Gazebos to be dedicated Tuesday
By KATE SCHOTT - kschott@daily-chronicle.com
Two gazebos that celebrate the history of the Lincoln Highway will be dedicated Tuesday in DeKalb County.
One is in DeKalb, the other in Malta, and both are part of a project aims to educate about the nation's oldest transcontinental highway.
The two interpretive gazebos are among the 16 that will be dedicated this year, said Diane Rossiter, associate director of the Illinois Lincoln Highway Coalition.
"Our goal is to bring travelers and visitors to learn about the Lincoln Highway," she said, but also to have them patron businesses in the communities in which the gazebos are in.
The project is four years in the making, and is funded primarily through a grant from the federal government. Each community with a gazebo paid 20 percent of the costs, with 80 percent being provided by the grant.
The Lincoln Highway, formed in 1913, was the first transcontinental highway in the nation, Rossiter said. Although the road is more than 3,000 miles long and travels through 13 states, the nearly 179 miles in Illinois is the only section of the highway that has a National Scenic Byway Designation from the federal government, she said. The designation was bestowed in 2000, according to the NSBD's Web site.
That allows the road to get grant dollars from the Federal Highway Administration to do projects that interpret the heritage and history of the highway in the state. The gazebos are the first such project to benefit from grants, she said.
"We wanted something that people would recognize from the highway or community, as being associated with Lincoln Highway," she said. "There are a lot of enthusiasts looking for Lincoln Highway trivia."
Each gazebo has four interpretive panels, Rossiter said. One is a map of the highway, and others tell about the highway. The fourth panel in each gazebo is designated to the community in which the structure resides in.
"It's an opportunity to tell us a little about how their community relates to the Lincoln Highway, something fun that happen there, or reason for something being there because of the Lincoln Highway," she said. "We are trying to tell some of those stories."
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