courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society
When this St. Louis man, Cory Smith, drove his St. Louis car, a 1910 Dorris, out west in 1915 to see the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco, he was answering the fair’s call to “See America First.” Smith wasn’t exactly a pioneering motorist. Horatio Nelson Jackson and a dog in dust goggles had already become the first to cross the U.S. by car in 1903. Smith wasn’t the most famous visitor to California’s fair, either. That was Henry Ford’s 21-year-old son Edsel, who came from Detroit in his Model T, getting mired in mudbanks and breaking wheel spokes along the way. Smith wasn’t even the most famous fairgoer from St. Louis; that honor went to some Plymouth Rock hens from Kirkwood who won the blue ribbon in the poultry exhibit. But he did make history as part of the first big wave of people who undertook that most American of journeys: the road trip. And even in the modern era of getaway fares and bullet trains, some of us still can’t resist packing up our maps and coolers, filling our tanks and hitting the road to cure our itch to see new things, and briefly soothe our relentless American restlessness.
