The third of the 1925 regional meetings of the Joint Board on Interstate Highways was held in a place that had been famously characterized by poet Carl Sanburg (1878-1967) as the City of Big Shoulders. This regional meeting, as with those both past and future, would largely involve having attendees figure out and decide upon those routes that should form the U.S. Numbered Highway System.
“Highway officials of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky will meet in Chicago on June 3 to designate the important interstate roads in these States which will be uniformly marked as United States highways,” reported the Illinois-based Effingham Daily Record a couple of days before this meeting.
This newspaper also noted, “Regional meetings were held in San Francisco on May 15 and in Kansas City on May 27 and the Chicago meeting will be followed by meetings in Atlanta, New York and Boston for the purpose of selecting the important interstate roads which, after coordination as between the various sections, will be known as United States Highways.”
The meeting in Chicago took place in Room 1404 of the Kimball Building at Jackson Boulevard and Wabash Avenue. The attached photo of this building, which is now known as the Frank J. Lewis Center and has become the central location for the DePaul University College of Law, was taken during the 1910s.
This meeting started at ten o’clock that morning. The following members of the Joint Board on Interstate Highways were in attendance:
- Edward Warley (E.W.) James (1877-1967), who served as both the chief of the Design Division of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) and the board’s secretary;
- Frank F. Rogers (1858-1942), state highway commissioner of Michigan and the incumbent president of the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO);
- William Otis Hotchkiss (1878-1954), chairman of the Wisconsin State Highway Commission;
- Frank T. Sheets (1890-1951), chief engineer of the Illinois Highway Department;
- Albert Harrison Hinkle (1880-1951), superintendent of maintenance for the Indiana State Highway Commission; and
- Lou A. Boulay (1878-1953), state highway director for Ohio.
The following highway officials were present at the meeting by invitation:
- John T. Donaghey (1867-1933), state highway engineer for the Wisconsin State Highway Commission;
- Edward Newton Todd (1873-1949), state highway engineer for the Kentucky State Highway Commission; and
- James T. Voshell (1874-1956), a BPR district engineer.
The meeting, as confirmed in the comprehensive board report finalized a couple of months later, turned out to be a low-key and noncontroversial gathering when it came to the discussion and selection of potential routes for the U.S. Numbered Highway System. “The work of selection was continued in entire harmony,” was the report’s overall assessment of the meeting.
This report, however, did draw a marked contrast between this meeting and the one that had been held in San Francisco the previous month. “In the Western group the general attitude was that roads of immediate importance should be included and the understanding seemed to prevail that additional routes would be added from time to time,” according to the report. “At the Chicago meeting on the other hand the attitude appeared to be that the States of that group were prepared to lay out at this time a system of interstate connections that would comprise all likely routes for an indefinite period, and the other roads built in the future would be tributary to the system now planned.”
The meeting in Chicago did have something notable in common with the one that had taken place in Kansas City: numerous representatives of auto trails – routes identified by names rather than numbers – likewise showed up at the Kimball Building to have their voices heard and views made known. Just like the meeting in Kansas City, as verified in the report, there were “no serious difficulties” with these representatives in Chicago. While they did not sit in on the meeting itself, several auto trail spokespersons were able to have informal discussions with the state highway officials outside of Room 1404. Five days after this gathering of the board was held, the next regional meeting took place down south in Georgia’s capital city.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
For more information on the regional meeting of the Joint Board on Interstate Highways in Chicago, please check out https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Report_of_Joint_Board_on_Interstate_Highways_October_30,_1925 and https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/numbers.cfm
Transportation History 
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