MEMORANDA TO TEXAS EDITORS
About a month ago the Texas Highway Commission gave the name of JEFFERSON DA.VIS to the highway from the Red River thru Austin and San Antonio to Laredo. This highway, nationally known as the MERIDIAN HIGHWAY from Winipeg to Mexico City, was sometime ago locally named the PAT NEFF HIGHWAY.
At the same meeting the OLD SPANISH TRAIL from Orange to El Paso was named in Texas the STEPHEN F. AUSTIN HIGHWAY. At the last meeting of the Highway Commission the name STEPHEN F. AUSTIN was abandoned and JEFFERSON DAVIS MEMORIAL HIGHWAY substituted.
News reports state the highway from Red River to Laredo is now being marked by the Highway Department as JEFFERSON DAVIS HIGHWAY and the Highway Commissioners say JEFFERSON DAVIS MEMORIAL HIGHWAY is settled for the Orange—El Paso road.
This if persisted in means the destruction of the Old Spanish Trail from St. Augustine, Florida to San Diego, California as a national highway, for Texas with one-third the distance across the continent can make or break the project.
The Old Spanish Trail was organized at Mobile in 1915 and has been a continuous active organization ever since. At a conference in Houston in 1919 San Antonio was asked to assume the national headquarters work. The value of connecting such a project across Texas was recognized and the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce appropriated $1000 and others followed with support in loyal measure. In the ten years of this work members have spent over $100,000 personally. They have succeeded not only in making the Old Spanish Trail a connected transcontinental trunkline of very valuable possibilities to the South, but they have fostered the construction program until $35,000,000 have already been spent; $7,900,000 of construction in progress will be completed this year; $10,000,000 of new construction will be inaugurated in 1925.
The Old Spanish Trail is known all over the land. It is of record in national offices everywhere, on all maps, in government manuals, at schools, libraries, colleges, and with all magazine editors interested in outdoor life and auto travel. More magazine and feature articles are published than for any other national highway. Its name, its historical background, its potential service to national tourist travel, and the possibilities of its territory for settlement, development, fishing, camping and resting, all appeal to the northern editors. If let alone it will be the nation's best known highway.
The OST Association in the past ten years has published 40,000 service and general maps; 10,000 four-color lithograph wall maps; 50,000 miscellaneous leaflets and booklets; 20,000 Travelogs and now has a wealth of material ready for a Texas Travelog of 20,000 oopies; magazine and feature articles have reached a circulation of over 4,000,000; over 2000 miles of roads have been marked and new marking is necessary; zero milestones have been dedicated by presidents and governors; OST field
men have traveled over 50,000 miles in this work---in the early days they
wallowedin mud and mire working out courses of the highway across the