The tale of naming Meridian Road begins in the early 1900s, when then-Mayor John C. Nicholson was instrumental in forming Meridian Highway, which started in Galveston, Texas, and zipped all the way to Canada. Nicholson, a member of the Good Roads Association, was a Newton attorney and former mayor. “In January 1910, Logan Waller Page, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Public Roads, was invited to send a representative from his office to Kansas to witness the organization of a new automobile road association,” according to an article called, Two Trails of the Twentieth Century: John C. Nicholson and Newton, Kansas, from Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains. “By 1911, Kansas was engaged in two of the most ambitious efforts in the movement for cross country roads and the city of Newton, energized by one of its remarkable citizens, John Charles Nicholson, was at the crossroads of these early automobile trails.”
Source: Harvey County Now
