In the early years of the Lincoln Highway Association, it pushed for a transcontinental highway and, as support for better roads and federal road funding grew, turned to setting road-building standards. By 1920 it proposed an "Ideal Section" as an "Object Lesson" in advanced highway engineering and sought public and professional ideas through Collier's Magazine and thousands of questionnaires sent to experts nationwide. After review by a panel of highway specialists between December 1920 and February 1921, plans called for a mile-long model road with a one hundred ten-foot right-of-way, a steel-reinforced concrete roadway forty feet wide and ten inches thick for four lanes, capacity for heavy axle loads and substantial daily automobile and truck traffic, a pedestrian footpath, elevated curves, special bridges, drainage features, guard rails, roadside landscaping, and illumination for night driving, making it the first highway section in the United States to provide such lighting. Indiana secured the project, and in April 1921 a 1.3-mile stretch between Dyer and Schererville was selected. Built in 1922 and 1923 by J.C. O'Connor and Sons with federal, state, county, and private funding, the road drew worldwide attention as a vision of the future. Its bridge, culvert, shoulders, and Jens Jensen-designed landscaping were completed by mid-June 1923, and delayed lighting installations were finished before the end of that year, with free electric service provided from April 1924 to September 1, 1925. Planned dedications involving Presidents Warren G. Hardin and later Calvin Coolidge never occurred, so the Ideal Section was not officially dedicated until 2016. Jensen, a Chicago landscape architect known for Prairie Style design and native gardens, created a pedestrian path with hedges, trees, layered stonework, open sun-spaces, and native materials as both a safety feature and an element of beauty. On September 1, 1928, in a nationwide effort to keep the Lincoln Highway visible within the new U.S. numbering system, Boy Scouts placed about 2,400 concrete posts along the route, with Indiana placements following in April 1929; thirteen stood between the Schererville Post Office and the state line in Dyer. The Ideal Section outlasted expectations: although expected to last only until the 1940s, it carried heavy traffic, appeared in good condition in 1956, and when U.S. 30 was widened in 1997, its original ten-inch concrete was still intact beneath later resurfacing. The site was permanently marked in 1942 by the Lincoln Highway Association, later rebuilt in 1969 after damage, and includes plaques connected to the Sauk Trail. After the original association dissolved shortly after 1942, interest later revived, and by 1992 a reorganized Lincoln Highway Association again worked to preserve, promote, and interpret the route, while both Indiana routes were designated a Historic Scenic Byway in 2011.