Part 3: Automobile Route Guides
During
the
first years of the 20th
century, the automobile overtook the bicycle as major force for
improving roads
and for road maps. The cycling maps
proved to be inadequate guides for automobiles so, following the lead
of the
cyclists, motorists organized national clubs including the Automobile
Club of
America and the American Automobile Association.
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   Official Automobile Blue Book, 1915. Vol. 4: Middle West. Cover and sample route page. Directions are from Lansing, Michigan to Napoleon, Michigan (marked in red on reference map). |
To ameliorate the void in touring
information,
these clubs produced descriptive, written, guides or route books. The
most
popular were The Official Automobile Blue Books, published from 1901 to
1929. These
books, contained maps of the area, along with
detailed point-to-point driving instructions. The detailed, verbal
descriptions
were needed because the roads themselves were not posted with names or
numbers,
although route numbers appeared in the books themselves. Although extremely useful, early motorists found these guides hard to follow and rather cumbersome to use. According to one traveler “Whoever had the seat of honor beside the driver got the Blue Book job and spent the day with his nose glued to the fine-typed pages and read aloud each direction, but never quite in time to prevent the wrong turn.” (Hokanson, D. The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America. 1988. p. 91) |
  Rand McNally Photo Auto Guide. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1907. Showing Route Between Detroit and Toledo. Reproduced with permission from Newberry Library |
An interesting variant of the guidebook was the photographic guide. Introduced in 1905 and issued by several companies, these guides contained photographs of the major strategic turns with captions indicating the direction of the turn along with the mileage to the next one. The accompanying strip maps in the guidebooks were linked to the turns portrayed in the photographs. The Rand McNally “Photo-Auto” Guides, twenty- five of which were issued between 1906 and 1910, were the most ubiquitous. |
 R.E. Olds test driving the curved dash Oldsmobile in Lansing, Michigan. Reproduced with permission from Michigan State University Archives. |
During the
first decade of the twentieth century
the conditions of the roads were still quite dreadful. Over 90 percent
of the
roads outside the cities in 1904 were still dirt, while the others were
composed of only gravel, stones, or shells. Dusty when dry, filled with
bottomless chuckholes when wet, and with few bridges, the roads were
often
impassible. They were also without signposts. “When my father bought his first Ford roadster in 1904, he tried to drive it to Port Huron. In one ten-mile stretch between Lapeer and Imlay City he got stuck in the middle of the road eight times and each time he had to be hauled out by a farmer with a team of horses. When he got to Imlay City he had the Ford put on a railroad flatcar and sent it back home. It was seven more years before roads improved enough so that he dared try it again.” E. Love. The Situation in Flushing. New York: Harper & Row, 1965, p. 184 |