Old Spanish Trail (auto trail)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 History Summary
2 Future
3 Links
4 History Details

[edit] History Summary

The Old Spanish Trail auto highway (the OST) once spanned the country with a full 3,000 miles of roadway from ocean to ocean crossing 67 counties and eight states along the Southern border of the United States. Work on the auto highway began in 1915 and, by the 1920s, the trail linked St. Augustine, Florida to San Diego, California, with its center and headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. The cities in between boasted a shared heritage of Spanish missions, forts and Spanish colonization.

[edit] Future

Much of that trail still exists, and preparations have already begun for a decade-long Centennial Celebration to begin in 2019 and end with a 2029 motorcade grand finale from St. Augustine to San Diego. The present-day, all-volunteer Old Spanish Trail Centennial Celebration Association OST100 is collecting oral histories, travel logs and news articles related to the Old Spanish Trail in order to conserve the roadways, businesses and historic sites of the original Old Spanish Trail autohighway both physically and in the memory of the American people.

The current work of revitalization, historic preservation, public/private partnerships, restoration, and road enhancements, follows the lead of the original founders of the OST, who involved greatly diverse interests in building and beautifying the original roadway.