This Must Be the Place

Tracing sites from American history too obscure even to merit signs.

Whenever I speed past a roadside historical marker, I grow wistful, knowing an era has passed. Specifically, the era when people actually took the time to stop and read these signs. ("If you've ever passed a historical marker and wondered what it said, then this app is a must-have," announces the website for Historical iMarkers.) They were the landmarks of the long Sunday drive, when any sort of distraction was welcome. "Frederick Funston, five feet four and slightly built," begins an actual marker in Allen County, Kan., "went from this farm to a life of amazing adventure."

We're now in too much of a hurry to get on down the road. If it's Sunday, this must be Home Depot. The markers continue to inform us that in this nondescript building or on that empty cornfield a momentous incident once happened. Here just outside Hohenwald, Tenn., Meriwether Lewis died (thereby investing, as the marker puts it, what is now a clearing in the woods with an "immortal touch of melancholy fame.") There, a Michigan marker notes, is where "A Scotsman, named Taylor, grew the first celery in Kalamazoo in 1856." Texas alone has over 15,000 markers. If you spent two minutes at each, it would take you more than 500 hours to read them, travel not.

A Utah marker commemorates a record day during the building of the transcontinental railroad.

 

George H.H. Huey/Corbis

Stop sign A Utah marker commemorates a record day during the building of the transcontinental railroad.

Now, consider the scope of Andrew Carroll's mission. He set off to find the history between the markers—people and events that, unlike Frederick Funston and his amazing adventure, were ignored. Mr. Carroll is interested in the events and accomplishments that slipped through the cracks of our memory for one reason or another, but are still worthy of recognition.

His "almost compulsive desire to seek out unmarked history sites throughout the country" began in Jersey City, N.J. Here, one night in 1864 a young man fell off the platform in front of a moving train and was rescued by a bystander. The young man was Robert Todd Lincoln (the president's son), and his rescuer was Edwin Booth (brother of future assassin John Wilkes Booth.) From this Ripley's Believe It or Not moment, Mr. Carroll "started to wonder what other great unmarked sites are all around us that we pass by or walk over every day."

So he set out on a series of expeditions crisscrossing "the country to find people and places neglected by history"—in big cities, small villages, empty fields, on imposing mountainsides and windswept buttes. It turns out there are many; nearly 500 pages' worth here, and you get the feeling he only stopped because the pressmen were waiting to print his book.

In Virginia, for instance, he retraces the path of Irene Morgan, an African-American woman arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a white person in 1944—11 years before Rosa Parks. One of her lawyers was Thurgood Marshall; her case went to the Supreme Court, which decreed in 1946 that "seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single uniform rule"—an early crack in the wall of segregation. Rosa Parks has historical markers honoring her in Alabama and Tennessee. Morgan, not so much. Mr. Carroll finds few traces of the incident and sets out to visit an old jail where Morgan was locked up after being hauled off the bus. The old jail, he reports, is now home to the county's cooperative extension service.

On another excursion, to South Carolina, Mr. Carroll tracks Henry Laurens, who is remembered for his role as president of the Continental Congress in 1777-8. He even has a couple of towns and counties named after him. But he's little remembered for what else he did: He was the first American to request cremation rather than burial. Actually, "request" is a bit tepid—in his will he threatened to disinherit his son if he failed to carry out his wishes. Laurens was an inadvertent pioneer, and during a visit to the plantation where "that awful ceremony" (his daughter's words) took place, Mr. Carroll tells the story of how slow society was to accept cremation—a practice that didn't become commonplace until more than a century later.

But he also turns up intriguing incidents lacking historic markers for another reason: People don't care to remember them. This includes Haun's Mill in Missouri. In 1838, 18 Mormons were slaughtered during an attack by a militia frothy with anti-Mormon rage. There's nothing much there now; Mr. Carroll had to call the sheriff's office to find out where the settlement was located. An historical marker on the site actually had been erected, but repeatedly vandalized and stolen. Descendants of the killers still live in the area, he is told: "It's not a proud moment in local history, and the signs kept getting torn down."

America's less glorious history is a recurrent theme in his narrative. Mr. Carroll tracks Ona Judge, Martha Washington's runaway slave ("a perfect mistress of the needle," her husband, George, wrote). And the Cincinnati Zoo, which held an exhibit of living Native Americans in 1887. And the site of the last circuslike outdoor public executions, which took place in Owensboro, Ky., in 1936. Inquiring after these and other episodes, Mr. Carroll was rewarded with tight smiles and a tactful change of subject.

Readers should fasten their seat belts for this tour—not just for the hill-and-dale content. There's also a lot of swerving between roadside encounters and basic history lessons. One paragraph begins, "One of the doctors most responsible for implementing this doctrinal shift in Nazi medical polices was Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and the head of the Third Reich's euthanasia program." The next begins: " 'Do you want to see our petting zoo?' Karen asks me." Sometimes these jumps lend his narrative the randomness of a great road trip; at other times, you need to stop, scratch your head, then check your bearings.

"Here Is Where" can also detour too deeply at times into logistics, explaining the complications of scheduling a trip to Hawaii or relating the time Mr. Carroll accidentally hit the mute button on his GPS and went 40 miles out of his way. Also, he notes his principled stand against trespassing. That seems a bit meek; tearing one's clothes on barbed wire comes with the territory he staked out for himself.

Mr. Carroll spends an inordinate amount of time stalking across parking lots—the former residence of a noted preservationist in San Antonio is now a parking lot, as is the site of Leary's bookstore in Philadelphia, where an early printed version of the Declaration of Independence was discovered in 1968 by staffers packing up the store before it was demolished. Parking lots are "the bane of history, I'm coming to realize," Mr. Carroll writes.

Maybe so. But I often wished he would take the time to explore deeper connections between people and place. Indeed, he set up this question in his introduction, asking "beyond mere sentimentality, what difference does it honestly make if historic sites are torn down, boarded up, bulldozed or simply neglected?" It's a good question, but one he sidesteps. After so many miles chasing so many obscure historical events, he must have concocted a Theory of Buried History. If so, he does not let on.

An Idaho police sergeant tells him that if young people knew more about where they lived, "the more pride and ownership they feel about the place, and the less likely they are to disrespect or vandalize it." But such comments themselves felt a bit like roadside markers themselves, pointing us in the direction of something that merits further study. Do parking lots matter? I'm not sure, and I would very much like to hear the arguments for and against.

Still Mr. Carroll's explorations are strangely compelling—I started wondering what history had disappeared from my own neighborhood. "Here is Where" could be the basis for a cool Google Glass app—mash it up with GPS coordinates and let it populate the spaces around us with ghosts, both good and evil. We may lose a bit of ourselves by outsourcing our imagination. But we may lose even more by letting time erode the history of our land.

—Mr. Curtis is the author of "And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails."

A version of this article appeared June 22, 2013, on page C9 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: This Must Be the Place.

The book is "Here Is Where" by Andrew Carroll

Here's one story on the book:

               Here Is Where chronicles Andrew Carroll’s eye-opening – and at times hilarious -- journey across America to find and explore unmarked historic sites where extraordinary moments occurred and remarkable individuals once lived. Sparking the idea for this book was Carroll’s visit to the spot where Abraham Lincoln’s son was saved by the brother of Lincoln’s assassin. Carroll wondered, How many other unmarked places are there where intriguing events have unfolded and that we walk past every day, not realizing their significance? To answer that question, Carroll ultimately trekked to every region of the country -- by car, train, plane, helicopter, bus, bike, and kayak and on foot. Among the things he learned:

*Where in North America the oldest sample of human DNA was discovered

* Where America’s deadliest maritime disaster took place, a calamity worse than the fate of the Titanic

*Which virtually unknown American scientist saved hundreds of millions of lives

*Which famous Prohibition agent was the brother of a notorious gangster

*How a 14-year-old farm boy’s brainstorm led to the creation of television

Featured prominently in Here Is Where are an abundance of firsts (from the first use of modern anesthesia to the first cremation to the first murder conviction based on forensic evidence); outrages (from riots to massacres to forced sterilizations); and breakthroughs (from the invention, inside a prison, of a revolutionary weapon; to the recovery, deep in the Alaskan tundra, of a super-virus; to the building of the rocket that made possible space travel). Here Is Where is thoroughly entertaining, but it’s also a profound reminder that the places we pass by often harbor amazing secrets and that there are countless other astonishing stories still out there, waiting to be found. 

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