The 1913 Lincoln Highway in Porter County, Indiana, part 1: A rural alignment

As you leave La Porte County and enter Porter County on the Lincoln Highway, you encounter a 3.4-mile old alignment that weaves across current State Road 2. Imagery ©2026 Airbus, Landsat/Copernicus, Maxar Technologies, Vexcel Imaging, Inc. Map data ©2026 Google. The red dashed vertical line near the right edge of this map snippet is the county line — this old alignment begins, barely, in La Porte County. It’s well marked if you want to follow it yourself. Here’s the westbound road. I’m betting this is a 16- or 18-foot wide road, which is a typical width the old Indiana State Highway Commission built from the late 1910s through sometime in the 1930s. When Indiana improved its initial highways, it often did so in place, primarily by widening them. But in some cases it built new alignments, to smooth out sharp curves and to eliminate blind hills like this one. This alignment isn’t particularly curvy; I’d say it’s more winding. The real reason, I’m sure, the state built a new alignment…