"Staying here tonight. A beautiful motel as most of them are and there are so many." So wrote a traveler spending a night at a motel between Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia writing home on the motel's postcard in 1955. U.S. Highway 1, before the arrival of Interstate 95, was considered America's Main Street, the most heavily traveled highway on the east coast, running from the Canadian border in Maine to Key West, Florida. In 2010, Highway 1 was designated an Historic Highway. The stretch of highway between Richmond and Petersburg, long known locally as the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, or...