Yellow brick road
The actual road is believed to be one in Peekskill, New York, where L. Frank Baum attended Peekskill Military Academy. According to a local legend, the Yellow Brick Road was derived from a road paved with yellow bricks near Holland, Michigan, where Baum spent summers. Ithaca, New York, also makes a claim for being Frank Baum's inspiration. He opened a road tour of his musical, The Maid of Arran, in Ithaca, and he met his future wife Maud Gage Baum while she was attending Cornell University. At the time, yellow bricks paved local roads. Yellow brick roads can also be found in Aberdeen, South Dakota; Albany, New York; Rossville (Baltimore County), Maryland; Montclair, New Jersey (Parkhurst Place and Afterglow Way); Bronxville, New York (on Prescott and Valley roads); Chicago, Illinois; Liberal, Kansas; Sedan, Kansas and Chittenango, New York, as well as a school in Abington, Pennsylvania, and abroad in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Yellowstone Trail
The automobile was just becoming popular, but there were few good all weather roads, no useful long distance roads, and no government marked routes. The federal government had not built roads in the 19th century, except for the National Road (aka National Pike) from Washington, D.C. to the Mississippi River. Many states had constitutions that forbade "internal improvements." The Yellowstone Trail developed in parallel with the nationwide effort for internal improvements, which included building and improving roads. Only the Yellowstone Trail, the Lincoln Highway, and the National Old Trails Road were transcontinental in length and notability, out of the 250 named Auto Trails of the era. In the early days of the Yellowstone Trail (generally before the advent of numeric signs and highway designations), the route was identified with yellow bands painted around trees and telephone poles, yellow arrows painted on barns, yellow painted rock piles, and so on.