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By Rickie Longfellow
Linking Mark Twain's hometown of Hannibal to the smaller cities of Louisiana, Missouri's Highway 79 runs parallel to the mighty Mississippi River. All three communities were once riverboat boomtowns; their Italianate and Victorian architecture a...
By Rickie Longfellow
More than 155 years ago one of the worst tragedies in American travel occurred during the westward migration. The 1840s wagon train journey to California usually began at Independence, Missouri, around the first of May. Taken into consideration were...
By Rickie Longfellow
The bloodiest battle of the Civil War took place on September 17, 1862, on Antietam Creek near the small town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Four hours of intense fighting took place on an old sunken road that separated two farms. A staggering 23,100 men...
By Steve Hachenberger, Montana resident
In the last Back in Time we told readers about Steve Hachenberger of Montana who bought and donated the original 1936 Number 25 license plates that...
By Rickie Longfellow
Since the beginning of time, creeks, rivers and other bodies of water have flooded their banks for a variety of reasons: steady and/or torrential rains, hurricanes, melting ice and other natural occurrences. Flash floods, caused by breaking dykes and...
By Rickie Longfellow
In 1799, Mississippi Governor Winthrop Sargent signed a bill creating the First Road Act. When Mississippi became the 20th state in the Union on December 10, 1817, the roads were little more than meandering trails for the approximately 70,000 people...
By Rickie Longfellow
The Cumberland Gap, which measures 1,304 feet in altitude, is Nature's passage through the Cumberland Mountains between Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. One of three natural breaks in the rugged Appalachian Mountain range, it served as a gateway in...
By Rickie Longfellow
Highway One follows the Pacific coastline from Baja to the top of the Olympic Peninsula. The most scenic is the 139 miles from Monterey to Morro Bay near San Luis Obispo.
John L.D. Roberts, M.D., from New York founded the town of Seaside in...
By Rickie Longfellow
County Highway S-2 is a desert road in south-central California with a fascinating history. Beginning at California Highway 79 near Warner Springs, the road leads south through the Anza-Borrego Desert in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Known as...
By Rickie Longfellow
The oldest constructed roads discovered to date are in former Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq. These stone paved streets date back to about 4000 B.C. in the Mesopotamia cities of Ur and Babylon. The location in the land of the Sumerian people offered...