From Pine to Palm

I remember hearing my grandfather tell of the Orleans-Kenner Electric Railway, or “O-K Line,” adjacent to the Jefferson Highway—which hbrought riders from New Orleans into Harahan and Kenner from 1915–1930. A few years later in 1935, my father attended the opening of the nearby Huey P. Long Bridge, attracting even more cars along the highway named for President Thomas Jefferson. This same highway rolled past my childhood home in Jefferson Parish, a few miles from the Orleans Parish line. It’s where I was born, and I’ve spent years driving its lengths. When I moved to Baton Rouge, I lived within a stone’s throw of that city’s section of the Jefferson Highway.

But I never knew the route’s history, or that its remnants still to this day run through seven states and Canada’s Manitoba Province—taking you right through the center of the United States.

The Origins of the Jefferson Highway

Long before Route 66 and the interstate highway system, before most roads were even drivable by car, the Jefferson Highway—named for the president who doubled the country’s size in 1803—gave farmers and tourists a route from Winnipeg, Canada, all the way through the heart of the Louisiana Purchase to New Orleans.

The highway was the brainchild of Edwin T. Meredith of Iowa, the founder of Successful Farming magazine and a gardening journal that eventually became Better Homes & Gardens—publications still in print over a century later. He saw early on that the widespread accessibility of automobiles, spurred by Henry Ford’s assembly lines, would be monumental developments for both Midwest farmers bringing product to market and the concept of tourism as an economic driver.

In 1912, Carl Fisher conceived of and developed the revolutionary Lincoln Highway, running east-to-west from New York City’s Times Square to San Francisco. So, Meredith started to imagine a north-to-south route.

Meredith and around one hundred of his supporters met in New Orleans on November 15-16, 1915. They invited state and local government representatives from some of the states that made up the Louisiana Purchase. He included leaders of the “Good Roads” movement, automobile clubs, and commercial and civic organizations.

U.S. Senator Lafayette Young of Iowa and Walter L. Parker, the general manager of the New Orleans Association of Commerce, led the meeting in the Association’s auditorium. Meredith was elected president; David Fink of Muskogee, Oklahoma, vice president; and Parker secretary of the Jefferson Highway Association. They chose the route’s key cities: Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota; Des Moines, Iowa; St. Joseph, Joplin, and Kansas City, Missouri; Muskogee, Oklahoma, and Denison, Texas. In Louisiana, the highway would travel through Shreveport, Alexandria, and Baton Rouge, concluding in New Orleans.

[Read about contributor Chris Turner-Neal's experience driving the Natchez Trace, here.]

Organizers decided to curve the route west from Shreveport into Texas and up to Oklahoma, then back east into Missouri, bypassing Arkansas. According to current president of the Jefferson Highway Association Roger Bell, this was because Arkansas's contingent of representatives at the organizing meeting was smaller than that of Oklahoma and Texas. Arkansas would later build their own Jefferson Highway route, which would not be officially recognized by the JHA until the 1920s  when it was dubbed the "Arkansas Scenic Route".

After the cardinal points were chosen, the association consulted with various counties and townships along the route. Tourism outreach commenced. Signage, travel brochures, and gimmicks like a campground offering free gasoline where Northwestern State University’s library in Natchitoches now stands sprung up across the 2300-mile highway.

Visitors immediately took to the route, which acquired the nickname the “Pine to Palm Highway.” By 1929, brochures advertised that much of Louisiana’s portion was 85 percent “hard-surfaced.” The international highway came to its end at the corner of St. Charles and Common in downtown New Orleans, where a granite obelisk read, “The End of the Jefferson Highway–Marked by the New Orleans Chapter D.A.R. 1917, Winnipeg to New Orleans.”

The Jefferson Highway Today

Over a century later, much of the Jefferson Highway has melded with other named routes within the U.S. National Highway System, much like the more famous Route 66.

Since re-establishing the Jefferson Highway Association in 2011, there have been renewed efforts to raise the route’s profile to be as prominent as other cross country corridors like Route 66 and the Lincoln Highway. “It’s not a ball of fire but it’s growing,” said Bell of the organization’s work to popularize the highway. “We’re in growth mode in several states now. Communities are discovering us.”

The volunteer members study and share the route’s history, meet for annual conventions, and encourage businesses and communities to enact signage. Currently, the organization is working on a website portal to aid tourists.

“Being a north-south route, it is a different culture element traveling from Winnipeg and northern Minnesota to south Louisiana,” said Bell. “And there are a lot of stories to tell along this route. It continues to evolve. And we continue to see people traveling the route”—even some European travelers, he said.

Bell drove a good portion of the highway in 2017, dragging his reluctant teenage son and wife along for the ride. “We had an adventure every day,” he said. “My son said it was the best vacation we ever had.”

“Being a north-south route, it is a different culture element traveling from Winnipeg and northern Minnesota to south Louisiana...And there are a lot of stories to tell along this route. It continues to evolve. And we continue to see people traveling the route," —Roger Bell

The approach to this sort of non-destination-based tourism is different, he added. “It’s not Disneyland. I’m going out into America and touring communities and meeting people. It’s an American experience.”

As the highway’s 1923 brochure claims, “In its course, the Jefferson not only traverses the heart of the richest country on the globe, but also one filled with romance and sentiment.”

The Jefferson Highway in Louisiana

To embark on the Jefferson Highway from the very bottom here in Louisiana, begin at the southern terminus at Common and St. Charles in downtown New Orleans, take Canal Street north to City Park Avenue and Metairie Road, then head west along Metairie Road into Jefferson Parish. Shrewsbury Road connects to the present Jefferson Highway, but travelers may instead use Claiborne Avenue, which turns into Jefferson Highway at the Orleans Parish line.

One of the reasons the Jefferson Highway in Jefferson Parish remains a large thoroughfare is because it is a remnant of the O-K Line. “When the railroad company acquired the land to lay tracks and build stations, it bought a corridor one hundred feet wide, thirty feet for the tracks and thirty-five feet on either side for further use and development,” wrote Earl J. Higgins in Metairie, Ames, High: The Streets of Jefferson Parish. “Those buffer and expansion strips would later carry motorized vehicles alongside the railway cars.”

The highway does a little jog in Harahan around the old railroad lines, then moves into St. Charles Parish and follows the River Road to Hwy. 73 through Geismer, Dutch Town, Prairieville and “Old Jefferson” in southeast Baton Rouge.

The original Jefferson Highway crossed the Mississippi River by ferry until bridges were constructed. From Port Allen, the highway headed west on Highway 76 (Rosedale Road) to Krotz Springs where it veered north on Hwy. 71. Travelers visited Bunkie, LeCompte, and Pineville before entering Alexandria.

From there, Hwy. 71 continues north through Tioga, Colfax, St. Maurice, and Clarence before becoming the Winnfield Highway and curving above Natchitoches, crossing the Red River into Louisiana’s oldest town and along its famed historic Jefferson Street, the name of which dates to the highway’s origination.

From Natchitoches, the Jefferson Highway heads west over the Old Spanish Trail to Robeline and then north on Highway 120 to pass through Marthaville. It turns into Hwy. 175 as it rolls through Pleasant Hill and Mansfield before entering Shreveport. The final stretch leaves downtown Shreveport and backtracks on Highway 79 west, then Highway 80, to the Texas state line. •

For maps and more information on the Jefferson Highway, visit jeffersonhighway.org.

The 2024 Jefferson Highway Conference & Sociability Caravan

The Jefferson Highway Association will host its annual conference April 24–27 at The Hotel Bentley in Alexandria. The event will feature former Louisiana Lt. Governor Jay Dardenne, musician Cecelia “Cece” Otto presenting “Songs from the Jefferson Highway Era” and Stephanie Stuckey, chairwoman of Stuckey’s roadside restaurants.

There will be bus trips along the Jefferson Highway (Hwy. 71) in Avoyelles Parish, with stops at LSU-Alexandria’s Epps House, part of the Solomon Northrup Trail, and Bunkie, where new highway signage has been installed and a new sign will be unveiled. “We will add four new signs, bringing the total to nine,” said Wilbert Carmouche, Director of Tourism in Avoyelles Parish.

Before the conference, association president Roger Bell and members from thirteen states will reenact the “Jefferson Highway Sociability Caravan,” along the original route from Shreveport to Alexandria. These “sociability runs” consisting of groups of cars occurred in the early days of the highway, Bell said. While in Shreveport, waters from the northern reaches of the Red River will be poured into Louisiana’s stretch as another reenactment from the highway’s early years.

“It will be a symbolic meeting of the river waters,” said Arlene Gould, executive director of Natchitoches Parish Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The caravan will lunch at Mansfield Female College Museum in Mansfield and continue on to Natchitoches, where signage will be installed. Members will overnight in Natchitoches at accommodations associated with the newly created Jefferson Highway Lodging Association.

On Wednesday, the group follows the original route to Alexandria, traveling through Grant Parish and the towns of Colfax and Pineville. The Sociability Caravan concludes at The Bentley, another lodging association member.