Progress on Fort Fisher Visitors Center-- Part 3: Road Construction and World War II

The new visitor center and archaeology facility carry a price tag of $2.5 million, funds primarily secured through state  budget appropriations.

Nearly $3 million more is needed to complete the overall site improvement project, which includes reconstruction of a series of Civil War-era mounds.  To clear the site for a runway, the Army bulldozed  three of the mounds after activating Fort Fisher as  a training base during World War II.

A fourth mound was taken out by the construction of U.S. Highway 421 before the war.  US-421 ends at the "Rocks" by Battery Buchanan.  Also, North Carolina's Fort Fisher Ferry is located there (where people can go across the Cape Fear River to Southport.

The idea is to tell a complee and inclusive story of Fort Fisher.

Construction of the Fort Fisher visitor center is expected to be complete by mid-to-late May 2024.  Once the building is up and operating, the current visitors center will be torn down.

--Old B-Runner

Cruising With the USS Montgomery-- Part 3: The Lincoln Highway and National Road

Beside Route 66, Illinois is fortunate to have two other major old roads going through it.

One is the first paved transcontinental highway across the United States, the Lincoln Highway.  It ran from New York City to San Francisco.

And, a part of it went down DeKalb, Illinois' Main Street, called, get this, Lincoln Highway.  My wife and I often did something called the Lincoln Crawl back when we were students at Northern Illinois University.  That is where you went to as many bars along the road as you could.  NIU is located along this great road, but we sure didn't know the history of this road as students.

Plus, Illinois also has the western extremity of the old National Road.   This was the first major improved road built in the country by the federal government.  It was built between 1811 and 1837 heading westward out of Cumberland, Maryland, and eventually to Vandalia, then capital of Illinois.  This road was a major path for Americans moving into the Old Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin).

I have driven long segments of both these roads as well as all of Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Old B-Runner

Cruisin' With the USS Montgomery-- Part 2: Getting Hooked on Old Roads

Often when I'm doing all these blogs, I go ahead from the story I'm on and find out, as Paul Harvey would call it, "The Rest of the Story."  I start digging a little deeper into it to see what I find.  It is kind of like looking for buried treasure.  Kind of like all the hype back when Geraldo Rivera went into Al Capone's vaults.  You never know if you'll find something or not.

I call this "RoadTrippin' Through History" as you don't even know if you'll stay, as in this case, with the Civil War.  You just keep following leads.  Sometimes you get nowhere, others, like this, you sure do go places.

This takes in another one of the things I'm nuts about, old roads and trips on them.  Today. most vacations are all about the destination, not what you can see and do on the way.  Now, I realize most people don't have a lot of time on vacations and I'm fortunate enough to be retired.

My late wife, Liz, and I got hooked on old roads in 2002.  And, that road was Route 66 which we took from Chicago to St. Louis over spring break.  We got hopelessly hooked.  

Plus, Illinois is fortunate to also have two of the other major old roads, the Lincoln Highway and the National Road.  

--Old B-Runner