Memorial Highways
Michigan has been designating certain routes as memorial highways since about 1925. These memorializations have commemorated an historical event, a prominent individual or certain group of people. Some of the earliest memorial highway designations are still used today, although many have long since faded into oblivion. In fact, in 2000-01 MDOT performed an audit to ascertain just how many memorial highways have been created over the years and found more than fifty such designations. Most of these memorializations were in the form of legislative acts or resolutions and, unfortunately, no central record of the designations was kept.
In 2001, the Michigan House proposed legislation, which was signed into law in October of that year, creating a single statue for the consolidation of memorial highway names. It was found that some highways had been dually-memorialized—where two different memorial designations had been assigned to the same stretch of roadway. This new act, known as the "Michigan Memorial Highway Act," consolidated the various memorial highway designations into a single statute and requires MDOT to erect the highway signage denoting the designation once "sufficient private contributions have been received to pay the cost of erecting those markers," according to the bill text.
View the contents of Public Act 142 of 2001 from the Michigan Legislature website.
In the future, additional information regarding the various Memorial Highways in Michigan will be included here, along with maps depicting the locations of these highways. In the meanwhile, however, please visit the MDOT "Memorial Highway Search" website, linked below, for more information.
Published in 2004...
A Drive Down Memory Lane: The Named State
and Federal Highways of Michigan by Le Roy Barnett,
published by Priscilla Press, distributed by Wayne State University
Press. A 288-page book chock full of information and 250 maps. Unfortunately, it is out of print, but is available from a variety of booksellers, online sources and can be found in many public libraries in Michigan. (ISBN No. 978-1886167247)
Additional Information
- Michigan's Memorial Highways section from the MDOT website.
- Memorial Highway Search page from the MDOT website (archived from 2017). Allowed visitors to search for Memorial Highways by county. It was an excellent resource, but as this is an archived version from 2017, it does not include any newer designations than that time.