From the time of his birth in Salem, Connecticut in 1867, Bela Lyon Pratt was surrounded by music and art. The grandson of Oramel Whittlesey, the founder of the first conservatory of music, Pratt’s artistic abilities as a musician and sculptor were discovered by his family at an early age. After graduating from Yale University School of Fine Arts, he enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under many important sculptors including his mentor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Throughout his own fruitful career as a sculptor, he created over 180 works, both in his own studio and during his time as a professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Perhaps some of his most recognizable works are The Genius of Navigation sculptural groups which were created for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892, a series of busts representing Boston’s intellectual community, as well as his Indian Head half and quarter eagle coin designs for the U.S. Mint. Though his untimely death in 1917 at the age of 49 ended his prolific career, his wife, Helen Lugarda Pray Pratt maintained and carefully preserved the photographs, articles, letters, receipts and other documents relating to his creations, most of which are still intact today and maintained through the Bela Lyon Pratt Historical Society, operated by Pratt’s granddaughter, Cynthia Kennedy Sam.

In the early 1900’s, Charles Henry Davis was an instrumental figure in the development of America’s transportation system. Davis was born into a family heavily involved in the road construction industry; his father and grandfather started the American Road Machine Company, of which Davis later inherited and became president. The Davis family also had substantial holdings in the coal fields of Kentucky, through which Charles encountered a young Henry Ford. Knowing that Ford had novel ideas about creating a reasonably priced car for the masses, Charles approached Henry with a proposition: Ford could lease his coal mines with the agreement that Ford would do his own mining, pay a set price per car load of coal, and provide Davis a royalty on each new automobile Ford produced which thus became a large source of Davis’s wealth.

Being heavily vested in all things automotive related, it made sense that in 1911, Davis would found the National Highways Association with the slogan "Good Roads Everywhere". One of the Association’s first initiatives was the publication of a map of which would propose a 50,000 mile National Highway network to be "built, owned, and maintained by the National Government." In 1912, as part of this campaign, Davis commissioned four promotional bronze works to be created by New England sculptor Bela Lyon Pratt, including the National Highways Association Crest, a National Highways Association Eagle Radiator Cap, the American Road Congress Logo, as well as the offered lot, the National Highways Association Map. According to Pratt’s Granddaughter Director of the Bela Pratt Historical Society, because Pratt often made only one or very few castings of his works, the offered lot is very likely the very same plaque which was acquired by Charles H. Davis, and probably the only one cast, the original receipt of which is housed in Pratt Historical Society archives and are accessible online.

Perhaps because the scope of his ideas were so vast, Charles H. Davis had immense difficulty finding support for their execution, and it has been said that his ideas were simply too "ahead of his time." Davis devoted the rest of his life to publicizing his concepts through speaking engagements, sending maps and pamphlets to government officials, funding highway engineering graduate programs, and publishing articles in various periodicals until his health began to fail prior to his death in 1951. Though the majority of his proposals were never carried out, only five years after his death, the United States did indeed pass the Federal Aid Highway Act which to date has now built just slightly less than 50,000 miles of interstate highways.

For more information regarding the offered lot, please visit the Bela Lyon Pratt Historical Society Website.