An Ohio Company Still Builds Its Shiny Travel Trailers by Hand, and Visitors Can Watch Them Come Together Inside the Factory
Every one of those famous silver trailers gets held together with thousands of rivets, many set by hand. People can walk the factory floor and watch it happen.
Read More 7 min read
Nearly 400 Candy Bins Fill This Pennsylvania Shop Inside a Restored 1890 Victorian Building
Nearly 400 candy bins. That's the number waiting inside one small shop in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I can't stop thinking about it.
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More Than 200 Antique Dealers Have Passed Through This Pennsylvania Store, Along With Hollywood Stars
The building holding these antiques dates to the 1850s, and it still has no air conditioning. The owners say a cooling system just isn't possible in a structure that old.
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Since 1950, This Pennsylvania Candy Shop Has Been Making Chocolate by Hand, but Its Future Was Once Uncertain
Five feet of floodwater can destroy a lot, but it cannot destroy a legacy. In Pennsylvania, a candy shop has been making chocolate by hand since 1950.
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A Georgia Engineer Turned Down a New York Job and Opened a Frozen Custard Shop Instead
Vanilla custard, thick and cool, stopped a conversation mid-sentence and left a grin that lasted all afternoon. Georgia has a frozen custard shop that began with a choice.
Read More 6 min read
Six Abandoned Ohio Factory Buildings That Once Supplied Two World Wars Have Been Turned Into a New Community
Brick walls rise through the trees along a river in Ohio, their tall windows and faded masonry looking like a page torn from a history book. This place once made millions of bullets...
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A Georgia Museum Claims to Have Elvis Presley’s Actual Wart Among 30,000 Pieces of Memorabilia
A tiny wart in a jar on red velvet is not what most people expect to find in a Georgia boarding house. An old 1908 home in the hills of northeast Georgia holds one of the wildest...
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An Ohio Cafe Has Been Collecting Hot Dog Buns Signed by Celebrities, Including a U.S. President, for Over 50 Years
Signed hot dog buns line the walls behind glass, each one scrawled with a famous name. This Ohio restaurant has been collecting them for over fifty years, ever since a simple mistake...
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This Pennsylvania Candy Store Has a 400-Pound Chocolate Turtle and an Entire Kingdom Made of Chocolate
A warm, rich cloud of chocolate wraps around you before the counter even comes into view. Rumors of a giant chocolate turtle had floated around for years, but the imagination pictured...
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An Ohio Makeup Artist Took Over an Old Church and Filled It With More Than 200 Rescued Statues
Saints watch from every corner of an old Ohio church, their eyes following you down the aisle. The building once served as a neighborhood parish, and today it holds more than 200...
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13,000 Clocks and Watches Fill This Pennsylvania Museum, Including One With Marching Soldiers
Soft ticking drifts out of the galleries like friendly whispers, a chorus of clocks marking time in a small Pennsylvania river town. The largest collection of clocks and watches...
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Behind a California Gift Shop, 145 Steps Lead Down to a Secret Sea Cave Carved Into the Cliffs
Seashells and postcards fill a cheerful shop near the coast, the kind of place you wander into for a magnet and leave. Then a small wooden door near the back catches the eye, and...
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California Turned a Concrete Ship Into a Floating Nightclub With a Ballroom and Swimming Pool
Pelicans lining up along a broken deck like they own the place is not what most people expect on a quiet beach walk. Out past the waves sits a gray, cracked hull made of concrete,...
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Workers Renovating a Georgia Building Dug Into Its Basement and Found Nearly 10,000 Human Bones
Tall white columns on a quiet Georgia street look calm, proud, and almost too pretty to hold a dark secret. That is the first impression of this building, and it is a lie.
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A North Carolina Designer Built a 22-Room House With Ceilings From 5½ to 25 Feet High
Ducking your head to enter a room built for kids while a ceiling floats twenty-five feet above you is not something you forget. This is exactly what happens inside a North Carolina...
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Eight Members of a North Carolina Family Were Embalmed Upstairs in This Building, Now It’s a Store and Museum
Candy jars and a good sandwich were the expectation when I walked into a small-town store. What I found was a brick building constructed in 1908 with a story that followed me home.
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A 27-Ton William Penn Has Stood 500 Feet Above A Pennsylvania City for More Than a Century
Tilting your head back on a busy sidewalk and spotting a giant bronze figure in a wide hat is not an everyday occurrence. He stands way up there, keeping watch over the whole city,...
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Two Giant Furnaces Are Nearly All That Remain of a Pennsylvania Steel Mill That Once Stretched for Miles
Rusty blast furnaces rising over a river in Pennsylvania are not something you see every day. Two giants, each about 92 feet tall, stand there like they are still waiting for the...
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A North Carolina Girl Who Passed Away at Sea Was Brought Home for Burial Inside a Barrel
Legend holds that a little girl in a barrel rests in a North Carolina cemetery, wrapped in live oaks that whisper whenever the sea breeze slips through. Her story mixes love, promise,...
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A 60-Foot Stone Tower Has Stood on a California Beach Since 1926, Complete With a Secret Staircase to the House Above
Salt air, crashing waves, and a stone castle rising straight out of the rocks. This California shoreline hides a tower that looks like it wandered off a storybook page and decided...
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Millions of WWII Soldiers Passed Through This Tiny Ohio Railroad Town, Where Volunteers Fed Them Around the Clock
Warm coffee and a cookie were the greeting at a small Ohio depot, and the gesture meant more than I understood at the time. Driving into this quiet village, a simple train museum...
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Hundreds of Freedom Seekers Looked for a Light on This Ohio Hill Before Crossing Toward Safety
Stopping mid-sentence is not the usual reaction to a view, but looking down from this Ohio hill will do that. The river curves far below, and the green hills of Kentucky roll away...
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This California Restaurant Serves Pink Champagne Cake Inside a Dining Room Where Almost Everything Is Pink
Pink lamp posts glowing against green hills are enough to make anyone laugh out loud in the car. Even the trash cans are pink, and somehow that makes you love the place before...
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North Carolina’s Outer Banks Became Known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” After Thousands of Shipwrecks
Thousands of ships rest on the ocean floor off this North Carolina coast, their stories buried in sand and saltwater until a small museum decided to pull them back into the light....
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Thousands of Bicycles Fill This Pennsylvania Warehouse, Including Rare Models Most People Have Never Seen
Bicycles hanging from ceilings, leaning in rows, and climbing walls in colors most people did not know bikes came in fill a plain industrial building in Pennsylvania. A bright...
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An Ohio Writer Woke to Footsteps on the Stairs Before a Ghostly Figure Walked Straight Through His Bedroom Wall
Footsteps pacing around a dining room table, then racing up the stairs toward a young writer, are the story that made this Ohio house famous. James Thurber heard them one November...
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This Georgia Landmark Took 1.3 Million Volunteer Hours to Build, Yet the Entire Project Was Finished in Just 17 Months
White stone spires rising above the trees on a Georgia road make you question whether you took a wrong turn. Barefoot on cool marble a few minutes later, staring up at ceilings...
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This Ohio Museum Preserves the Road That Carried America West Before the Interstates
Three stories share a single roof in a small Ohio museum, and each one pulls you in like a kid at an aquarium. The 136-foot diorama stretches across a room, capturing every mile...
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A California Ghost Town Has a House Built From More Than 50,000 Glass Bottles That Refused to Disappear
California does abandoned places particularly well, but this desert stop has one survivor that looks almost too playful for a ghost town. Ruined walls and empty foundations stretch...
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The First Man to Walk on the Moon Grew Up in This Tiny Ohio Town, Where His Spacesuit Came Home Too
White domes in grassy fields look like they landed rather than were built, and that was enough to pull off the highway after years of driving past. Inside waits the story of a...
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A South Carolina Submarine Disappeared in 1864, Then Was Raised From the Ocean Floor 136 Years Later
Real Civil War submarines are not supposed to float in tanks of treated water, yet one does, still being cleaned inch by inch by scientists who have been at it for years. The tank...
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This North Carolina Lunch Counter Opened in 1923, and Its Pork Chop Sandwich Became Part of Mayberry History
Pork chop sandwiches have been sliding across a North Carolina lunch counter since 1923, long before anyone thought to call the place a landmark. Tourists photograph the sign,...
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America’s First Pumped Public Water System Was Built in Pennsylvania in 1762 With Wooden Pipes
Water runs steady and cold under a stone bridge, even on a warm afternoon. Ten acres of mills, ruins, and shaded footpaths sit just below a main street in Pennsylvania.
Read More 5 min read
Ancient Figures Cover an Ohio Sandstone Cliff, but Nobody Knows Exactly Who Carved Them
I found this place almost by accident, driving past soybean fields and barns in Jackson County until the road narrowed and the GPS stopped sounding confident.
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An 1801 South Carolina Brick Factory Closed in 1960, Yet Its Kiln Tunnels Are Still There
Four brick domes in South Carolina are easy to drive past without a second glance. I did not expect to spend an entire afternoon staring at them, but that is exactly what happened.
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This Pennsylvania Diner Has Been Feeding Railroad Country Since 1933, and Locals Still Pack the Counter
Modest at first glance, a corner building in a Pennsylvania railroad town draws a line of people that tells you everything before you even see the menu. Since the 1930s, this diner...
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An Ohio Village Preserves a Whole Collection of Buildings That Nearly Disappeared With Their Communities
Sixteen buildings sit along quiet gravel paths under the trees, and most of them were not born here at all. They were lifted, hauled, and rebuilt piece by piece because the alternative...
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Pennsylvania Drained and Buried an Entire Inland Port After the Railroad Made It Obsolete
A playground shaped like a canal boat sits on top of a vanished harbor, and a creek murmurs along the edge. Two hundred years...
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This California Man Spent 38 Years Digging a Half-Mile Tunnel Straight Through a Mountain
Hand-dug tunnels through solid granite sound like tall tales, but this one is real. I had heard about a man who spent nearly four decades chipping away at a mountain, and I assumed...
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This Ohio Inn Has Been Feeding Travelers Since the 1800s, and Its Dining Rooms Still Look Like an Early American Tavern
The building looked like it had missed two centuries of change, sitting there among cornfields as if time had simply skipped it. I had turned off a quiet country road in Ohio,...
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An Abandoned Pennsylvania Village Still Sits Beside the Canal That Once Kept It Alive
That cluster of stone and clapboard houses sat quietly off a country road in Pennsylvania, and I pulled into the parking lot expecting a quick stretch of the legs. I got a whole...
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This Georgia Restaurant Started With No Stove, So Hot Meals Had to Arrive by Taxi
Fried chicken and a taxi story, that is what I came for and what I left with from that Georgia spot. Back in 1947, two brothers opened a tiny 30-seat restaurant with no stove and...
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A North Carolina Port Was Burned in 1776 and Never Rebuilt, Then a Civil War Fort Rose on Top of Its Ruins
Down a quiet North Carolina road, past a pond where an alligator suns itself like it owns the place, sits one of the strangest layered spots I have visited. I almost drove past...
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A 25-Foot Statue of Liberty Stands in the Middle of a Pennsylvania River, and the Original Blew Away
Mist still sat low over the wide Susquehanna when I drove north out of Harrisburg, and I honestly had no idea what I was about to see. Somewhere in that stretch of water called...
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Ohio’s First Christian Settlement Lasted Just Five Years Before Its Residents Abandoned It
A field of log cabins in eastern Ohio stuck with me for weeks after I first walked through it, and I did not expect that to happen. The village sits just off the highway, and the...
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A South Carolina Canal Built to Bypass River Rapids Still Cuts Through the Woods Two Centuries Later
Warm South Carolina air came through the open windows as the road narrowed and pine and hardwood closed in on both sides, and a small brown sign pointed me toward a state park....
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Dinner Is Served Inside an Ohio Jail That Locked Up Prisoners for More Than a Century
That building in Ohio went up in 1865 as a county jail, and it held prisoners for well over a hundred years before the sheriff finally moved out in the 1970s. I pulled into town...
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A South Carolina Church Was Abandoned More Than 150 Years Ago, but Its Stone Walls Never Left
Fieldstone walls rose behind a low wall of trees, looking as stubborn as they must have looked two centuries ago, and I pulled off a busy South Carolina road expecting a quick...
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Skip the Famous Smorgasbords for These 10 Lesser-Known Pennsylvania Buffets
Pennsylvania Dutch cooking makes a lot more sense when you can see the fields it came from, and I have learned that on drives through the back roads and quiet farm valleys of this...
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America’s First Gold Rush Started With a 17-Pound Rock Found in North Carolina
Cold creek water ran over my sneakers while I stood near the spot where a 12-year-old boy pulled a 17?pound yellow rock out of the water in 1799, a rock his family used as a doorstop...
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Fried Green Tomatoes Put This Tiny Georgia Restaurant on the Movie Map
The screen door swung open and the smell of hot oil and cornmeal drifted out onto a Georgia porch where people were already rocking in their chairs waiting their turn.
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A California Dinner Show Puts Sword Fights, Pirates, and Cannon Fire on the Menu
That galleon looked impossible, a full-sized 18th-century Spanish ship sitting in an indoor lagoon with masts stretching toward the ceiling like something out of a storybook.
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An Arizona Dinner Spot Pairs Steaks With a Secret Room Hidden Behind a Bookcase
Hidden behind a bookcase, the room I assumed was an exaggeration turned out to be the least surprising part of the evening. Dramatic art, moody lighting, and a menu that makes...
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This Pennsylvania Restaurant Lets You Eat Dinner High Among the Trees
The soft hollow knock of my shoes on the wooden walkway was the first thing I remember, that sound as the forest closed in around me. I had driven out to a quiet Pennsylvania road...
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The Louisiana Roadside Museum Built Inside a Creole Cottage with a Giant Bass
A vintage gas station frozen in time, a fish the size of a pickup truck with the head of an alligator, and a cat that greets you at the gate. That is what I found when I drove...
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This California Museum Is a Collection of Weird, Wonderful, and Completely Unexplained Objects
That museum behind a plain storefront in California hums with crickets, glows in low amber light, and asks you to lean in close to things you cannot quite explain. I drove past...
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This Ohio Museum Holds One of the Largest Collections of Native American Artifacts
That echo in the limestone rotunda stopped me the moment I stepped inside, voices drifting up and getting lost somewhere near the mosaics. I had pulled up to a massive half-circle...
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This Georgia Attraction Is a Giant Folk-Art Environment Built by One Man from Bottles and Concrete
Orange, turquoise, and gold appeared through the Georgia pines, painted with faces and swirling circles that seemed to hum in the afternoon heat.
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10 Classic North Carolina Steakhouses That Locals Can’t Get Enough Of
That smell of sizzling beef and the hum of a room full of people who know exactly what they came for is what I keep finding in North Carolina. The state gets a lot of credit for...
Read More 8 min read
