Albany County preserves a stretch of the Old Lincoln Highway

Albany County still holds one of the most legible stretches of the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental road for automobiles, and that makes the county’s old alignment more than a nostalgic drive. Much of the route through the Laramie Basin still looks close to its early form, so a weekend on this road becomes a way to see history on the ground, then spend money where that history is visible.

A road that still looks like the early motor age

The Lincoln Highway was dedicated in 1913 and stretched more than 3,000 miles between New York City and San Francisco. The Wyoming Department of Transportation says the route measured 3,389 miles and could cut coast-to-coast travel from at least two months to about 20 to 30 days, depending on weather. The Lincoln Highway Association says it stayed the best-known highway in the country from 1913 into the late 1920s, before the federal highway numbering system of 1925 turned much of it into U.S. 30 across Wyoming.

That history matters because the road’s character in Wyoming is still uneven and often rugged. The association says much of the route today is dirt and gravel and can be impassable for much of the year, which makes Albany County unusual: the old grade here remains visually unchanged in places even after later paving and gravel surfacing. Early travelers also had to contend with a patchwork system of county upkeep, volunteer help, snow, mud, spring floods, no speed limit and no driver-licensing requirement until 1947. Those are the conditions that make the surviving roadway feel less like a museum piece and more like a working remnant of the first automobile age.

A weekend route that keeps spending close to the landmarks

For Albany County, preservation has a practical payoff. A route that is still readable on the ground gives visitors a reason to slow down in Laramie, stop for meals, fill a tank, and stay the night instead of simply passing through on a faster corridor. The benefit is not abstract heritage talk. It is a travel pattern that sends spending to the places that sit closest to the route and its monuments.

That is why Visit Laramie’s Old Lincoln Highway tour works as a weekend framework rather than just a history list. The route menu gives travelers a set of named anchors, including the Southern Loop, the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Monument, the Tree Rock Detour, the Ames Brothers Monument Detour, Fort Sanders, and the Northern Route through Bosler and Rock River. Each stop adds a different piece of the county’s story, and together they make the old highway usable as a self-guided itinerary.

1. Start in Laramie with the Southern Loop and the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Monument

The Southern Loop is the cleanest starting point for readers who want to understand how the road first crossed Albany County. It places the highway in the context of the Laramie Basin, where the grade still reads like an early auto route rather than a modern limited-access road. That makes it the right place to begin if the goal is to see why the county’s preserved alignment has tour value in the first place.

The Abraham Lincoln Memorial Monument gives the route its most direct namesake stop. The National Park Service’s pending list dated June 13, 2026 includes an Albany County Abraham Lincoln Monument nomination at Sherman Summit Rest Area, a sign that the site remains active in the preservation pipeline. In practical terms, this is where a heritage drive turns into a visitor stop that can support nearby food, fuel and lodging before the route heads farther out into the county.

2. Follow the detours to Tree Rock and the Ames Brothers Monument

The Tree Rock Detour shows how the Lincoln Highway worked as a landscape of small, memorable landmarks rather than a single straight line. That kind of detour matters to travelers because it breaks up the drive and gives the old road texture, especially in a county where the preserved alignment itself is part of the attraction. A stop like this helps explain why heritage tourism has value here: people are not just driving through, they are getting out to look.

The Ames Brothers Monument Detour is one of Albany County’s strongest anchors. Visit Laramie says the Ames Monument is 60 feet tall and was built in 1881 at Sherman Summit, elevation 8,247 feet, to honor Oliver and Oakes Ames, who were influential in construction of the transcontinental railroad. The monument connects two eras of western transportation in one place: the railroad age and the automobile age. That overlap is exactly what makes the stop meaningful for visitors who want more than a roadside photo.

3. Finish with Fort Sanders and the Northern Route through Bosler and Rock River

Fort Sanders widens the trip beyond the Lincoln Highway itself and ties the route to older layers of Albany County history. The site gives travelers a reason to read the landscape as more than pavement and signage. In a weekend itinerary, that matters because it keeps the trip from becoming a drive-by monument tour and turns it into a layered county experience.

The Northern Route through Bosler and Rock River is the leg that shows how the old highway connected smaller places as well as major destinations. Those names matter because heritage tourism only works when travelers have a reason to keep moving, and the old alignment gives them one. A drive that reaches Bosler and Rock River supports the kind of spending that small communities feel first, from fuel to lunch to an overnight stay in the county.

The markers and preservation history still visible on the road

The Lincoln Highway’s roadside markers add another layer of concrete history. The Lincoln Highway Association says Boy Scout troops placed the memorial markers on September 1, 1928 at 9:00 a.m., and about 2,436 markers were actually placed nationwide. In sparsely populated western states, county highway crews often installed them later, and some of those markers still stand in Wyoming even though many have lost their bronze medallions.

That marker system is part of the same preservation story now unfolding through the National Park Service. The agency uses the National Register of Historic Places as the federal government’s official list of historic places worthy of preservation under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. In Albany County, that framework gives sites such as the Abraham Lincoln Monument more than sentimental value. It places them inside a formal preservation system that can keep the county’s Lincoln Highway stretch legible, visited and economically useful for the next generation of travelers.