge at Blair to Fremont, bypassing this segment, which continued to serve local traffic. This well preserved example of early twentieth- century road construction reflects the importance of the Lincoln Highway and its role in promoting today's modern highway system. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Nebraska State Historical Society, 2013

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Malcolm X Birthsite — 13 mi
  The North Omaha lot where Malcolm Little was born in May 1925 and his family was driven out by the Klan, saved by Rowena Moore and now planned as a cultural center.
• Winter Quarters and the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery — 13 mi
  The Latter-day Saint camp of 1846 to 1848 on Omaha land in what is now Florence, where hundreds died the first winter, and the cemetery and trail center beside it.
• Joslyn Art Museum — 14 mi
  Omaha's free art museum, a 1931 Art Deco memorial with two modern pavilions, and the keeper of Karl Bodmer's watercolors from the upper Missouri in 1833 and 1834.
• The Durham Museum (Omaha Union Station) — 15 mi
  Omaha's 1931 Union Station, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's Art Deco depot for the Union Pacific, closed to trains in 1971 and kept as a city museum with its waiting room intact.

More markers nearby

• Father Flanagan's Boys' Home — 4.3 mi
• Kobs Pioneer Cemetery — 6.0 mi
• New Pennsylvania Cemetery — 8.5 mi
• Oto Indians — 8.5 mi