The Seedling Mile

The Lincoln Highway Association had a problem in 1913 that argument could not solve. It had proclaimed a transcontinental route, but almost all of it was dirt, and the counties that would have to pay for pavement had never seen any. So the association built demonstration stretches, one mile long, dropped into the middle of ordinary mud roads, and called them seedling miles. The point was the contrast at either end. Malta's was the first of them built anywhere in the country, poured in October 1914, ten feet wide, and finished with a celebration that November, fourteen months after the route itself was proclaimed. The local consul, Dr J. W. Corkings, picked the muddiest site he could find on purpose. Marquette Cement donated eight thousand barrels to Illinois and two thousand of them to Malta, the state supplied engineers and equipment, the county board put in money, and the mixer was a steam machine borrowed from work that had never been more ambitious than a sidewalk. It was designed to still be carrying traffic twenty years on, at a time when nobody could say whether concrete would do that. The mile ran west from the Malta cemetery, which sits on Illinois 38 at the north edge of the village, to about where Kishwaukee College stands. An interpretive gazebo stands at the college end, and a mural on the old town hall at 127 North 3rd Street tells the story from the village. Illinois 38 is still the Lincoln Highway, and by the middle 1920s a paved road was a thing counties competed for rather than resisted.