Quarter Miles Travel With Annita

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The Adventure begins when you reach into your pocket. Each U.S. Mint Commemorative Quarter design tells a unique story. Each quarter is filled with pride, from hometown heroes to iconic landmarks; wildlife and nature to music and culture. Reach into your pocket and let Quarter Miles Travel take it from there, we’ll turn that quarter into an adventure.

  1. 2d ago

    Episode 56: The Three Fifths Compromise

    The Three Fifths Compromise What it was and who benefited COLD OPEN [SOUND: Quill scratching on parchment. A gavel, once, distant. Silence.] ANNITA (V.O.): In the summer of 1787, in a locked room in Philadelphia, fifty-five men sat down to build a government. And for weeks, in that room, they talked about hundreds of thousands of human beings — argued about them, bargained over them, measured them, weighed their worth against tax revenue and political power — and not one of those human beings was ever asked what they thought. Not one of them was in the room. Not one of them had a vote, a voice, or a name that made it into the record. They were husbands and wives. Mothers who had already buried children sold away from them. Grandfathers who remembered a homeland none of these delegates could have pointed to on a map. Blacksmiths, healers, midwives, farmers, cooks — entire lives, entire families, entire histories, reduced in that room to a single question: how much of a person should the law say they were. The men in that room decided on three-fifths. Not because they believed it. Because it was useful. [SOUND: Silence holds, then fades.] This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. On this show, I always tell you — we say their names, and we tell their stories. But today, that promise is harder to keep than it’s ever been. Because the truth is, we don’t have most of their names. History didn’t record them. The Constitution didn’t ask for them. An entire population was debated, decided, and written into law — without a single one of them ever being permitted to speak for themselves in that room. So today, we’re not just telling you what happened in Philadelphia in 1787. We’re standing in for the hundreds of thousands of voices that should have been in that room and weren’t — and we’re telling their story anyway, exactly as fully and as honestly as we can, because somebody finally should. SEGMENT ONE: The Number That Came Before [SOUND: Soft, sparse instrumental bed, low — something unresolved, not comforting] ANNITA (V.O.): This story doesn’t start in Philadelphia in 1787. It starts four years earlier, in 1783, in a much quieter argument about money. Under the Articles of Confederation, the fledgling national government had almost no way to fund itself. It could only ask the states for money — “requisitions” — based on the value of land within each state, a system nobody could measure fairly or enforce honestly. So Congress considered a fix: base each state’s tax burden on population instead. And here, for the first time, the question arrived — a question this country would spend the next seventy-eight years failing to answer honestly. If a state’s population determined what it owed, did enslaved people count as part of that population? James Madison, then a young Virginia delegate to the Confederation Congress, proposed a number: three-fifths. It wasn’t drawn from any principle about human worth. It was, by most accounts, simply a number that split the difference between two sides who couldn’t agree on anything else. That 1783 proposal came up for a vote as an amendment to the Articles — and it failed, falling two states short of the unanimous approval required. But a number, once spoken aloud in a room full of powerful men, doesn’t simply disappear. It waits. SEGMENT TWO: The Room Reopens the Question ANNITA (V.O.): Four years later, delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia, in the same stifling summer heat we’ve talked about before on this show, to write an entirely new Constitution. And on June 11th, 1787, the three-fifths number walked back into the room. It was delegate James Wilson of Pennsylvania who formally reintroduced it — proposing that enslaved people be counted at a three-fifths ratio as an amendment to the Virginia Plan, the framework then being debated for how the new government would be structured. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina seconded it. Here’s something worth sitting with: Wilson wasn’t a slaveholder, and by most historical accounts, he wasn’t ideologically committed to protecting slavery. He appears to have simply reached for a number that had almost worked once before — a number he calculated might actually get enough votes to hold this fragile convention together. Practicality, not principle, put that fraction back on the table. And once it was on the table, the room split — but not in the way you might expect. SEGMENT THREE: The Argument Nobody Wants to Admit They Made [SOUND: Music drops low, more tense] ANNITA (V.O.): Here is the detail that should stop you cold, and it’s the one most people never learn: the two sides of this debate did not argue from principle. They argued from advantage — and they switched sides entirely, depending on what was being counted. When it came to representation — how many seats a state got in Congress, how many electoral votes it held — southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted as full persons. Every enslaved person counted meant more political power for the state that held them in bondage. Northern delegates objected. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts asked the room a question that exposed the entire moral rot of the argument in a single sentence: why should “the blacks, who were property in the South, be in the rule of representation more than the cattle & horses of the North?” Notice what that question does. Gerry is arguing against the compromise — and even in his objection, he reaches for cattle and horses as his comparison. This was not, on either side of the room, a debate about the humanity of enslaved people. It was a debate about property, dressed in the language of political philosophy. But then came taxation — and the exact same men flipped their positions entirely. When it came to how much a state would owe in federal taxes, southern delegates suddenly wanted enslaved people counted as little as possible, to keep their tax burden low. Northern delegates now wanted them counted fully, to raise it. Let that sink in. The very same enslaved human being was, in the same room, in the same week, argued to be a full person when it helped the North, a full person when it helped the South, and no person at all when it helped either side avoid a cost. The only consistent principle in the entire debate was self-interest. South Carolina’s John Rutledge said the quiet part aloud, telling the convention plainly: “Religion & Humanity had nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with Nations.” His fellow South Carolinian, Charles Pinckney, went further, declaring that his state would never accept Congress “meddling with the importation of negroes” — a warning that slavery, and the ongoing trade in human beings, was not up for negotiation at all. And some southern delegates made an even starker threat. They stated outright that they would “never confederate” — that they would walk out, refuse to join this new nation entirely — unless enslaved people were counted at a ratio of at least three-fifths. The compromise, in other words, wasn’t reached through persuasion. It was reached through the threat of national collapse. One voice in that room said something closer to the truth than almost anyone else. Gouverneur Morris of New York called slavery a “nefarious institution… the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” He attacked the compromise directly, for rewarding the act of enslaving people with more political power — the more a state enslaved, the more it would be represented in the very government built on the promise of liberty. SEGMENT FOUR: The Compromise, Written Into Law ANNITA (V.O.): In the end, the room settled on the same fraction it had nearly settled on four years earlier. Article One, Section Two, Clause Three of the United States Constitution: representation and taxation would be determined “by adding to the whole Number of free Persons… three fifths of all other Persons.” They didn’t even use the word “slave.” The Constitution never does — not once, anywhere in its original text. The framers wrote around it deliberately, using euphemism to avoid stating plainly what they had just built into the nation’s founding law. Three-fifths of all other persons. A whole system of human bondage, folded into a single evasive phrase. And it worked — not morally, but mechanically. It held the convention together. It got the South to sign on to a union it might otherwise have refused. And it embedded, permanently, into the mathematics of American democracy, the idea that enslaved human beings were worth counting, but not worth freeing. [SOUND: Music softens into something heavier, more solemn] SEGMENT FIVE: What It Built — The Presidency and the Power ANNITA (V.O.): The effect was not abstract. It was immediate, measurable, and it shaped the government for generations. Because House seats — and therefore Electoral College votes, since electoral votes are based on congressional representation — were calculated using three-fifths of the enslaved population, southern states received significantly more political power than their actual voting population ever justified. Not one enslaved person could cast a ballot. And yet their existence, counted at sixty percent value, inflated the power of the very people who held them in chains. The numbers tell the story bluntly. After the 1790 census, enslaved people made up roughly 39 percent of Virginia’s population, 43 percent of South Carolina’s. Constitutional scholar Akhil Amar has pointed out that after the 1800 census, Pennsylvania’s free population was actually ten percent larger than Virginia’s — and yet Virginia received twenty percent more electoral votes. Pennsylvania’s power came from free citizens who could vote. Virginia’s came, in significant pa

  2. Sep 5

    Destination: The History of America’s Labor Force

    The History of America’s Labor Force “The Price of a Day’s Work: Labor, Jobs, and the Fight for Fairness in America” *Photos at the bottom SEGMENT ONE — approx. 9:00  The History of America’s Labor Force and How Labor Day Became a Holiday [SOUND: Show theme, warm, fades under welcome] ANNITA: I’m Annita with Travel With Annita, and this weekend, most of us will fire up a grill, maybe hit one last beach trip, and enjoy a day off work. Let’s talk about The History of America’s Labor Force. But Labor Day didn’t start as a cookout holiday. It started as a protest — and understanding how it became a national holiday tells you almost everything about how hard-fought every single workplace protection in this country has been. The story actually has two men fighting for credit, and historians still argue about which one truly deserves it. Peter J. McGuire has long been called the “Father of Labor Day” — his gravestone in Pennsauken, New Jersey, is inscribed with those very words, and every year, labor leaders still gather there to honor him. McGuire’s own story is worth knowing: he was the child of Irish immigrants, and he quit school at a young age to go to work himself, long before he ever became a labor leader. He co-founded the United Brotherhood of Carpenters in 1881, and helped lead the movement that eventually became the American Federation of Labor. The AFL-CIO itself has said that McGuire “probably did more than anyone else” to convince skeptical, locally-minded union activists around the country that a national labor federation wasn’t just necessary, but actually possible. But there’s another man in this story — Matthew Maguire, a machinist who served as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York, and many historians now believe he actually proposed the idea first. It was Maguire who sent out the announcements and invitations for that first Labor Day gathering, and Maguire who rode in the lead carriage of the parade itself. For decades, credit for founding Labor Day actually went to Maguire — it wasn’t until 1924, forty years after the fact, that the credit was formally shifted over to McGuire instead, and the debate over who truly deserves the title has never fully settled. That first parade happened on September 5th, 1882, in New York City. Somewhere between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand workers marched that day, sponsored by an organization called the Knights of Labor — one of the largest and most influential labor organizations of the era, open to nearly all workers regardless of skill, trade, race, or gender, at a time when that kind of inclusiveness in a labor union was genuinely radical. There was no deep historical significance to that particular date, by the way — McGuire simply said it fell about halfway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, giving working families a break during that long stretch of the calendar with no holiday at all. It took twelve more years, and something far more tragic, to turn that one parade into a national holiday. In the summer of 1894, the Pullman railroad strike erupted — and we’re going to come back to Pullman a little later in the show, because that story matters more than you might think. That strike turned violent, and federal troops were sent in to break it up. Workers died in the clashes. Congress and President Grover Cleveland, looking to make peace with an angry and grieving labor movement, rushed a bill through just days after the strike ended, and Cleveland signed Labor Day into law as a national holiday on June 28th, 1894. Here’s a detail that doesn’t often make it into the story: Cleveland specifically chose to elevate Labor Day, held safely in September, rather than embrace May Day, the international workers’ holiday already celebrated in many countries. May Day carried socialist and radical associations in the public mind at the time, tied to earlier labor unrest, and Cleveland wanted nothing to do with that reputation. So America ended up with its own separate labor holiday, deliberately distanced from the more radical politics of the labor movements happening elsewhere in the world. So the very holiday we use to close out summer was born, in part, out of federal troops firing on American workers, and a president trying to calm public anger without embracing the more radical wing of the movement that made the holiday necessary in the first place. When we come back, I want to take you somewhere this history rarely goes — because you cannot talk honestly about American labor without talking about Black workers, both enslaved and free. [SOUND: Music bridge] SEGMENT TWO — approx. 9:35 From Bondage to the Fields — Sharecropping and the Migrant Workers of Florida ANNITA: Welcome back to Travel With Annita. I want to be honest with you. For the first two hundred fifty years of this nation’s story, Black labor wasn’t paid at all — it was stolen. When emancipation finally came in 1865, the promise was freedom. What actually followed, for millions, was a different kind of chain, dressed up to look like opportunity. It’s called sharecropping. Formerly enslaved people, with no land and no money, needed to survive. White landowners — sometimes the very people who had enslaved them — needed labor but had no cash to pay wages. So a system formed: a family would work a parcel of land, and in exchange, they’d owe the landowner a share of whatever they grew, often as much as half the harvest. On paper, that sounds almost like a fair trade. In practice, it was a trap, and here’s exactly how the trap worked. Sharecropping families had no money for seed, tools, food, or clothing until harvest time — so they had to borrow against a crop they hadn’t grown yet, usually from a store owned by the very same landlord, at interest rates that could run fifty percent or higher. This is called the crop-lien system, and it functioned like a plantation commissary designed to keep a family owing more than they could ever hope to repay. By the time harvest came and the books were “settled up,” most sharecropping families ended the year owing money, not earning it — trapped for another season, then another, then another, sometimes for generations. In Georgia alone, by 1910, over fifty percent of Black farmers were sharecroppers or wage laborers, while more than forty percent of white farmers owned their own land outright. Across the entire South, by 1880, nearly eighty percent of Black farmers were sharecroppers or tenants, not landowners. And when Black families tried to organize together — to demand fairer terms, the same way industrial workers up north were organizing into unions — the response was often violent. In Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919. In Camp Hill, Alabama, in 1931. In Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1935. Black sharecroppers who tried to unionize were attacked, and in some cases killed, simply for asking to be paid fairly for their own labor. Historians today describe this system for exactly what it was: freedom in name, but economic bondage in practice — the plantation, rebuilt with paperwork and interest rates instead of chains. Now let’s bring this closer to home, because Florida has its own chapter of this story, and it deserves to be told just as clearly. Starting in the late 1800s, and picking up heavily in the early 1900s, thousands of Black Bahamians began migrating to South Florida — drawn by the construction of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad, the rapid growth of Miami, and agricultural work in citrus groves and the pineapple industry, which the Bahamas themselves had once depended on before disease and hard winters collapsed it. Between 1900 and 1920 alone, somewhere between ten and twelve thousand Bahamians made that crossing — many settling in communities like Coconut Grove, which still carries that island heritage today, in its food, its churches, and its culture. Bahamian men cleared roads and built homes and hotels; Bahamian women staffed the hotels rising up along Florida’s booming coastline. And alongside them worked Black Americans who’d migrated down from Georgia, Mississippi, and across the South — many of them refugees from the very sharecropping system we just described, following the crops from state to state: peaches in South Carolina, cabbage in North Carolina, tomatoes and strawberries right here in Florida. There’s a literary connection here worth knowing, too. The great Florida-born author Zora Neale Hurston wrote about exactly this world of Black migrant farmworkers in the Everglades muck, laboring around towns like Belle Glade — culminating, in her most famous novel, in the catastrophic 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, which killed thousands, a large share of them Black migrant agricultural workers whose deaths were undercounted and under-mourned for decades afterward. Hurston didn’t invent that world. She documented it. And then there’s Florida’s sugarcane industry — this piece of the story isn’t ancient history at all. From 1941 all the way into the mid-1990s, virtually every stalk of sugarcane grown in Florida was cut entirely by hand, by workers brought in mostly from Jamaica under a federal guest worker program. Cutting cane by hand, in Florida heat, with machetes, hour after hour, is some of the most physically brutal agricultural labor in this country’s history. Workers were housed in company camps around towns like Belle Glade, paid low wages, and had little real power to push back against unsafe conditions — the same basic pattern of debt and dependency that shaped sharecropping generations earlier, simply relocated to a new crop, a new labor force, a new era. This history isn’t finished, either. Today, in places like Immokalee, Florida, Haitian and Mexican farmworkers still fight the same fundamental battle — fair wages, humane housing, and freedom from

  3. Sep 4

    Destination: America A Young Nation – The War Was Won — Now What?

    America A Young Nation – The War Was Won — Now What? I’m Annita with Travel With Annita, and today we’re picking up right where the story usually stops. We all know 1776. We all know Yorktown, 1781, when the war was effectively won. But here’s the question nobody asks enough: what happened the Monday morning after? In September of 1783, the Treaty of Paris made it official. Independence, recognized by the very king who’d refused to grant it. And here’s something that surprises a lot of people — Britain didn’t just recognize a strip of coastline. They ceded territory stretching all the way west to the Mississippi River. Overnight, this brand-new country doubled, tripled in size on paper, and had almost no way to actually govern any of it. Because here’s the thing about winning a revolution — the fighting is, in some ways, the easy part. You know who the enemy is. You know what victory looks like. Building a government from scratch, with thirteen different states that had spent the last several years being fiercely independent of each other, and even more fiercely suspicious of any government trying to tell them what to do? That was a completely different kind of battle. The system already in place at the time was called the Articles of Confederation, adopted back in 1781, even before the war had officially ended. And it was designed to be weak. Deliberately, intentionally weak. Think about what these people had just lived through — years under a king who taxed them without asking, who quartered soldiers in their homes, who dissolved their local governments whenever it suited him. So when it came time to build something new, the instinct was: never again. Never let one government have that much power over us again. So the Articles gave Congress almost nothing to work with. No power to levy taxes — Congress could only ask the states nicely for money, and the states, more often than not, simply didn’t pay. No power to regulate trade between states, which meant New York could tax goods coming in from New Jersey like they were a foreign country. No real national army, no national currency worth trusting, no executive branch at all to actually enforce anything Congress did manage to agree on. Congress was, in a very real sense, a room full of representatives who could debate and recommend, but couldn’t compel anyone to do anything. For a couple of years, the country limped along like this. States printed their own money, which lost value practically as fast as it was printed. Trade between states got tangled in a mess of competing tariffs. Soldiers who had fought the entire war often went unpaid, waiting on promises from a Congress that had no actual money to give them. There’s a reason historians often call this stretch “the critical period” — because in hindsight, it’s genuinely unclear whether this experiment survives. And then, in the fall of 1786, that fragile situation broke wide open — not in some far-off frontier, but in Massachusetts, among ordinary farmers who had, in many cases, fought in the very war that was supposed to have earned them a better life. These were men crushed by debt. The state was demanding taxes paid in hard currency, at a moment when currency of any kind was scarce, and courts across western Massachusetts were foreclosing on farms right and left. So a former Continental Army soldier named Daniel Shays helped lead an armed uprising — farmers marching on courthouses to physically shut them down before they could hear another foreclosure case. At one point, they even attempted to seize the federal armory at Springfield, hoping to arm themselves properly. The rebellion itself didn’t last. Massachusetts militia put it down by early 1787. But the effect on the country’s leadership was seismic. Because think about what this proved: under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had essentially no ability to respond. Massachusetts had to handle this entirely on its own. If ordinary citizens could take up arms against courts and come dangerously close to seizing a federal armory, and the national government simply had no mechanism to help — what happened next time? What happened if it wasn’t put down so easily? Leaders like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had already been warning for years that the Articles were too weak to survive. Shays’ Rebellion turned that warning into urgency. Even George Washington, who had largely retired from public life after the war, wrote with real alarm about what he was seeing, wondering aloud whether the revolution had been fought for nothing if the country couldn’t even govern itself in peace. So a meeting was called. Delegates from the states would gather in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 — officially, just to revise the Articles of Confederation. Just to patch a few things up. That is not remotely what ended up happening. When we come back, I’ll tell you exactly how that room in Philadelphia turned a modest repair job into an entirely new country. [SOUND: Music bridge] SEGMENT TWO — approx. 9:35 Philadelphia and the Deal That Built a Country ANNITA: Welcome back to Travel With Annita. So when we left off, delegates were heading to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, technically just to revise the Articles of Confederation. Fifty-five delegates, representing twelve of the thirteen states — Rhode Island refused to send anyone at all, suspicious from the very start of where this was all heading. They weren’t entirely wrong to be suspicious. Because almost as soon as the convention opened, the delegates quietly abandoned the idea of revising anything. Instead, under the guidance of men like James Madison — who did so much of the intellectual heavy lifting that he’s often called the Father of the Constitution — they began drafting something completely new. An entirely different framework for how this country would govern itself. And immediately, they hit a wall. It’s a wall that, honestly, still shapes American politics today: how do you fairly represent both large states and small states in the same government? Virginia, the most populous state, proposed what’s called the Virginia Plan — representation in Congress based purely on population. Naturally, the larger states loved this. The smaller states, like New Jersey, saw exactly where that led — permanent political dominance by a handful of big states — and countered with the New Jersey Plan, which called for equal representation for every state, regardless of size. For weeks, this genuinely threatened to collapse the entire convention. Neither side would budge, because neither side was wrong to worry about what they stood to lose. What finally broke the deadlock is what we now call the Great Compromise, or sometimes the Connecticut Compromise, since it was Connecticut’s delegates who proposed the fix: a two-chamber Congress. The House of Representatives, apportioned by population — a win for the big states. The Senate, with equal representation, two senators per state regardless of size — a win for the small states. It’s the exact structure Congress still has today, nearly two hundred and forty years later, and it exists because of a fight almost nobody remembers happened. But there was another compromise made in that room, and this one doesn’t get to wear the word “great.” Southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted toward their state’s population — which would give them significantly more seats in the new House of Representatives, and more electoral votes down the line. Northern delegates objected, and not, it must be said, primarily out of moral conviction — mostly out of concern that it would hand the South outsized political power. The compromise they landed on was the Three-Fifths Compromise: each enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation. Sit with that for a moment. Human beings, counted as three-fifths of a person — not because anyone believed that was a scientific or moral truth, but because it was a number two sides could agree on to settle a political fight. And those same human beings, whose bodies were being used to inflate a state’s political power, had no rights, no vote, no voice in any of it whatsoever. This is the piece of our founding story that doesn’t get talked about enough on the average history tour, and I think it deserves to be said plainly: the contradiction between “all men are created equal” and a Constitution that quantified human beings for political convenience wasn’t an oversight. It was a choice, made deliberately, by delegates who understood exactly what they were doing and chose political expediency over the principle their own revolution had just been fought to defend. That contradiction didn’t get resolved in Philadelphia in 1787. It got postponed. And the bill for that postponement came due less than eighty years later, in a Civil War that very nearly tore this country apart for good. By September of 1787, after months of debate, compromise, and genuine crisis, the delegates finished their draft. What emerged from that room is still, to this day, the oldest written national constitution in continuous use anywhere in the world. But writing it was only half the battle. Now it had to be approved — by the very states whose delegates had just spent months arguing about it. And that fight was its own kind of drama. When we come back, I’ll tell you about the promise that finally got it across the finish line, and about the man who turned out to be surprisingly good at building a government nobody had ever seen before. [SOUND: Music bridge] SEGMENT THREE — approx. 9:35 The Bill of Rights and the First President ANNITA: Travel With Annita, glad to have you back with me. So the Constitution was written. Now it needed ratification — appr

  4. Aug 25

    Following Togo’s Trail: A Travel Guide to the 1925 Serum Run

    Following Togo’s Trail: A Travel Guide to the 1925 Serum Run Nome, the Diphtheria Outbreak, the Iditarod, and Where to Find Togo Today Every hero has a version of the story the world remembers, and a version that’s actually true. For Togo, the twelve-year-old sled dog who led his team across the most dangerous 260 miles of the 1925 race to save the children of Nome, Alaska, those two versions couldn’t be further apart. On a recent episode of Quarter Miles Travel, “The Dog They Left Out of the Story,” we traced Togo’s journey from a sickly, unwanted puppy to the true hero of the Great Race of Mercy — and uncovered why history handed his statue, his fame, and his place in the public imagination to a different dog entirely. This guide picks up where that episode left off, mapping out the real places where Togo’s story still lives today — from the frozen coastline he once crossed in the dark, to the quiet corners of three states where his memory finally caught up with what he actually did. Why This Guide In January of 1925, a diphtheria outbreak threatened the town of Nome, Alaska, and a relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred sled dogs raced 674 miles across the frozen wilderness to deliver life-saving serum. Togo, the twelve-year-old lead dog of musher Leonhard Seppala, carried that serum across the longest and most dangerous stretch of the route — and for decades, watched a different dog receive most of the credit. This guide gathers the real places where that story still lives — from the town the serum was racing to save, to the museum where Togo himself still stands watch, to the world-famous race his journey inspired. Whether you’re planning a full Alaska trip or a detour through New York City, here’s where to go to trace this remarkable piece of history for yourself. Alaska: Where It Happened Nome, Alaska How to get there: Nome is not accessible by road from the rest of Alaska; visitors fly in, typically via Anchorage This is where the story begins and ends — the isolated coastal town that a diphtheria outbreak threatened to devastate in the winter of 1925, and the town Togo, Seppala, and the rest of the relay mushers raced to save. Nome today remains a small, remote community on the Bering Sea coast, rich with Gold Rush history layered on top of this later chapter. A drive east along the Bering Sea coast follows roughly 30 miles of the historic serum run trail itself, giving visitors a genuine sense of the terrain the mushers crossed. Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum — Nome, Alaska Located in Nome, this local museum holds photographs and artifacts from the original 1925 serum run, offering a direct and tangible link back to that winter. It’s the natural first stop for anyone wanting to understand the event from the perspective of the town it saved, rather than just the mushers who saved it. Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters & Museum — Wasilla, Alaska Location: Mile 2.2 Knik Road, Wasilla, AK (near the intersection with Knik-Goose Bay Road) Website: iditarod.com/plan-your-visit — https://iditarod.com/plan-your-visit/ Hours: Generally open year-round, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., with extended daily hours (roughly 8 a.m.–5 p.m.) during the summer season (mid-May through mid-September); confirm current hours before visiting, especially in winter Admission: Free museum entry; dog-cart rides available for a small fee (around $10/person) during summer months This is the single most important stop on the entire trip: Togo himself, mounted and preserved, stands on permanent display here in a glass case — the actual dog, not a replica. The headquarters also houses decades of Iditarod race memorabilia, trophies, and photographs, and offers dog-cart rides in summer so visitors can get a small taste of what it feels like to be pulled by a real sled dog team. Located about 45 minutes to an hour north of Anchorage, this is an easy and essential day trip for anyone visiting the area. Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Website: iditarod.com — https://iditarod.com The race itself is the living legacy of the 1925 serum run — a roughly 1,000-mile course from the Anchorage area to Nome, run every March by mushers and dog teams retracing much of the same historic ground Togo and Seppala once covered. The ceremonial start takes place in Anchorage, with the competitive restart currently held in Willow, about 70 miles up the Parks Highway. If your travel dates allow, visiting during the race (early March) offers a rare chance to see the modern-day version of exactly what this history was really about. New York City: Where Togo Is Remembered in Bronze Togo Statue — Seward Park, Manhattan Location: Seward Park, bounded by East Broadway, Essex Street, and Canal Street, New York, NY 10002 (Lower East Side) Tucked into a small Lower East Side park, this bronze statue of Togo has stood at the East Broadway entrance since 2001 — one of only a small handful of statues in the country dedicated to him specifically, rather than to the serum run in general. The park underwent a major renovation in recent years, and Disney partnered with NYC Parks to add an interpretive plaque alongside the statue honoring the 260 miles Togo covered to help deliver the serum. It’s a quiet, easy-to-miss corner of the city — worth deliberately seeking out rather than stumbling upon. Balto Statue — Central Park, Manhattan Location: Central Park, near East 67th Street, New York, NY (Doris C. Freedman Plaza area) Worth visiting for context, even though it tells only part of the story: this statue, unveiled in December 1925, honors Balto, who led the final and shortest leg of the serum relay into Nome. It became — and remains — far more famous than any tribute to Togo, despite Togo having run the longest and most dangerous portion of the journey. Seppala himself was famously unhappy about this imbalance, writing in his own memoir that he resented the statue given to Balto, believing Togo was the dog who truly deserved it. Visiting both statues in the same trip makes for a genuinely compelling contrast — and a good conversation starter about how history remembers its heroes. Maine: Togo’s Final Years Poland Spring Resort & the Togo Statue — Poland Spring, Maine After the serum run, Togo spent his retirement here, in the care of musher Elizabeth Ricker, fathering the next generation of a sled dog line before his death in 1929. In 2022, Poland Spring unveiled a bronze statue in Togo’s honor — the newest of his memorials, and a fitting tribute given that this is where he actually lived out his final, peaceful years by the fire. It’s a quieter, more personal stop than the New York statues, tied directly to the end of Togo’s story rather than its most famous chapter. A Suggested Way to Experience This Story If you’re able to combine stops, consider this rough arc: start in New York, comparing the Togo statue in Seward Park with the more famous Balto statue in Central Park, to understand how public memory shaped this story from the very beginning. Then travel to Alaska — Nome first, to see where the serum was actually headed and to visit the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, followed by Wasilla, to stand in front of Togo himself at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters. If your schedule allows a visit in early March, the modern Iditarod race offers a living, breathing continuation of the exact history you’ve just traced. And for those who want the quieter, final chapter, a stop in Poland Spring, Maine, completes the picture — from the dog who was almost forgotten, to the dog whose name is now remembered in three states. For more on the U.S. Mint State and Commemorative Coins visit their website USMint.Gov 2008 50 State Quarters Coin Alaska Uncirculated Reverse

  5. Aug 10

    Destination: Story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis

    Destination: Story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis Ever wonder how travel expert Anita Thomas chooses her next destination? Well, this year she’s just flipping a coin. For eight years, Anita has been hosting her award-winning podcast, Quarter Miles Travel. And this year on Travel with Anita, she is sharing those experiences with you. This season, Anita will take you to the states commemorated on the back of a quarter, revealing hidden hotspots and don’t-miss destinations that you might not have heard about, possibly in your hometown state. The adventure begins as he reaches into her pocket. Here’s Anita Thomas. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, as you know, we are the spot where we don’t just show you a destination, we take you into its history, its heroes, and the stories that make it so unforgettable. And today, we’re heading to the twin island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, a place of quiet beaches, volcanic peaks, and one truly extraordinary claim to fame. Are you ready for this? It is the birthplace of one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton. Now, did you know that? Well, if not, that’s what today’s show is all about. Because now you know Hamilton from the $10 bill, of course we know that. And you may know him from the history books as the main man who shaped America’s financial system as its very first Secretary of the Treasury. Or you may also know him, if you’re one of the millions who have seen it, you may know him from the stage where a hip hop and R&B musical turned his story into one of the most celebrated works of theatrical performances in a generation. So let’s get to the information, though, about Hamilton. Because if you didn’t know about him being born on Nevis, this is gonna be a great show for you to find out a lot of great American history, but also Caribbean history. Born on the island of Nevis around 1757, Hamilton’s beginnings, well, they were anything but easy. Because we may think of one of the Founding Fathers as having an easy life from birth until the end. Well, he was raised in poverty, orphaned as a teenager, and yet through sheer intellect and ambition, he rose to become one of the most influential figures in early American history. He was a key author of The Federalist Papers. Yep, that was Hamilton. He was an aide to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. That was Hamilton. And he was the architect of the young American nation of their banking and financial system. That was definitely Hamilton. So it’s a remarkable journey, a remarkable story. And it all starts on a small Caribbean island to the center of American power. And it’s a story that in recent years found a whole new audience. Because in 2015, the musical Hamilton, well, it reimagined his life on Broadway, turning a Founding Father into a cultural phenomenon, and sending curious travelers looking for the real place where his story began. And that place is Nevis. And today we’re going to take you there. But now it won’t just be me. Joining me is someone who knows this island very, very well, and of course knows Hamilton’s connection to it better than, certainly better than I do, and almost anyone. And that would be Greg Phillip of Nevis Sun Tours. So I’d like to welcome Greg to the show for him to help us tell the story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis Island. So Greg, thanks for joining me today. Alexander Hamilton is celebrated as one of America’s Founding Fathers. But before America knew him, he was a young boy growing up in Nevis. So tell us- Yes… a little bit of, about what life was like on Nevis during his childhood, and how did the island, well, how do you feel the island shaped the man that he became? So Anita, thank you very much for having me. I’m, I’m really happy to be here with you this morning, um, to talk first of all about, um, yes, Alexander Hamilton and his role, um, living here on Nevis. But in addition to that, I’m very much happy to be here to talk about Nevis in general, and also my company, Nevis Sun Tours. Um, Nevis Sun Tours, um, really we’re both a destination management company and a luxury travel enablement platform, which basically means that where it might be difficult for people to obviously find luxury when they’re traveling, we work with, um, them and, um, their travel agencies, et cetera, to ensure that they can enjoy luxury vacations here on Nevis. Now, in relation to Alexander Hamilton, um, I, I probably spend more time with Hamilton than is normal. [laughs] And, and, and the reason, the reason I can say that is because, you know, um, for us at Nevis Sun Tours, we’ve really, um, embraced Alexander Hamilton and, and fully incorporated him into the stories that we tell about this island of Nevis. And it’s important that we do so because, you know, many people do not realize that Alexander Hamilton was born here on the island of Nevis.  Mm. Just the fact that he’s born here on the island of Nevis really says that, um, a small island in the Caribbean have had so much to do with the, number one, the existence of America, and number two, with the way America is with its financial systems, its defense systems, et cetera. Because Alexander Hamilton is the man that had so much to do with the origins of all those things. So your question I should, I should get to that about- [laughs] Alex- [laughs] about how, how this island would have, um, shaped him. Absolutely.  Um, that w- without a doubt. And, and I can say this confidently, with as much confidence as it’s possible for anyone to say anything. Alexander Hamilton, the man we know for all the things he has done, could not have ever become the man he became without the island of Nevis in his background. And, and, and that’s, that’s as, that’s as sure as we can be. And, and the reason for that is because, um, so many things happened here on this island that really shaped Alexander Hamilton. This island shaped the man Alexander Hamilton became. Well, what was life like during his childhood on Nevis at that time?  Ah. Well, [laughs] I’ll say, I’ll say this, it wasn’t easy. 00:07:03,352 –> 00:07:03,792 [speaker_1] Mm. 00:07:03,992 –> 00:07:13,892 [speaker_2] Um, and um, it, it, it begins with this, and, and y- probably for many of your listeners a little-known fact. Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock. Really? His mother and father were not married. And because his mother and father were not married, I mean, back then any child that was born out of wedlock had a very difficult road ahead. Mm-hmm. Um, a, number one, Alexander Hamilton would have been in a situation where he could not go to school with, with other children, um, at the school here, that he should have gone to in Nevis. And, and the schools back then, education was taken care of by the Anglican Church back then, and there was absolutely no way the church was gonna have a child from a sinful union-.. go to school with other good Christian children. So if you could imagine- Yeah. here is Alexander Hamilton starting life without a clear opportunity to be educated. That’s Hamilton’s life here on Nevis when starting. But surrounding him here on Nevis are so many other things. It’s, um, the, the vibrant, um, trade and commerce that really positioned Nevis as a, as a world economic power for Great Britain, in terms of what was contributed. And, and, um, all the trade and commerce I’m speaking of related to Nevis and Hamilton’s time here would have been, um, surrounding both sugar and slavery. And um, I, I’ll tell you this though, Anita, um, when, when we talk about Caribbean travel and people coming to enjoy the Caribbean, um, the slavery issue is not something that we can ever shy away from because it is so much a part of our history. What we’ve done though, um, and in the work that we do, is to make sure that when we tell those stories, that they’re told truthfully, but they’re not told, they’re not told in a way that’s going to alienate anyone. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.  Um, they’re told in a way that is, that is honest, truthful, and of course, um, w- keeping the fact in mind that this is our history, and it’s a, it’s a history that must be told in a certain way, um, so that it is honored and it is honorable. And keeping in mind that no one today was involved in what was happening back then. Hamilton’s early childhood on Nevis is very important to the development of the man who would then become such an important part of American history. I’ll stop here, but when we come back, I will continue my conversation with Greg in talking about Hamilton and the island of Nevis on Travel with Anita and Friends. Back in a minute.  Kind of a wonder how travel expert Anita Campbell keeps her travel destinations fresh. Well, this year she’s still flipping a coin. For eight years, Anita has hosted her award-winning podcast, Quarterhouse Travel. And this year on Travel with Annita, she is sharing those experiences with you. This season, Annita will take you to the states commemorated on the back of a quarter, revealing- [Instrumental music] We know one of our Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, as the person who helped us get a treasury system set up in the United States. But what do we know about his early childhood and the conditions under which he grew up living on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean? Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends. I asked Greg Phillip of Nevis Sun Tours to tell us more about the conditions and times when Hamilton lived on the island, what was going on, those conditions, and how they go about presenting that history as part of their tours. We, we definitely, with our stories, keep history in its true context. Never mind that we may have feelings, but whatever we feel today, um, are things that we have to embrace because, especially when we’re talking about

  6. Aug 10

    Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America

    Destination: Four Georgians Who Shaped America Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, Georgia has always produced more than its share of remarkable people, men and women whose ideas, courage, and craftsmanship reach far beyond our state lines and help shape the story of our entire country. We’re going to meet four of them: an industrialist who built a town from the ground up, a woman who started a movement that still shapes girls’ lives today, and a master bridge builder who connected two states with his own hands, and a woman who broke barriers as a teacher, a nurse, and author decades ahead of her time. Now, I’m talking about some really pretty fantastic people, some that you may know very well and others that may be new to you. Henry Ford, of course, we know him from Ford Motor Company. Juliette Gordon Low of the Girl Scouts. Horace King, who built a bridge, and Susie King Taylor, the educator who worked through the Civil War to educate people in reading and writing. Now, four Georgians, four extraordinary stories that we’ll share today. So I’m ready to really get into it now, and I’d like to start with the man that I like to say is the man who built a hill. I’m talking about Henry Ford’s Georgia legacy along the Coastal Bryan Heritage Trail. Some of us may have actually driven through Richmond Hill. It’s just a little south of Savannah in a town that is so charming you’d swear it was designed that way on purpose. And, well, it kinda was. We’re talking about Richmond Hill, Georgia, that is a place that is right off of Highway 17 or Interstate 95. And you may not realize that you just passed through a town that is one of the most famous men in America, in American history, he- that he basically built with his own two hands. Now, Henry Ford, and that is of course the Henry Ford, the Model T Henry Ford of the Ford Company. Well, that assembly line, the man who put America on wheels, and for over 20 years, this stretch of Georgia coast was where he came to slow down. So let’s back up a little because to understand why Henry Ford ended up here, you have to understand who he really was before he even set foot in Georgia. Now, back in 1914, Ford did something that shocked the entire country. He doubled his factory workers’ pay practically overnight to $5 a day. [laughs] That doesn’t seem like much now, but at that time, that was really big money, and newspapers all over the world ran the story. Nobody had ever seen an industrialist share that kind of money with the people actually building his products. Well, now, let’s be honest, though, because it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds. It came with strings attached. Ford had inspectors checking up on workers and home lives, expecting them to save money, stay sober, keep things tidy. [laughs] Wow, that’s quite an involvement there, and people didn’t love that part. You can understand why. But at the heart of it, Ford believed something a lot of wealthy men of his era didn’t, that if you take care of the people around you, everybody does better. The company does better. The community does better. The individual people do better. So keep that in mind because that same instinct, that’s, that’s exactly what he brought with him to Georgia. And by the early 1920s, Henry and his wife, Clara, were spending their winters down in Fort Myers, Florida. But Florida was growing. It was growing fast, and the Fords started feeling really a little crowded. So what did Henry do? Well, what Henry always did. He asked someone he trusted. His good friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, told him about a quiet stretch of the Georgia coast, a little place called Way Station. And Henry and Clara came to take a look, and from what history books tell us, it was Clara who really fell the hardest for that particular area. She loved the Spanish moss hanging off of those big live oak trees and the birds everywhere you looked, and that slow, easy, kind of low country charm that you get in that area. Of course, Henry saw something a little different. He saw opportunity, and before they even left Savannah, he told his secretary he… to start negotiating right away. And that was it. By March of 1925, Henry Ford owned his first 100 acres in Way Station. Over the next several years, Ford just kept buying. Old rice plantations, overgrown farmlands, even the abandoned grounds of historic Fort McAllister. And by the time he was done, Henry Ford owned somewhere around 85,000 acres. Yep, you heard me right, 85,000. Now, that’s 120 square miles. That’s a lot of land, and for those of you who are keeping track at home, that’s actually larger than some countries. That’s pretty big. Henry Ford didn’t buy all of that land just to sit on it and enjoy the view. Way Station at that time was one of the poorest communities on the whole Georgia coast, and Ford, true to that same instinct that gave us the $5-a-day pay, decided he was going to change that. So he started a working farm, timber operations, a sawmill, and that sawmill alone put hundreds of local people to work who really had had really not that much opportunity in the past. But he ran into a problem. Folks couldn’t get to the jobs that he was creating. The roads were just not built for it, so Ford solved that, too. He had his own sawmill start producing materials for tenant housing, designed so that the homes could go up quickly and also efficiently as, as well. Now, all told, they built over 200 houses, and Ford didn’t, he didn’t price poor families out, either. Some of the most struggling families in that area paid him just a dollar a month in rent. A dollar a month. And to keep going, a community center, a kindergarten, a medical clinic, a real medical care for people who rarely had had access to it before, churches, a bakery, a post office, and my favorite part, an honest-to-goodness industrial arts and trade school with science labs and auditorium, giving kids, um, an education that frankly a lot of the wealthier towns didn’t even have back then. He was really putting things on the map. And this wasn’t Henry’s writing checks from Detroit and calling it a day. By all accounts, he was out there walking the streets, talking to his neighbors, checking in on the schools and the sawmills himself. And Clara too. She was the one who brought in music programs and supported local artists, adding a little beauty and culture to go along with all of the Ford practicality. So by 1936, the Fords decided to build themselves a proper home right on the banks of the Ogeechee River on the old site of the historic Richmond Plantation. And when I say a home, I mean a home. About 70,000 square feet, Greek Revival style, built out of that beautiful Savannah gray brick, sitting on 55 acres of manicured lawns and gardens, and they called it Richmond Hill. So you see? That’s why I said it’s a man who built a hill. Now here’s a sweet little twist, though, a little twist to the story. In 1941, the federal government needed land in the middle of Bryan County to build an Army training base, and what we now know as Fort Stewart. And that meant several small communities in the county had to be relocated, and a lot of those displaced families ended up resettling right here in the town that Henry Ford had spent 15 years building up. And later that same year, the town made its official way station’s name become Richmond Hill in honor of Henry and Clara Ford. Now, Henry Ford passed away in 1947, and a few years later in 1951, the Richmond family’s holdings were sold to the Union Camp Paper Company, and by the summer of 1952, Ford’s operations here officially came to a close. But the city remained the same name, Richmond Hill, as we know it today. That grand Richmond Hill mansion was added to the National Registry of Historic Places back in 1978, and these days it’s part of a private community called the Ford Field and River Club. So it’s not open to just walk right in, but the Richmond Hill Historical Society does offer special tours throughout the year, so keep an eye out for those, ’cause you’ll definitely wanna go and check out that amazing Georgia history and American history. Now, I’ll stop here, but when I come back, I have another extraordinary Georgian here on Travel with Anita and Friends. Now our next Georgian up here today on Travel with Anita and Friends, where we’re highlighting extraordinary Georgians who’ve made a difference in not only Georgia history, but American history. Well, this woman, she built something you can’t always see: confidence, independence, and purpose in generations of young girls who came after her. Juliette Gordon Low. She was deaf in one ear, restless in the drawing rooms of Savannah society, and absolutely determined to give girls a place to lead and not just follow. She started a movement in her own backyard that reached the entire world. Her name, again, Juliette Gordon Low. Do you know that name? Well, you may not know her name, but you certainly know the Girl Scouts, the Girl Scouts of America. And I’m sure if you’re like me, you’ve bought some of those Girl Scout cookies, or you may know some young girls who’ve gone through the Girl Scout program. Here’s her story that I wanna share with you. Here’s Juliette Gordon Low. To understand Juliette Gordon Low, well, we need to step back to the early 1900s, because in those days, opportunities for women and girls w- were very limited. Women could not vote. Social expectations were very strict. Girls were often taught to be quiet, be polite, and be prepared for the traditional roles of life, and you know those traditional roles generally meant things that you did in your home. But Juliette Gordon Low believed girls deserved something, something very different, something more. She believed that they should be curious, they should be adventurous

  7. Aug 2

    Episode 54: Horace King – The Prince of Bridge Builders

    Episode 54 Horace King – The Prince of Bridge Builders “The Man Who Built the South’s Bridges” The Story of Horace King [SOUND: River current, low ambient water sound. A single hammer strike on wood, echoing. Then silence.] ANNITA (V.O.) Somewhere along the Chattahoochee River, there’s a bridge that isn’t there anymore. Most of them aren’t. Floods took some. War took others. Time took the rest. But the man who built them? History almost took him too. [SOUND: River fades under.] This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. And today, we’re going looking for Horace King. [SOUND: Soft acoustic guitar bed, low, under narration] ANNITA (V.O.): Before we get to the man, I want you to understand the river. The Chattahoochee cuts a long, winding line between Georgia and Alabama, nearly 450 miles of water that, in the early 1800s, was less a landmark than an obstacle. If you wanted to move goods, families, or an entire town’s commerce from one side to the other, you needed a way across. And building something strong enough to survive that river, its floods, its currents, its width, required real engineering skill. In the growing antebellum South, that skill was in short supply. The man who had it in greater measure than almost anyone else in the region was, by law, someone’s property. [SOUND: Guitar] ANNITA (V.O.): Horace King was born enslaved on September 8th, 1807, in Chesterfield District, South Carolina. His ancestry was African, European, and Catawba, a heritage as layered as the structures he’d spend his life constructing. In the 1820s, contractor John Godwin purchased Horace and brought him to Alabama, to help build bridges across the Chattahoochee. Together, in 1832, they completed the first bridge to span the river and connect Georgia and Alabama at what’s now Columbus and Phenix City. Even in bondage, Horace’s intellect was unmistakable. He mastered the Town lattice truss, a design patented just a few years earlier, using interlocking wooden planks pegged together in a diagonal pattern, strong enough to carry enormous weight with real structural grace. It was a relatively new technique even among trained engineers. Horace didn’t just learn it, he mastered it well enough to teach it, adapt it, and improve on it. By adulthood, he wasn’t just following instructions on a job site. He was managing entire work crews. He was solving structural problems that stumped men with formal engineering educations he never had access to. Godwin recognized what he had. He allowed Horace to travel and build alone across the region, an almost unheard-of freedom of movement for an enslaved man in the Deep South. [SOUND: Guitar fades] ANNITA (V.O.): In 1846, with Godwin’s support, the Alabama legislature passed a special act approving Horace King’s manumission. Sit with that for a moment. A state legislature, in a state built on the institution of slavery, passed a law to free one specific man, because his talent had become too significant, too visible, too undeniable to leave unrecognized. He didn’t step into freedom uncertain of his path. He stepped into it already renowned, a craftsman actively shaping the built environment of two states, about to expand into a third. Over the next four decades, King designed and built bridges, mills, and public buildings across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. He constructed massive Town lattice truss bridges across nearly every major river between west Georgia and northeastern Mississippi, including almost every crossing of the Chattahoochee between Carroll County and Fort Gaines. In the mid-1850s, he built Moore’s Creek Bridge over the Chattahoochee, between Newnan and Carrollton. He worked on portions of the Alabama State Capitol, including intricate spiral staircases that still draw visitors’ awe today. By some counts, across his lifetime, he built more than 100 bridges. A story worth sitting with: for years, many of King’s structures were credited only to the contractors or firms that employed him — a common erasure for Black craftsmen of the era, one that often continued well after emancipation. Part of why we tell this story today is to put his name back where it belonged all along. [SOUND: Music softens, holds low] ANNITA (V.O.): Here’s the hard truth about building things out of wood, along a river prone to flooding, in a region that would soon be torn apart by war: most of it doesn’t survive. Most of what Horace King built is gone now. Lost to war. Lost to flood. Lost to the simple passage of modern development, as newer bridges replaced the old ones he’d built by hand. Of the roughly hundred covered bridges he constructed, only one remains standing and still in use today, the Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge, in Meriwether County, Georgia. Horace King died in LaGrange, Georgia, in 1885. His five children carried his work forward after him, including his son, George King, who continued building in his father’s tradition. In 2004, the Horace King Overlook was dedicated at Riverfront Park in Albany, Georgia, a permanent marker for a man whose actual bridges mostly didn’t survive to mark themselves. [SOUND: soft music] ANNITA (V.O.): If you want to stand where Horace King stood, you still can. Start in LaGrange, Georgia, at Mulberry Street Cemetery, recently restored, with accessible pathways and interpretive markers throughout the grounds. King’s family gravesite is there, marked with a dignified granite monument. And just steps away stands something remarkable: a section of an actual covered bridge, rebuilt by his son George and now permanently installed at the cemetery, after decades on display at Callaway Gardens. It is, quite literally, a piece of what he built, still here, still standing, still telling his story to anyone who takes the time to look. Seasonal walking tours in LaGrange often weave King’s story into a broader exploration of the town’s history, a chance to turn a quiet Georgia visit into something that connects directly back to the man himself. [SOUND: Music swells slightly, then settles] ANNITA (V.O.): Horace King built the crossings that let a divided landscape become passable — river by river, county by county, state by state. He did it while enslaved. He did it after freedom. And most of what he built didn’t survive him. But he did. His name did. And today, we made sure you heard it too. We say his name, and we tell his story. To visit the Mulberry Street Cemetery visit the website www.VisitLaGrange.com Photos

  8. Jul 30

    Episode 53: Susie King Taylor – From Slavery to Civil War to Her Own School

    Episode 53: Susie King Taylor – From Slavery to Civil War to Her Own School The Story She Wrote Herself   Quarter Miles Travel shares a powerful story – Susie King Taylor – From Slavery to Civil War to her own school. Born into slavery in Liberty County, Georgia, in 1848, Susie King Taylor taught herself to read in secret, at a time when it was illegal for an enslaved child to do so. After escaping to freedom in 1862, she became the first Black woman to teach openly in a school for African American children in Georgia — and then served through the Civil War as a nurse and laundress with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, tending wounded soldiers in the field. In 1902, she published her memoir, making her the first African American woman to write and publish an account of her own experience during the Civil War. Her story is finally getting the recognition it deserves — right here in her home state, in Hinesville, Georgia. And to help us tell it properly, I’m joined by the woman who has spent years bringing that story home: the founder and executive director of the Susie King Taylor Women’s Institute and Ecology Center, and curator of the Susie King Taylor Museum in Hinesville — Hermina Glass-Hill. Hermina, welcome to the show. Interview with Hermina She wrote it all down. Her own memoir — one of the only firsthand accounts by a Black woman who lived the Civil War from inside a military camp, not from a distance. And still — most people have never heard her name. This is Quarter Miles Travel. Today, we’re tracing the coastline she once called home — the islands, the schools, the quiet places where a girl with a stolen education became a woman history almost forgot. If you want to walk where she walked, start in Liberty County. Waterways, historic landmarks, and the Georgia coast she knew are still waiting to be explored. Plan your trip at libertycounty — that’s L-I-B-E-R-T-Y-C-O-U-N-T-Y dot org. Go to my website, Travel With Annita dot com, for photos of the museum. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast, and share it with other history buffs — and anyone who loves finding the little-known stories. We say her name, and we tell her story. Quarter Miles Travel and the U.S. Mint’s Georgia National Historic Site quarter highlight the beautiful Georgia coast.  The marine life, shore birds, natural habitat and the space where many Blacks have called the area home for generations. Among the sweet grasses, dunes and Atlantic Ocean shores men and women like Susie King Taylor have built their lives and left a legacy. Photos from the Susie King Taylor Museum in Hinesville, GA   Susie King Taylor’s Autobiography which you can purchase on Amazon.   Susie King Taylor’s autobiography 33rd US Colored Troops *Affiliate link to Amazon.

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The Adventure begins when you reach into your pocket. Each U.S. Mint Commemorative Quarter design tells a unique story. Each quarter is filled with pride, from hometown heroes to iconic landmarks; wildlife and nature to music and culture. Reach into your pocket and let Quarter Miles Travel take it from there, we’ll turn that quarter into an adventure.

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  • Creator
    Travel With Annita and Friends
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    68
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright Quarter Miles Travel 2021
  • Show Website
    Quarter Miles Travel With Annita