August 8, 2009
East of Cedar Rapids, Mount Vernon Road had a little hiccup in its straightness that was ironed out by the late 1930s. The segment left behind between 44th Street and Wilder Drive is named Lincoln Heights Drive, reflective of its role as part of the Lincoln Highway. However, the original Lincoln didn’t run here; it went through Marion instead.
The Lincoln Highway in Linn County played a background role in Iowa’s last major county-level political change: Cedar Rapids replaced Marion as the county seat in 1919, and Mount Vernon Road was paved eastward to the “Seedling Mile” two years later.
In the 1920s, convincing Iowans to get the state “out of the mud” was a project nearly as herculean as building the roads themselves. But as a few pieces were finished here and there, the lesson became very clear. As Pete Davies put it in the book American Road, pavement was power.