MANNS CHOICE, Pennsylvania — In January of 1941, hundreds of businessmen from communities all along the 7 miles of the Lincoln Highway that stretched from Everett to the top of Tull’s Hill met at the Ford Bedford Inn. They discussed plans for improving a highway that was first paved and modernized in 1919.Edmund S. Shuck, the president of the Pennsylvania Lincoln Highway Association, warned that the new “streamlined” Pennsylvania Turnpike would cost the state a $200,000 annual loss in business, depreciate property values, and create roughly $10,000,000 in state taxes as tourist spending shifted to the new road.Officials, including state Senate pro tempore Charles H. Ealy and Assistant Secretary of Highways C.H. Buckius, announced a countermeasure: a $12,000,000 modernization of the Lincoln Highway. In 1941, 7 miles between Everett and Bedford would be improved.
Bedford had long been a lodging and transportation center because of its split on the Forbes and Pennsylvania Road corridor before the route became part of the Lincoln Highway. Now, everything that had kept the small towns along the highway bustling was about to be bypassed thanks to the new Pennsylvania Turnpike, which had opened to traffic in October 1940.Shuck and the Lincoln Highway boosters weren’t wrong to be scared as the math was laid out to them. The turnpike really did siphon off the long-haul travelers who’d kept every diner, gas station, and tourist cabin between Bedford and Schellsburg bustling for decades. But somewhere in that same stretch of anxious years, a man named Clyde Crissey Jr. decided that the smart move was to build 12 more cabins anyway. Crissey already owned the Hotel Lincoln along the road just west of Bedford.The Lincoln Motor Court sits along the historic Lincoln Highway in Manns Choice, Pennsylvania, on May 13, 2026. (Photo by Justin Merriman)
