National Road celebration Monday
The Tin Can Tourists and a special giant-sized “happy birthday’ postcard will roll into Fayette County Monday as part of the 200th anniversary celebration of the signing of legislation by President Thomas Jefferson to build the National Road. “It’s exciting to have the National Road come alive again with vintage automobiles that would have traveled the same corridor in the early 1930s,’ said Donna Holdorf, executive director of the National Road Heritage Corridor. “It’s a great way to commemorate this 200th anniversary and the first of more events to come.’
The Tin Can Tourists are taking a special convoy of vintage trailers, many pulled by vintage cars through the area Sunday through Tuesday, as part of their journey as they travel the entire length of the National Road from Cumberland, Md., to Vandalia, Ill.
Forrest Bone, who coordinates the organization with his wife, Jeri, said, “This trip is two years in the planning and everyone I’ve talked to sees it as a once-in-a-lifetime event.’
According to a press release prepared by the National Road Heritage Corridor, the Tin Can Tourists were organized at Desoto Park, Tampa, Fla., in 1919. The group’s stated objective was “to unite fraternally all auto campers.’ Their guiding principles were clean camps, friendliness among campers, decent behavior and to secure plenty of clean, wholesome entertainment from those in the camp.
The group, known for the soldiered tin can on their radiator caps, grew rapidly during the ’20s and ’30s, the release said. Members could be inducted fellow campers through an initiation process that taught the prospective member the secret handshake, sign and password. After singing the official song, “The More We Get Together,’ the ‘trailer-ite’ was an official member of the Tin Can Tourists of the World. By 1932, membership estimates ranged from 30,000 to 100,000. The original organization remained in existence until the mid 1970s.
Bone said he and his wife renewed the Tin Can Tourists in 1998 and that applications were taken for this special National Road tour. From a membership of 600, a committee selected the best of the best to participate.
“We ended up with 30 units. One had to drop out. But we have five trailers from the 1930s. We’ve been around a little bit and we’ve never found a collection of trailers in a museum that would rival what we have on the road,’ said Bone, speaking on his cell phone from Cumberland, where the tour will begin.
The tour will include vintage trailers from 1932 to 1971 pulled by classic cars as well as a new 2006 Camp Inn Teardrop trailer pulled by a 2005 Volkswagen convertible.
In addition, the tour will be accompanied by a 3-foot by 5-foot postcard designed and produced by the United States Postal Service to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the National Road. The postcard says, “Happy Birthday National Road’ on the front and has room on the back for people to sign it.
“This is a bicentennial celebration and we’ve been delivering the mail just a little bit longer, but this road helped to build a nation and made delivering mail a little bit easier so we want to wish them well on this journey,’ said Diana Svoboda, communications specialist for the U.S. Postal Service.
The Tin Can Tourists are gathering this weekend in Cumberland and will travel through the area Sunday about 4:30 p.m. when they arrive in Addison for dinner at the Addison Methodist Church and an overnight stay in Addison Park.
After a tour of the St. Petersburg Tollhouse, they will depart for Fayette County Monday morning and arrive in Uniontown before 2 p.m., staying at Mount St. Macrina.
The group will tour the House of Prayer, the former historic mansion of coal baron J.V. Thompson.
They will enjoy a catered dinner at Mount St. Macrina and stay there overnight. An open house will be held from 5:30 to 8 p.m., allowing the public to enjoy the trailers.
On Tuesday, the Tin Can Tourists will leave Uniontown about 10 a.m. and travel to Brownsville, where the postcard will be on display in front of the Brownsville post office from about 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. It is the only official stop at a post office in Pennsylvania.
The group will tour the Flatiron building and Heritage Center and the Frank L. Melega Museum in Brownsville and have lunch before their departure.
The Tin Can Tourists will finish their tour at Vandalia on June 10.
The next anniversary event for the National Road will be the Great Race, the country’s longest and richest running vintage automobile rally, which will start in Philadelphia on June 24 and finish in San Rafael, Calif., on July 8. It will appear in this area on June 25 with an afternoon stop in Uniontown and an overnight stop in Washington.
For more information on the National Road Heritage Corridor, check the Web site at www.nationalroadpa.org.
For more information on the Tin Can Tourists’ visit to the National Road, check their Web site at www.tincantourists.com/hnr/ and for more information on the Great Race, visit www.Greatrace.com.