The movement for better roads in the United States grew from bicyclists known as wheelmen, who organized in 1880, promoted improved roads for farmers and travelers, and helped inspire a national good roads campaign that led to one of the first Good Roads highways in 1912, later named the Lincoln Highway in honor of Abraham Lincoln. Created by businessmen through the Lincoln Highway Association on July 1, 1913, the route ran from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, crossed 13 states at first and later 14, and became known as the Main Street Across America as realignments shortened it from 3,389 miles to 3,142 miles. The highway also helped publicize the need for federal involvement in road building, and the federal-state joint highway effort began in 1916 with the Federal Aid Road Act, followed in Indiana by the establishment of the Indiana State Highway Commission in 1919. A central figure in promoting the road was Henry Charles Ostermann of Tell City, Indiana, an orphan whose varied early life included work as a newsboy, hotel worker, sailor in the U.S. Navy, rancher, railroad worker, inventor, freight car businessman, and automobile dealer before he became the first Field Secretary of the Lincoln Highway Association in 1913 and later a vice-president. Traveling the full route multiple times each year, he promoted memberships, gathered practical information for motorists, encouraged local road improvements, and in 1919 led the first transcontinental Military Motor Transport Convoy from Washington, D.C. by way of Gettysburg and then west on the Lincoln Highway to California. After Ostermann was killed in an automobile accident in Tama, Iowa, on June 8, 1920, leaders of the association resolved to memorialize his work. Funds were set aside for a memorial seat, and plans for an Ideal Section campsite on 17 acres purchased in 1923 included landscaping by Jens Jensen and building designs by John Van Bergen, with Edsel Ford paying the architectural design expenses, but the campsite project was abandoned by 1928 because of high costs and other factors. The land was then sold to Joseph E. Meyer in 1929, with a small parcel deeded back for the memorial site; Meyer, founder of Indiana Herb Gardens, later Indiana Botanic Gardens, built his estate Indian Hill there beginning in 1933, and the property later became Meyer's Castle.