Introducing: Here Is Where

Last week I was in Maine to meet up with friends on Mount Desert Island, and I used the opportunity to test out my new equipment--camera, laptop, cell phone, etc.--and see what overlooked historic spots I could uncover between Bar Harbor and Portland. Along Route 1 there seemed to be signs every quarter-mile for yard sales. These aren't historic sites, in themselves, but they've revealed some nifty discoveries over the years, including Declaration of Independence broadsides, Civil War diaries, rare maps, and never-before-seen photos of prominent Americans.  

Soon after I launched the Legacy Project in 1998, we received a bundle of original World War II letters by a young corporal named Robert Easterbrook in Yokohama who unexpectedly found himself at the hospital bedside of Hideki Tojo, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. (Tojo was recuperating from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after trying to commit suicide--and therefore evade execution by the Allies for war crimes. The bullet missed his heart, and American MPs stationed outside his home heard the shot, rushed in to save him, and then took him to a U.S. Army hospital.) Easterbook was part of a revolving team of medics and doctors keeping Tojo alive, and the first line of his letter home captures how surreal the experience was. "Dear Mom + Dad: - I don't imagine you could ever guess where I am as I write this... I'm sitting in a chair about 3 ft. from the bedside of the ex-Premier of Japan..." He went on to describe his ambivalence about keeping Tojo alive, and he enclosed a small scrap of Tojo's bloody shirt.

Easterbrook's letter isn't a priceless, previously unpublished correspondence by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, or Susan B. Anthony. But it is an extraordinary eyewitness account penned by an incredulous young Marine sitting next to the man who was the Osama bin Laden of his day. The letter was bought at a yard sale for just pennies. (The Legacy Project partnered with the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum on an exhibit titled "War Letters: Lost & Found," which features Easterbrook's story, among many others, and can viewed online here.)

"Got any old letters?" I asked the man who seemed to be in charge of the first yard sale I visited. He eyed me suspiciously. "I don't mean like personal love letters, but wartime correspondence. Like from the Civil War," I explained. "Not to my knowledge, but look around. You never know what you'll find," he said. I mentioned to him that I'd seen countless yard sale signs along Route 1. "Is this a recession thing?" I asked. "No, it's a Maine thing," he said.

A few minutes later I came back with a handful of Popular Science magazines from 1963 and '64. "Five dollars for the whole stack?" I offered. "I would have taken a dollar, so sold." He promptly took my $5 bill, while muttering "I never thought anyone would buy those..."

Torn and crumbling as they might be, these 45-year-old magazines to me are irreplaceable time capsules. I love flipping through the pages of old magazines and glimpsing the interests, opinions, and predictions of generations gone by. "Will scientists create a safer cigarette?" one article asks. Another about the future of fuel cells is more prescient, and I'm especially intrigued by its author: Dr. Werner von Braun, the former Nazi who became one of the "fathers" of the U.S. space program. Apparently von Braun was a regular contributor to Popular Science, and he either penned a column about some futuristic topic or answered readers questions. ("Can an astronaut bail out and live?" one subscriber queried. "It depends..." von Braun replied.)

Further down the road I came upon the Holden Cemetery and pulled over for a brief meander. Not to sound morbid, but I find it almost meditative to walk through these final resting places while silently scanning the headstones to gather clues about the individuals buried below. A particular row affected me deeply. There were seven markers, one of which was knocked down and another was significantly smaller than the rest. The latter was for little George Blake III, only 10 months and 16 days old when he died. The epitaph was faded but legible: "Rest with your mother/lovely babe/Untill we meet again." Two headstones away was his mother Eliza, dead at the age of 21 on March 6, 1851. Her brother George W. Blake had passed on at age 27. Another brother, Thomas, made it to 40. But the person who most drew my attention was Harriet, the matriarch. By the time she had died in May 1885, just two days after her 82nd birthday, she had buried at least three children, one infant grandson, and her husband.  

Graveyards and cemeteries (and there is a difference between the two I only recently learned; the former is usually next to a church) are open manuscripts of historical information, documenting the wars, plagues, and natural disasters that have swept through entire towns and cities. And while a taphophile could do a better job than I of "reading" the collective headstones at the Holden Cemetery, I found the story--what little of it I could piece together--of the Blake family to be a humbling lesson in the resilience of those who have come before us and the hardships they so often endured.

Inevitably, I suppose, I'll get a GPS navigational device for my 50-state journey, but happiness for me is a tattered road atlas, even if it means I end up getting lost or repeatedly stopping and asking for directions. I like doing this. It gets me talking with people, and every so often they share an anecdote about a favorite spot of their own. In Maine it resulted in my finding the most historic site on my trip.

During a conversation with a Portland hotel clerk, I learned that Harriet Beecher Stowe had experienced her vision to write Uncle Tom's Cabin at the First Parish Church in Brunswick. The pew (number 23) where she sat is marked, but there's no plaque or sign outside. One could breeze by the church, as I certainly would have done, without ever knowing what had happened there. On March 2, 1851 (only four days before 21-year-old Eliza Baker died, I just realized), Stowe was listening to an abolitionist sermon when inspiration struck, and after rushing home she wrote out the first chapter of what would become one of the most seminal novels in American history. 

A final few words about this blog and what's to come: First, this will be the longest entry I write, mostly because I'll be sprinting from state to state and I doubt I'll have time to cobble together much more than a paragraph or two. These will appear every Monday, and I will of course be Twittering (@HereisWhere) as well throughout my travels because it's, like, you know, the law now.  

Second, accuracy is very important to me, and I will try to write only what I know to be true regarding these historic spots. But it will be hard for me to confirm every fact while on the road, so I welcome corrections and related anecdotes I might have missed. (What I put in the book I'm writing about these sites and this whole endeavor will be scrupulously vetted, and very few of the stories I allude to here will be used in the book, as I want both to be "fresh.") 

Finally, what I most hope this blog will do is not just record my own adventures, but inspire readers to set out on their own. I wanted to work with National Geographic Traveler on this initiative because I believe "Here Is Where" is as much about exploration and discovery as it is about history. Finding little-known sites has transformed how I see the places I visit and has prompted me to talk with and, most important, listen to individuals I might never have encountered otherwise. It has reminded me how fundamentally similar and truly interconnected we are and, ultimately, that this world--both because and in spite of us--is for all its troubles still a rather breathtaking place in which to stomp around. 

Do you have a forgotten history site you'd like to share with Andy? If so, please e-mail him at: HereIsWhereUSA@yahoo.com. You can follow Andy on Twitter (@HereisWhere) and on this blog and read more about the project in this recent article in the New York Times. 

Photo: Top photo of Andrew by Tom Davidson; all others by Andrew Carroll Mount Desert Island, Maine. All photos and text © Andrew Carroll.