Written on 43rd Street in New York City in response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”, Guthrie celebrated the beauty and the freedom of our country and its roads in one of his most remembered songs.

Images in this video are representative of what Route 1 looked like from its beginnings in 1926 through about 1956. The images come from several public sources: The Tichnor Brothers collection of vintage post cards is a wonderful catalog of 25,000 images from 1930 to 1945 available at the Digital Commonwealth through the Boston Public Library. www.digitalcommonwealth.org/collections/commonwealth:0p096w19r The John Margolies Roadside America collection can be viewed online at the Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/john-margolies-roadside-america-photograph-archive.html I filled in the rest with my favorite photos and videos of buildings and scenes that you might have seen while driving Route 1 between 1926 and 1956.