Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Real events too strange to have made the textbook.
Gloucester, MA
The woods above Gloucester contain cellar holes from an abandoned colonial settlement known as Dogtown. Decades after the village vanished, millionaire Roger Babson had dozens of huge boulders carved with commands and maxims such as 'USE YOUR HEAD' and 'GET A JOB,' creating one of New England's strangest hiking trails.
Sevierville, TN
A bronze Dolly Parton sits with a guitar outside the Sevier County Courthouse in her hometown. The unusually approachable monument has become a pilgrimage point connecting one of Tennessee's most famous performers directly to the place where her story began.
Ketchikan, AK
This preserved Creek Street house interprets the life and workplace of Dolly Arthur, one of Ketchikan's best-known madams. Its small rooms and period furnishings make the city's former red-light district unusually tangible.
Silver City, NV
This preserved stamp mill documents the transition from early ore processing to cyanide technology; the Comstock Foundation offers scheduled tours rather than unrestricted entry.
Stony Point, NY
Doodletown was a small Hudson Highlands settlement whose remaining residents left in the 1960s after the Palisades Interstate Park Commission acquired the property. House foundations, roads, cemeteries and interpretive signs remain in the woods, reached only by hiking trails inside Bear Mountain State Park.
Hillsborough Township, NJ
Heiress Doris Duke buried a number of beloved dogs and other animals on her vast Duke Farms estate. Their individual markers form an unusual private-animal cemetery that can be reached only according to Duke Farms' public access rules and trail hours.
Ely, MN
Dorothy Molter became known as the 'Root Beer Lady' while living alone for decades in what became the Boundary Waters wilderness. Her relocated cabins and artifacts preserve the story of an unusually independent life that ended only after wilderness rules made her the final resident of the area.
Falls City, NE
This marker interprets the role of the Dorrington family and Falls City area in antislavery activity and Underground Railroad history before the Civil War. It provides a public, routeable location for a history that often depended on private homes and secret movement.
Park County, WY
Remote ranch remains are tied to Amelia Earhart, who planned a cabin in the Kirwin country before her 1937 disappearance.
Bismarck, ND
Large depressions, defensive ditches and refuse mounds mark a major Mandan village above the Missouri River. The abandoned village remains are unusually readable from the ground and reveal centuries of changing settlement size and fortification.
Presque Isle, ME
A small park commemorates the field where Double Eagle II launched in 1978 before completing the first successful transatlantic balloon crossing. Displays and a balloon replica mark the beginning of a flight that ended thousands of miles away in France.
Harlan, IN
Archillous "Archie" Arnold's grave in Scipio Cemetery is flanked by two old parking meters, both permanently reading "Expired." The intentionally comic memorial turns an ordinary rural cemetery visit into one of Indiana's stranger examples of personalized grave art.
Berkeley Township, NJ
A former Pine Barrens company town survives inside Double Trouble State Park, where cranberry agriculture and Atlantic white-cedar logging once supported a small industrial community. Historic houses, a sawmill and other village structures remain along public trails.
Norfolk, VA
Doumar's still uses the original-style four-iron waffle machine associated with founder Abe Doumar, who helped popularize the rolled waffle ice-cream cone at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The century-old drive-in remains in business, and visitors can often watch cones being made on the historic machine while ordering from the restaurant.
Edgefield, SC
The grave of Dr. William DeVore is associated with an unusual above-ground structure traditionally described as having a trapdoor or access hatch. Local stories offer competing explanations for the grave’s peculiar construction, helping turn a single burial into a longstanding Edgefield curiosity.
Columbus, GA
The inventor of Coca-Cola, pharmacist John Stith Pemberton, is buried in Columbus's historic Linwood Cemetery. His grave creates a quiet counterpoint to one of the world's most recognizable brands and is specifically noted by the city among the cemetery's notable burials.
Waldorf, MD
Dr. Samuel Mudd treated John Wilkes Booth's broken leg here after Lincoln's assassination, helping make the farmhouse one of the most notorious stops on Booth's escape route. The privately owned historic property operates as a seasonal museum on selected days rather than daily.
Walthill, NE
Built as a hospital by Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, widely recognized as the first Native American physician in the United States, this restored building carries major Omaha Tribe and medical-history significance. Current programming and interior access should be checked before arrival.
Titusville, PA
Edwin Drake's successful 1859 oil well at this site helped launch the modern petroleum industry. The museum preserves a replica well house, operating historic oil-field equipment and exhibits explaining the chaotic oil boom that transformed northwestern Pennsylvania.
Las Cruces, NM
Ruins of the Van Patten Mountain Camp and later sanatorium sit below the Organ Mountains beside a spring-fed canyon. The blend of resort remains, health-history ruins and dramatic geology makes this one of southern New Mexico's strongest OddWay hikes.
Key West, FL
Remote islands, shipwreck history, legends of treasure, and the giant Fort Jefferson.
Macon, GA
Allman Brothers Band members Duane Allman and Berry Oakley are buried near one another in Rose Hill Cemetery, a place closely tied to the band's early Macon history. The graves remain major pilgrimage points; visitors should treat the surrounding active cemetery respectfully.
Dubuque, IA
The Egyptian Revival former county jail is one of Dubuque's most unusual nineteenth-century civic buildings, with heavy stone walls and fortress-like details. Interior access is not reliably public, so OddWay should treat it as an exterior architectural stop unless an authorized event is offered.
Dubuque, IA
Built in 1856, this narrow stone-and-brick tower was used to manufacture lead shot by dropping molten lead from the top so it formed into spheres while falling. The surviving structure is a rare remnant of nineteenth-century industrial technology.
