100 Years of the Old Spanish Trail Auto Highway
By Charlotte Kahl, Chair of the San Antonio Old Spanish Trail Centennial Celebration Association
Balboa, Cabrillo, Columbus, Coronado, Cortez, DeSoto, Gálvez, Menéndez,Ponce de Leon, Onate, and Vaca came by ship and rode by horseback along the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Later railroads crisscrossed North America. As the twentieth century began southbound highways were built to New Orleans and Miami.
In 1915 Mobile, Alabama hotel owner S. H. Peck, and businessmen Stewart LeBlanc and Palmer Pillans devised the plan of a paved auto highway from New Orleans to the Atlantic to give drivers of the new horseless carriages a way to visit Mobile and a way to ship materials into Mobile and manufactured goods from the city. Their road was to follow the route of the early Spaniards. They named it the Old Spanish Trail (OST).
Before the Great World War there were no Departments of Transportation at the federal, state or local level. It was up to the Chambers of Commerce or Rotary Clubs of businessmen to fund the paving out from their city to link up with the next town for a continuous route. Following the war, the western states wanted to become involved with the Old Spanish Trail auto highway. San Antonio, Texas, at the center of the transcontinental highway from Atlantic to Pacific established the central office for the design and building of the highway and created distinctive red and yellow banded white markers with black OST lettering to be painted on poles and posts all along the route. By 1923 women established an OST Beautification Department. The men would build the highway, the women beautify it. The women used the 32-mile segment northward from San Antonio as the Headquarters Section, widening it from 40- to 100-ft Right of Way for safety, adding native blooming trees and shrubs, and asking businesses and ranchers to build beautiful stone entrance gateways to their establishments. These improvements were recommended to others all along the OST.
As the centennial of the planning and building of the highway approached, San Antonio again stepped up to establish a central Old Spanish Trail Centennial Celebration Association, to guide communities all along the route to locate, revitalize and preserve the roadway, businesses and historic sites of the original Old Spanish Trail auto highway for a decade long Centennial Celebration with a 2029 reenactment of the 1929 motorcade grand finale from St. Augustine, Florida to San Diego, California.
The centennial celebrations have started with reenactments of the annual conventions held by the original OST association to guide and encourage their neighbors along the way to get their segments paved, and their sea walls and bridges built. The reenactment of the first convention in Mobile, Alabama in December of 2015 was a great success. LeBlanc and Pillans descendants were in attendance. OST100 will reenact the second 1916 convention in Pensacola, Florida December 1, 2 & 3, 2016 with lectures, exhibits by localities with successful projects of beautification, economic development, or preservation of iconic motor courts, drive-in restaurants, gas stations or theaters. Also included will be downtown walks past the historic sites early travelers would have seen and a motorcade to the nearby town of Milton to view WPA concrete enhancements preserved during up-grading of a U. S. 90 bridge, and the recreational trail created from the original OST brick roadbed. More information about the OST, OST100 and centennial celebrations can be found on www.oldspanishtrailcentennial.com.
About Charlotte Kahl: After 20 years of worldwide travel with Air Force husband, great-grandmother Ohio-born Charlotte Kahl settled into San Antonio nearly 40 years ago to become a community activist and local historian. Appointed by San Antonio Mayor Ed Garza and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff to lead the planning effort for a decade-long centennial celebration of the building of the transcontinental Old Spanish Trail auto highway, Charlotte’s travel is now exclusively in US Gulf and southern border states promoting OST centennial activities.