Lee Highway


The Lee Highway was a United States auto trail through the American South and Southwest. When opened in 1923, it connected Washington, D.C., and San Diego, California; extensions were later added to New York and San Francisco.
The route was created to be a Southern complement to the Lincoln Highway, the nation's first transcontinental auto route. It was named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee as part of a broad effort to present Confederate actions during the American Civil War as just, heroic, and not centered on slavery.
The route was laid out by the Lee Highway Association, a private group founded in 1919 to create the route and encourage the improvement of roadways between Washington and San Diego. The later extensions used existing developed highways.
By 1926, the American Association of State Highway Officials adopted the U.S. numbered highway system to replace named trails. Parts of Lee Highway were designated with route numbers—east to west, U.S. 211, U.S. 11, U.S. 72, U.S. 70, U.S. 366, and U.S. 80—while other parts retained vestiges of its earlier name and history.
The highway's name is remembered in the titles of several bluegrass fiddle songs.

History

In 1919, Dr. Samuel Myrtle Johnson of Roswell, New Mexico, wrote to David Carlisle Humphreys of Lexington, Virginia, proposing a transcontinental auto trail that would connect Southern states as the 1913 Lincoln Highway had done in the north. Johnson proposed to name this new road for Robert E. Lee, the former leader of the vanquished Confederate Army. At the time, Lee was venerated by many Americans, especially in the American South, under the pseudohistorical and historical negationist myth that the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery.
Humphreys duly put out a call for a meeting in Roanoke, Virginia, to form a new national highway association. On December 3, 1919, five hundred men from five states met in Roanoke to officially form the Lee Highway Association.
In January 1922, Johnson wrote in The New York Times, "Although only twenty months old, the work of the Lee Highway Association has already progressed so steadily that completion of the transcontinental route is anticipated within three years." In November 1923, a commemorative milestone was dedicated at a ceremony at Horton Plaza Park in downtown San Diego to mark the arrival of the highway at the Pacific coast. With much fanfare, President Calvin Coolidge pushed a button in the White House that rang a gong in Horton Plaza.
From the memoirs of Katherine Johnson Balcomb, published in The Balcomb Family Tree Book:
The national project echoed efforts in cities and towns across the South to venerate Lee and other Confederate leaders during the period of reconciliation in the decades following the American Civil War. In his 1922 piece in the Times, Johnson wrote that the association "proposes to infuse into the national life, the inspiration to noble things that cannot fail to result from a knowledge of the life, character, and services of Lee", adding that the project would be a "worthy work of patriotism in honoring a great American".
The route was inaugurated on November 17, 1923, from an eastern zero-mile marker on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., to a western zero marker, the Pacific Milestone, in the center of San Diego.

Routing

The route of the Lee Highway was designated by the following routes:
Much of the original route is still known by the name "Lee Highway", including in these cities and areas :
In October 1938, cities along the highway made national news when the San Diego Zoo, under the direction of Belle Benchley, arranged to have two three-year old giraffes, later named Patches and Lofty, transported from British East Africa via freighter. During the giraffes' 54 days at sea, they were caught in the Hurricane of 1938. After a 16-day stay at the U.S. Animal Quarantine Station in Athenia, New Jersey, they were loaded on a customized 1938 International D-40 truck for a 14-day journey on the Lee Highway to the zoo in San Diego. The highway, quarantine station, giraffes, and zoo feature prominently in the 2019 novel West With Giraffes.
The "Lee Highway Blues" is a standard of southern string band music. It is widely attributed to G. B. Grayson of the popular Grayson and Whitter string band of the late 1920s, who recorded it under the title "Going Down The Lee Highway" but it was almost certainly composed by fiddler James McCarroll of the Roane County Ramblers. The tune has been used as a fiddler's showpiece, especially in the Virginia area and notably by Scotty Stoneman and by string band revivalists such as the Highwoods String Band. Alice Gerrard and Hazel Dickens recorded a rendition of Lee Highway Blues on the Smithsonian Folkways album Pioneering Women of Bluegrass, as did Chubby Wise. David Bromberg wrote a whimsical bluegrass variation, "The New Lee Highway Blues", describing the tribulations of traveling on an endless highway of one-horse towns.
The song was the final track on Wanted Dead or Alive, Bromberg's third album, released in 1974. AllMusic described the song as among "Bromberg's strongest and best-loved material".
Fiddler Ken Clark performed a variation called "Lee Highway Ramble", recorded around 1961.