The seasoned motorists who tackled a stretch of the Dixie Highway during a tour Saturday had a full itinerary of interesting places to learn about.
Starting at the Markham Roller Rink, a midcentury icon that’s still open to those who can ply the hardwood on wheeled feet, the daylong motorcade visited various historic places and eras as it traveled south.
Scheduled stops along the way didn’t adhere strictly to the highway’s modern route. A foray into Thornton offered a visit to the state’s oldest standing brewery, now Thornton Distilling, as well as a glimpse millions of years into the past via fossilized sea life extracted from the massive limestone quarry in the village on display at the Thornton Historical Society.
The Art Deco era was featured at Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, where tourists could check out the school’s marvelous architecture as well as frescoes created during the Great Depression by artist Edgar Britton under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. The school also featured its giant globe, a companion to one created for President Franklin D. Roosevelt by a Chicago Heights firm amid World War II.
In Crete, the town’s catalog of Sears Homes was featured, taking people back to the early 20th century days when kit houses would arrive by train as part of a mail-order delivery.
More events ensued as the motorists, many driving Ford Model A classics, proceeded down the Dixie to Beecher, Grant Park, Momence and on to Saint Anne.
The Day on the Dixie drive was the latest installment of a mostly annual tour that organizers use to bring attention to the wealth of historic attractions in the south suburbs as well as a fundraiser for continuing efforts to ensure Dixie Highway has its place among the state’s famous byways, Lincoln Highway and Route 66.
It’s a rightful place, as all three roads were major elements of an early scheme to make motoring around the state easier at a time when the popularity of horseless carriages began to take off. They were among the first five roads in Illinois to receive federal funding for modernization, along with the old National Road downstate and a route linking Chicago and Waukegan.
Dixie and Lincoln Highways, and of course Route 66, all are the subject of continuing fascination. The national Lincoln Highway Association is holding its annual conference this week in Indiana with five days of tours and sessions based in Elkhart, though Lincoln Highway fans tour the coast-to-coast road year round. A Route 66 tourism site offers guidebooks in various languages, including German and Mandarin, attesting to the worldwide popularity of John Steinbeck’s “Mother Road.”
Looking for something local to do this summer? The three roads form a sort of triangular frame for the south suburbs, and they are never closed, except for occasional construction projects. The Dixie-Lincoln-Route 66 Triangle Tour awaits you. It’s fun and easy to do. And it doesn’t cost much more than a tank of gas and maybe the tab for lunch at one of the restaurants along the way.
The top tip of the Triangle Tour technically is in Chicago, but for our purposes we’ll shear that off and start the Dixie Highway portion in Blue Island, one of the Chicago area’s oldest towns and home to one of the great old fashioned downtowns in the suburbs. There’s a certain Galena-ish vibe to the architecture there, though there are no ties to President Ulysses S. Grant. But there are thrift stores and good places to eat, and some excellent places for a beer or two if doing the Triangle Tour in reverse and ending up in the Olde Western section of town.
The tour proceeds south on Dixie over one of the five bridges over the Calumet River and goes by the Libby, McNeill and Libby building, built in the 1910s and once home to a massive food canning operation that sent south suburban truck farm vegetables all over the world, including to American troops during World Wars I and II. It hasn’t been used for much lately and was named on Landmarks Illinois’ 2024 list of Endangered Historic Places.
Continuing south, tourists will likely be stopped by trains — a good chance to view some remarkable folk art depending on how the railcars have been tagged. Some of the spray painted works really are amazing. But the proliferation of rail lines speaks to the industrial, working class nature of the corridor through Posen, Dixmoor and Harvey.
Here’s a neat thing for fans of old roads: A short stretch of old Dixie Highway still exists on the east side of the modern roadway for a couple of blocks south of 167th Street. It’s been resurfaced in the years since, but the old section, now called Robey Avenue, offers a glimpse of the narrow nature of the area’s earliest paved roads.
According to the book “The Dixie Highway in Illinois” by the late Jim Wright, the road’s grade crossing with the Illinois Central Railroad tracks in Homewood was less than ideal. After eight people were killed at the crossing in 1919, it earned the nickname “Death’s Angle.” A viaduct was dug under the tracks in 1922, funneling traffic at a right angle in a traffic pattern that continues to baffle some Dixie Highway motorists more than a century later.
Progressing through downtown Homewood, another great place for a bite or a quaff, the highway travels through the heart of south suburban golf country, where the combination of lush terrain and easy access from Chicago via IC trains resulted in a proliferation of country clubs, including Calumet, Ravisloe, Flossmoor, Idlewild and Olympia Fields.
But long before the first woods or irons made their appearance alongside Butterfield Creek, which flows through three of the courses, a clubhouse of a different sort was erected in the creekside woods.
After a developer uncovered Native American artifacts in the 1960s on a site where new homes were planned, researchers from the Field Museum and Northwestern University, along with a team of high school students, participated in an archeological dig not far from the Dixie Highway bridge.
What they uncovered was evidence of a “fairly substantial structure,” according to a report of the dig in a Field Museum publication from 1968. About 30-feet wide, the frame structure likely was used as a hunting lodge for people as early as the 1400s, the researchers concluded.
Going south past Bloom, Dixie Highway crosses Thorn Creek, another important historic waterway of the south suburbs. Rather than celebrating sharp, prickly undergrowth, the stream is named for the native hawthorn trees that once spread from its banks. It was such a vital feature to historic residents of the area that it lent its name to Thornton and Thornton Township to the north.
It also flows through Woodrow Wilson Woods in Chicago Heights, at the intersection where Dixie and Lincoln highways merge for a stretch.
The two important roads earned the intersection the nickname “Crossroads of the Nation,” thanks to enthusiastic boosterism by Chicago Heights officials. In fact, if it weren’t for the clout wielded by those boosters, Lincoln Highway might have followed the modern path of Sauk Trail instead. According to the late Chicago Heights historian Barbara Paul, they were able to convince planners to route the named roadway from Indiana north on Dixie Highway from Sauk Trail into their city before turning back west on what is now U.S. 30.
That combined stretch offers a glimpse into the heyday of Chicago Heights as well, including the last remnants of the city’s former downtown area, restaurants once owned by mobsters, a giant cow that at one time sat atop a place called “Steak, Tacos and Videos,” among other names, and other attractions.
From here, Day on the Dixie drivers continued farther Saturday, traversing South Chicago Heights, Steger, Crete and beyond. Triangle Tour participants could turn west on 26th Street, where Sauk Lake was formed by a dam in the 1920s, or Sauk Trail and link at some point to Lincoln Highway. The tour hooks up with Route 66 in downtown Joliet, which has a number of museums and roadside attractions as well.
This guide to the Triangle Tour stops here, out of necessity and column inch considerations. But it might continue at some point this summer with a deep dive along the Lincoln Highway and Route 66, at least the remnants up here that aren’t Interstate 55.
It’s road trip season, after all. Why not have some local adventures?
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.
