Crossroads Chronicle in Key West

It is not by chance that this publication is named The Crossroads Chronicle. The name was chosen because at one time Swainsboro was the only place in America where two transcontinental highways intersected, US Highway 80, which begins on Tybee Island Georgia and ends at San Deigo California and US Highway 1 that begins in Key West Florida and ends north of Fort Kent , Maine on the Canadian border. Its route runs 2,390 miles and a motorist traveling the road today is reminded frequently of the life and customs of the early days by the old inns which have survived the passage of time, and which now boast - in many cases with truth - of having sheltered the people who began our great country.

During its inception it stretched from end to end of the thirteen original colonies, George Washington traveled it repeatedly in peace and war. Now the 94-mile section between New York and Philadelphia carries a heavier average traffic than any other road of equal length in the world. Route No. 1 connects New York, Princeton and Philadelphia, the three cities at which the capital was established in the early years of the Republic, with Washington, the final choice; and it passes near or through nearly all of the Revolutionary battlefields.

Economically it was important because it connected the great manufacturing and industrial cities of the Atlantic Seaboard, and also because it is the most eastward through road on which all streams were bridged. Connecting semi-tropical Florida with the north-temperate Maine, the road was a principal tourist route from the large eastern cities to the winter resorts of the South and the summer resorts of New England. Until the advent of the interstate highway system its strategic value as a military road, in time of war, was the conclusive element which stamped this road as one of the most important, everything considered, in the United States.