Before there were numbered federal highways there was the Lincoln Highway, laid out in 1913 as the first road intended to carry a motorist from New York to San Francisco, and it came through Rochelle. The route is Illinois 38 through the town, and it makes a ninety degree turn in the middle of it, which is the kind of detail that mattered enormously in the era it was built. The Lincoln Highway was not constructed so much as designated: an association of automobile, tyre and cement men strung together existing roads, persuaded towns to improve their own stretches, and marked the result on poles along the way. A town on the line got traffic. A town left off it did not. That is why the corner is worth knowing about. Standard Oil of Indiana bought the lot at the turn in 1918 from Carrie E. Stocking of Bolivar County, Mississippi, for six thousand two hundred dollars, and put up a filling station, because a ninety degree bend on a transcontinental route is where cars slow down. Rochelle claims it as the first filling station on the Lincoln Highway anywhere in Illinois. The building was restored in 2001 and now houses a visitor centre and a shop for new businesses, and the association's own national headquarters is sixteen miles further west along the same road at Franklin Grove.
Getting there
41.9240, -89.0665
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
