Elite car club visits Franklin Grove while rolling along Lincoln Highway

FRANKLIN GROVE – One by one, members of the Superformance Owners Association rolled into Franklin Grove as part of their Fall Superformance Roundup, a driving tour from Milwaukee to Wyoming guided by Old Lincoln Highway markers.

The Superformance Owners Association, also known as the Superformance Car Owners Forum, or SCOF, is made up of owners of replica Cobras made for Shelby, Randy Thomas, ride organizer, said. The cars come from South Africa, completely assembled except for the engine and transmission. A group that is 400 strong, SCOF members take car trips together three times a year.

SCOF also is a member of the Lincoln Highway Association. A group of six Superformance cars – from Texas, Georgia, Las Vegas, California and Wisconsin – set out Friday morning from Milwaukee to travel the Lincoln Highway and arrived in Franklin Grove later that afternoon. The plan was to travel to Medicine Bow, Wyoming, arriving there on Wednesday.

“It all started in 2006 and we were at a race track in Hastings, Nebraska,” Thomas said of the group’s interest in the Lincoln Highway. “We went north and drove around and we came across the seedling mile.”

The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental road for automobiles in the United States, dedicated in 1913. It winds its way over 3,000 miles between New York City and San Francisco, according to the Lincoln Highway Association website.

In lllinois, the Lincoln Highway enters Illinois from the east on U.S. 30. The route runs west through Chicago Heights, continues west through New Lenox to Joliet, and then northwest, still on U.S. 30, through Plainfield, crossing historic Route 66 on the way to Aurora.

From Aurora, the highway takes Illinois 31 north toward Geneva. At Geneva, it turns west on Illinois 38 toward De Kalb. The Lincoln Highway continues west on Illinois 38 through Rochelle to Franklin Grove, the location of the national headquarters of the Lincoln Highway Association. The highway continues west on Illinois 38 through Dixon. West of Sterling, the Lincoln Highway rejoins U.S. 30, goes through Morrison, and then travels Illinois 136 into Fulton. A Lincoln Highway information center is in Fulton’s windmill near the crossing of the Mississippi River into Iowa.

Kay Shelton Kozac, president of the Lincoln Highway Association and a volunteer at the LHA’s national headquarters in Franklin Grove, said she learned the group would be coming about two weeks before its arrival.

“They were keen on trying to find some of those older markers,” she said.

Using maps and Google Street View, Shelton Kozac said, the group was able to note where 95-year-old Lincoln Highway markers can be found along the way.

She said Boy Scouts placed over 3,000 of those markers along the highway’s route in 1928, prior to maps becoming prevalent.

“The Lincoln Highway Association wanted a large enough organization that could handle that and that would be the Boy Scouts, because the Boy Scouts had Scouts in every state,” she said.

She frequently fields calls from people who want to travel along the Lincoln Highway, including bicyclists, motorcyclists and motorists.

“We do have car clubs come through,” she said. “These are pretty special cars. I don’t know if I’d see cars come through like this any time soon. This is pretty special.”