The Dixie Highway was a United States automobile highway, first planned in 1914 to connect the US Midwest with the Southern United States. It was part of the National Auto Trail system, and grew out of an earlier Miami to Montreal highway. The final result is better understood as a network of connected paved roads, rather than one single highway. It was constructed and expanded from 1915 to 1927.
Dixie Highway Today
The name "Dixie Highway" persists in various locations along its route where the main flow of long-distance traffic has been rerouted to more modern highways and the old Dixie Highway remains as a local road. In some south Florida cities, Dixie Highway (or sometimes Old Dixie Highway) parallels "Federal Highway" (U.S. Route 1), sometimes just a block away. In Tennessee, the name lives on in Dixie Lee Junction (where Dixie Highway and Lee Highway intersected). In Western North Carolina, seven bronze plaques on granite pillars placed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the late 1920s mark the route of the Dixie Highway (and honor General Robert E. Lee); these markers can be found in the towns of Hot Springs, Marshall, Asheville, Fletcher, and Hendersonville, and on the SC and TN state lines; today it follows US 25; an eighth monument of identical type can be found on US 25 in downtown Greenville, South Carolina. Two additional monuments can be found in Franklin, Ohio at the intersection of the Old Dixie Highway and Hamilton-Middletown Road, and near Bradfordville, Florida on US 319. The name Dixie Highway is also still commonly used in portions of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, such as in the Waterford MI area, where it is very much a major thoroughfare known as US 24.
In some cities and towns, Dixie Highway is the north–south axis of the street numbering system. The extension of development westward means that the northwest and southwest quadrants of the grid defined in this manner are generally much larger than the northeast and southeast ones which are constrained by the Atlantic Ocean. Also, the route of Dixie Highway generally parallels the coast, often running diagonally instead of straight north and south, causing irregularities in the numbering system.
Source: Wikipedia
