Transportation

Tatum, TX

Daniel Martin and his family settled here about 1833 alongside the historic Trammel's Trace, one of the earliest overland routes into Texas, though the cemetery's oldest documented grave dates to 1883. In the 1970s the building of Martin Lake left the burial ground on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, and in 1986 graves from nearby Grant Cemetery were relocated here to make way for coal mining. Still active, the cemetery is tended by an association that meets throughout the year.

Manor Township, PA · est. 1925

Martin Chartier was a French adventurer from Canada who had served at La Salle's Fort St. Louis in the Illinois country before leading a band of Shawnee eastward, first to Maryland and then, by 1697, to the Susquehanna at Pequea Creek. Settling on a tract granted him by William Penn, he became one of early Pennsylvania's most important Indian traders and interpreters, and an agent in Penn's treaties with the Susquehanna nations. His son Peter, born of his Shawnee wife, carried on the trade after him.

Bruceville, TX

A Scottish-born machinist, Martin Irons became one of the most prominent labor leaders of Gilded Age America. As chairman of the executive committee of the Knights of Labor's District Assembly 101, he led the great 1886 strike against Jay Gould's southwestern railroads. When the violent strike collapsed he was blacklisted, retiring near Bruceville but remaining active in reform until his death.

Bryan, TX

In 1924 Martin Kapchinskie set up a roadside store on the country lane between Bryan and Texas A&M, selling groceries, gasoline, a telephone call, and barbecue smoked in a pit out back. Through the Depression he sold off land to keep the doors open, and by 1939 he had traded the screened wooden stand for a brick building with a café-style bar. After World War II his son Albin added a meat market, and as the automobile reshaped the countryside the rest stop became a beloved fixture for generations of Aggies and locals gathering over domino games and pit barbecue.

Whitewright, TX

Built around 1905, likely by David Martindale for his stepson, this cross-gabled cottage housed tinsmith and volunteer fireman Ott Lackey and, from 1946, a family employed by the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. The "Katy" line's arrival in 1878 had brought Whitewright into being, and the house reflects the modest prosperity of such railroad towns. Its wood siding, turned columns, and pressed-metal skirting are typical of small-town Texas homes of the era.

Covington, KY

Born a storekeeper's daughter in 1868, Mary Greene left the land when she married riverboat captain Gordon C. Greene and became one of the very few women licensed as a boat master and river pilot. She steered through a cyclone, survived a nitroglycerine explosion, and after her husband's death in 1927 ran the Greeneline Steamers fleet of 28 paddlewheelers — including the famous Delta Queen.

Bomarton, TX

When the Wichita Valley Railroad pushed from Seymour to Abilene in 1906, it gave rise to Bomarton and drew settlers to the surrounding Baylor County plains. Trustees organized Mary's Creek School in 1908, one of thirty-eight rural schools in the county, starting with a single room and adding a second by the mid-1920s. Attendance peaked at sixty-nine pupils in 1930 before waves of consolidation eventually folded the district into Seymour.

Mason, TX

Built in 1869–70 by S. F. "Lace" Bridges, the Mason House served as a hotel and stagecoach stop on the San Antonio to El Paso Road. It offered weary travelers rest and local residents hearty meals, and was marred by a tragic 1900 fire that killed 23-year-old Annie Medlock. Later converted to apartments, it still keeps historic features such as its original kitchen cistern and stone fences.

Ingham Township, MI

Built in 1926 and energized in February 1927, the Mason–Dansville electric line carried the current of a new age into rural Ingham County. In the early twentieth century, electric interurban and power lines spread across the Michigan countryside, linking farms and small towns to the grid and to one another and transforming daily life with light, power, and faster travel.

Big Spring, TX

After the Staked Plains Lodge was chartered in 1884, its members saw a need for a Masonic burial ground in Big Spring, and lodge member George Bauer donated this land in 1885. The earliest documented grave is that of William Howerton, who died in 1886, and adjoining gifts grew the site into the sixteen-acre Mount Olive Cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are Masons and community leaders, Texas and Pacific Railway employees, and veterans of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam.

Boyd, TX

Built in 1877 at Old Aurora, two miles east, this two-story building served the community in many roles—its lower floor first a school renting for $2.50 a month, then a drugstore and post office, while the upper floor was always a Masonic lodge hall. When the railroad bypassed Aurora and the town began to fade, the whole structure was moved here in one piece in 1900. Its journey mirrors the fortunes of a settlement left behind by the rails.

Stonington, CT

This memorial honors the Greenman brothers — George, Clark, and Thomas S. Greenman — master shipbuilders whose careers spanned much of the 19th century in the shipbuilding country of southeastern Connecticut. In an age when the region's yards launched swift clipper ships, whalers, and coastal vessels, skilled shipwrights like the Greenmans turned local timber and craftsmanship into some of the finest wooden ships afloat. Their firm helped make the Mystic and Stonington shore a celebrated center of American maritime industry.

Rockport, TX

Built in 1868-69 for John M. Mathis, a founder who helped plat the town and became Rockport's first mayor in 1870, this raised coastal cottage blends Italianate, Classical, and Greek Revival details. Mathis later deeded it to his cousin Thomas, a rancher, shipper, and banker who was central to the region's cattle and coastal trade. Its arcaded basement and columned portico speak to the ambitions of a young Gulf Coast port town.

Houston, TX

William and Regina Matthews had this Craftsman bungalow built in 1915, hiring the W. T. Carter Lumber and Building Co. to raise a well-detailed house with a hipped roof, L-shaped porch on tapered columns, tracery windows, and exposed rafter ends. William worked as a civil engineer and chief draftsman for the Sunset Central Lines railroad. In 1930 the Johnsons—Ernest, a pumper and labor leader for Sinclair Oil—bought the home and converted the attic into dormered bedrooms for their five daughters.

Morgantown, KY

Maurice Hudson Thatcher moved to Butler County as a child in 1874 and rose through Kentucky's legal ranks before a career of national consequence. He served as the fifth governor of the Panama Canal Zone from 1910 to 1913, helping organize its government during the canal's construction. Later, as a U.S. Representative, he shepherded the legislation that created Mammoth Cave National Park, the Lincoln Birthplace historical park, and Zachary Taylor National Cemetery—also finding time to write poetry in praise of his beloved Green River.

Mauriceville, TX

Mauriceville grew up at the junction of two railroads built at the turn of the twentieth century and took its name from Maurice Miller, son of a railroad president. Merchant J.P. Hilliard anchored the new town with the first store and post office, and a station house, hotel, mills, schools, and churches soon followed—including a Baptist congregation for African Americans organized just behind Hilliard's store. As the surrounding timber gave out and the mills closed, the community waned, and its school district consolidated with Little Cypress in 1969.

Eagle Pass, TX

Carved from Kinney County in 1856 and organized in 1871, Maverick County took its name from Samuel A. Maverick, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Its county seat, Eagle Pass, sits where the storied El Camino Real crossed the Rio Grande — the same road that carried Spanish missionaries, the explorer Louis St. Denis, Moses Austin, and generations of troops and settlers into Texas. The land holds Spanish mission ruins and old military posts, including Fort Duncan, which sheltered both U.S. and Confederate soldiers.

Killeen, TX

After repeated flooding cut the Maxdale community off from Killeen, Bell County commissioners approved a bridge here in 1913—only to see it swept away by a flood before completion. They contracted again with Hess & Skinner Engineers, agents for the Missouri Valley Bridge Company, and the replacement opened in 1914 using a Parker truss for maximum strength at mid-span. It has carried traffic across the crossing ever since.

Maydelle, TX

In 1906 the state-owned Texas State Railroad pushed into this area hunting timber to fuel the iron works at the Rusk penitentiary, and a branch prison called Camp Wright rose at the railhead. When Rusk native Thomas Campbell became governor, he had the line extended to Palestine, opening the region to settlers who platted the town of Maydelle in 1910—named for the governor's daughter, who sang at its dedication. Cotton, timber, and tomatoes fueled its early years before the slow rural decline of the later twentieth century.

Manassas, VA

In the early months of the Civil War, Confederate forces fortifying the strategic rail junction at Manassas threw up earthen defenses to guard the approaches to the vital Orange & Alexandria and Manassas Gap railroad lines. The Mayfield earthworks were part of this network of hand-dug forts ringing the town, built from the very soil soldiers stood upon. Manassas Junction sat at the heart of the war's opening campaigns, drawing two major battles to its fields in 1861 and 1862.

Winston-Salem, NC

Opened in 1919, Maynard Field was North Carolina's first commercial airfield, operating on the edge of Winston-Salem until the mid-1930s. It was named for Lt. Belvin W. Maynard, a North Carolina native and celebrated early aviator. The field belongs to the barnstorming dawn of American aviation, when former military flyers turned open ground into the country's first airports.

Maysville, KY

Chartered in 1829, the Maysville and Washington Turnpike laid down the first macadamized road in Kentucky—and reputedly the first anywhere west of the Alleghenies—when its opening four-mile stretch was completed in 1830. By 1835 the improved road ran all the way from Maysville to Lexington, threaded with thirteen tollhouses and six covered bridges. It carried the Bluegrass region's goods and travelers over a smooth, engineered surface that muddy frontier tracks could never match.

Storey County, NV

In 1862 Ivy Mead, John McCone, and a partner opened a foundry in Gold Canyon, moving it to this granite building two years later to serve the booming Comstock mines. McCone took sole ownership in 1866 and, after an 1872 fire, absorbed the Fulton Foundry to build what may have been the largest foundry in Nevada, employing 110 men. Its shops cast the early machinery of the Virginia and Truckee Railway and, in 1880, the largest casting ever poured on the Pacific Coast.

Rockport, TX

Tucked among hackberry, mesquite, and live oak on Texas's Coastal Bend, this family burying ground dates to the turn of the twentieth century, when Charles H. McLester—an engineer on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad—and his wife Eliza inherited the land in 1903. The McLesters were among the vegetable farmers of the nearby Sparks Colony, and the first grave, dug in 1909, held their thirteen-year-old son Bennie. Generations of educators, city officials, and veterans followed, and descendants still tend the plot.

McAllen, TX

When the federal government built this Spanish colonial revival post office in 1935 and dedicated it in January 1936, McAllen was a fast-growing town on the Texas–Mexico border that had already outgrown five earlier postal quarters since 1907. The building's baroque frontispiece, corbelled cornice, and red tile roof reflect the regional revival style that shaped much South Texas public architecture of the era. After serving the mail until 1957, it was repurposed for federal and city offices and named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1986.

Hanover, PA · est. 1954

Along the old Monocacy Road, Richard McAllister raised a two-story log building and opened a store and tavern that helped seed the settlement that became Hanover. In 1755 Benjamin Franklin, then organizing supply and communication for the frontier during the French and Indian War era, stopped as a guest. The original building stood until it was razed in 1950.

Coldspring, TX

Built in the 1880s, this Coldspring home was bought in 1913 by merchant Robert Hugh McClanahan, Jr., who served as county tax collector and as postmaster from 1914 until his death in 1940. After a 1915 fire destroyed the courthouse and the town square was relocated, McClanahan had his house turned to face the new town. Long a haven for travelers, it later passed to his son-in-law, Marshall Douglas Trapp.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2016

Established in 1804, the McClurg Iron Foundry was Pittsburgh's first air foundry, casting metal in a young industrial city perched at the gateway to the West. During the War of 1812 it forged cannons and ammunition, much of it destined for the American fleet that would contest control of Lake Erie. In 1835 the site achieved another milestone, producing the first locomotive steam engine built west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Dayton, OH

In the years around World War I, the U.S. Army turned a stretch of Dayton floodplain into one of the nation's first centers for aviation research, fittingly located in the hometown of the Wright brothers. Through the late 1910s and 1920s, engineers here pushed the young science of flight forward, testing new aircraft, engines, and equipment and chasing altitude and speed records at a time when airplanes were still a novelty. As the work outgrew the cramped, flood-prone site, it moved to a larger field nearby that would eventually become Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Morristown, NJ

Built in the 1810s, this stately Georgian mansion was the home of George Perot McCulloch, the visionary often called the "father of the Morris Canal." McCulloch championed the canal that would carry anthracite coal and iron across northern New Jersey and help power the region's industry. He and his wife Louisa were pillars of early Morristown, helping to establish local institutions including a nearby Episcopal church.

McDade, TX

Laid out in 1871 and named for Brenham lawyer James McDade, this Bastrop County town grew into a busy freight center and stagecoach stop, its school-church raised the following year. But prosperity came with lawlessness: a vigilante group organized in 1883 hanged three men on Christmas Eve, and the next day's reckoning erupted in a gunfight at the Rock Saloon, a building that survives today as a museum.

Hubbard, TX

Hubbard sprang up in 1881 when the Cotton Belt railroad pushed its line from Tyler toward Waco, and one of the town's first fine homes rose the next year. Local merchant and banker Joe B. McDaniel built this late-Victorian house of walnut and pine for his widowed mother, Elizabeth Bonner McDaniel, adorning it with ornate banisters, decorative columns and gables, and tinted glass.

Buda, TX

On a bluff above Onion Creek, the McElroy-Severn complex began in 1875 as a stagecoach house and post office serving travelers on the old San Antonio road. When the railroad drew mail service to the new town of Dupre — soon renamed Buda — in 1880, the station became a private home and ranch headquarters for more than a century. Its limestone post office, with carved stone lintels, and the much-remodeled center-passage house together recall Buda's scattered homestead beginnings.

McFaddin, TX

When a railroad line pushed through the McFaddin Ranch around 1900, a ranch settlement — briefly renamed Marianna by the railroad — sprang up with a depot, post office, church, and school. This board-and-batten mercantile, built in 1910, became the community's gathering place and for a time housed the post office. Its simple, sturdy design typifies the small-town general stores that anchored rural Texas commerce.

McFaddin, TX

The McFaddin ranch settlement was rechristened Marianna in 1906 by the railroad that reached it, and a post office opened the next year inside a general store, migrating between buildings before settling into this board-and-batten structure in 1913. At rancher A. M. McFaddin's request, the town reclaimed its original name in 1923. For decades the mail arrived and departed by train, a rhythm that continued until 1962.

San Marcos, TX

This spot marks where the Camino Real—the King's Highway from Nacogdoches to the Rio Grande—forded the San Marcos River. The French explorer St. Denis traveled it in 1714 to open trade with the Spanish, and the Austins likely crossed near here during their 1820–21 colonization efforts. Thomas McGehee settled on the east bank around 1846, and the family's long association gave the crossing its name.

McGregor, TX

McGregor was born of the railroad. In 1882 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe and the Texas and St. Louis lines drew statewide crowds to a public auction of town lots, and settlers from nearby hamlets like Banks and Eagle Springs moved in. Named for pioneer physician Dr. Gregor Carmichael McGregor, the town grew as an agricultural shipping hub and boomed again during World War II with a new ordnance plant.

Cushing, TX

McKnight Cemetery began in the 1850s as the family burying ground of William Newton and Rebecca McKnight and opened to neighboring communities by the Civil War. It served hamlets like Glenfawn, Linn Flat, and Toliver—the last of which faded into a ghost town after the Texas and New Orleans Railroad bypassed it, drawing residents to rail-served Cushing. Among those interred are Confederate soldiers and World War II R.A.F. Wing Commander Lance C. Wade, a celebrated fighter ace.

Boston, MA

In 1893 Massachusetts created one of the first regional park systems in the nation, setting aside forests, riverbanks, and shorelines around Boston for public use before the growing city could swallow them. Guided by landscape architects in the tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted, the Metropolitan Park System linked reservations and parkways across dozens of communities. This marker commemorates that system's first hundred years, 1893–1993.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth leased 100 acres on Decatur Road in 1925 for a new municipal airport, timed to the Air Mail Act that year, and by May 1926 National Air Transport — a forerunner of United Airlines — flew the field's first mail run to Chicago. Renamed Meacham Field in 1927 for a former mayor, it gained the nation's first air-conditioned passenger terminal in 1937 and, during World War II, trained U.S. Navy pilots and ferried fighters and torpedo bombers toward the Pacific. After commercial flights moved on in 1953, it became one of the world's leading centers for corporate and general aviation.

Meadow, TX

Meadow began in 1904 on open land grazed by the L-7 Ranch, then moved in 1917 to meet the Santa Fe Railway line — settlers famously arriving in boxcars, livestock in one end and furniture in the other. A boxcar first served as the station until this depot, built in 1911 far to the northeast at White Deer, was moved here in 1923 and used until 1965. Preserved in a park in 1967, it survives as a relic of the town's railroad beginnings.

Medicine Mound, TX

The area's earliest inhabitants were Comanche and Kiowa people who camped around four dolomite hills—the Medicine Mounds—prized for their healing properties. After the land was deeded to a railway in 1854 and Anglo settlers arrived in the 1870s, a small village grew, then relocated 2.5 miles north in 1908 when the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway came through. At its peak Medicine Mound held 22 businesses and 500 people, but the Depression and a 1933 fire that burned the whole town drove its decline, and the last business closed in 1966.

Quanah, TX

Built in 1910 by the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway, this depot stood in country sacred to Chief Quanah Parker's Comanches, who came to the nearby mounds to pray and to roll in the gypsum dust they believed could heal. Later a Santa Fe station, it saw its share of holdups and shootings — it still carries bullet holes — yet survived the 1935 fire that consumed the rest of the town. Retired in 1959, it was hauled down Highway 287 to its present home.

Beeville, TX

Spaniards named this creek 'Medio'—middle—around 1800 for its position midway between the San Antonio and Nueces Rivers, and explorers, padres, soldiers, and settlers crossed it on three ox-cart roads running from Mexico to Mission La Bahía at Goliad. The freight route sparked the 1857 Cart War between Texan and Mexican teamsters, and Mexican drivers' mesquite-bean feed helped seed the brush that lines the banks today. A downstream community rose and fell here—the town of Candlish, founded in 1909, became a ghost town—while nearby fossil beds later yielded a new species of mastodon.

Normanna, TX

Built in 1897 by the New Jersey Iron and Steel Company, this steel Pratt through-truss bridge carried the main road from Beeville to San Antonio across Medio Creek. Bee County funded its $3,990 cost by selling bonds from the permanent school fund, and the span rested on riveted-steel caissons that let it survive flood after flood. Repaired in 1923 and re-decked in 1947, it stayed in service for vehicles until 1987.

Megargel, TX

Megargel was born of the railroad in 1910, when the Gulf, Texas & Western pushed its tracks across Archer County and a townsite company platted a new town named for the line's president. Within months it had stores, a hotel, a bank, and a school, and it boomed again in 1923 when the nearby Swastika oilfield came in, bringing hundreds of wells, a theater, and one of Texas' earliest high school bands. A downtown fire, the Great Depression, and the abandonment of the railroad during World War II thinned its ranks, but oil and agriculture kept the town alive.

Megargel, TX

In the 1880s Archer County drew settlers including Irish native James Colgan and numerous families of Bohemian descent bearing names like Kulhanek, Bohac, and Pechacek. When the GT&W Railroad arrived in 1910, the town of Megargel was founded, and that same year Dr. W.T. Webb buried his infant son here in the first grave of what became the community cemetery. Maintained by an association, it holds settlers and military veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War.

McCamey, TX

In 1683–1684, Lt. Gen. Juan Dominguez de Mendoza led a party of 35 across the future Upton County on a Spanish expedition to explore the Pecos Plains, gather river pearls, and bring Christianity to the Jumano Indians. Setting out from below El Paso, the group founded San Clemente Mission where the Concho met the Colorado. Two centuries later, cattlemen following the Goodnight-Loving trail retraced part of Mendoza's route.

Houston, TX

Completed in 1930 during Houston's post–World War I economic surge, the Merchants and Manufacturers Building was raised to serve the city's traders and makers, sited to tap water, rail, and truck transport in one spot. Known as the M&M Building, it drew notice for its structural ingenuity and its striking cast-concrete Art Deco ornament. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1984.

Salt Lake City, UT

This monument marks the Salt Lake Base and Meridian, the fixed reference point from which the public-land surveys of Utah were laid out. Established in the mid-1850s as Mormon settlers organized the valley, the base and meridian anchored the grid of townships and ranges that would define land ownership across the territory. Nearly every property line and road alignment in the region traces back to this single surveyed origin.

Merit, TX

Merit began as an Upland South farming settlement on the rolling Blackland Prairie of Hunt County, its Methodist congregation organized in 1871 and its name drawn from a visiting judge, William W. Merritt. The railroad's arrival in 1886 spurred cotton, stores, lodges, and a newspaper — and in 1912 robbers famously blew the bank vault open with nitroglycerin for $4,500. The community cemetery, deeded by Dr. Alexander Murchison in 1907, still holds veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam and is one of the county's few surviving swept-grave burial grounds.

Mesquite, TX

This ground was already a burial place before the Texas and Pacific Railroad founded the city of Mesquite in 1873, its earliest marked grave dating to 1859. In 1890 local builder and civic leader Louis C. Ebrite laid out the cemetery in the grid of driveways still used today, and it was formally deeded for cemetery use two years later. It continues to honor area veterans and the generations of families who built Mesquite.

Bowling Green, OH

These paving bricks, stamped 'Metropolitan Block, Canton, O.,' were salvaged in 2010 from East Wooster Street in Bowling Green, Ohio, where they had been laid in 1901. Brick paving was a hallmark of the Progressive Era's good-roads movement, when American cities traded muddy dirt streets for durable, mass-produced paving brick shipped from Ohio's booming clay-products industry. Preserving them keeps a tangible piece of early street-building visible in the modern city.

Comfort, TX

German immigrant Frederich Christian Meyer arrived in Comfort in 1862 and ran a stage stop and weigh station, gradually enlarging a log cabin and building a two-story stone home in 1869 for his wife Ernestine, a midwife who kept a separate building with maternity rooms for the women of the surrounding ranches. As rail lines reached the Hill Country in 1887, the Meyers added a hotel, and Ernestine and her children ran the business for decades after Frederich's death. A daughter, Julia Meyer Ellenberger, added a second guest house in 1920 and operated the complex until 1956.

Troy, OH

In the 1830s Ohio was racing to knit its interior farms to the wider world by water, and the Miami and Erie Canal was the state's grand answer—a hand-dug ribbon eventually linking Cincinnati on the Ohio River to Toledo on Lake Erie. The stretch reaching Troy was carved beginning around 1834, and by 1836 Lock 12 was raising and lowering canal boats through the town, its stone chamber letting vessels step up or down the valley's grade. The Troy section opened with real fanfare on July 4, 1837, when General William Henry Harrison—already a national figure and a future president—joined other dignitaries to mark the occasion. Today only the lock's footprint remains, a quiet trace of the waterway that once carried the region's grain, pork, and passengers.

Tipp City, OH

In the 1830s, canal fever swept Ohio as the young state raced to link its farms to the wider world. The Miami and Erie Canal, whose Lock 15 section here was dug between 1833 and 1837, was part of an ambitious waterway that eventually stretched some 250 miles from Cincinnati on the Ohio River to Toledo on Lake Erie. Locks like this one raised and lowered mule-drawn boats step by step across the region's changing elevation, and the towns that grew up along the towpath — Tipp City among them — owed their early prosperity to the barges gliding past.

Saint Marys Township, OH

This marker stands along the route of the Miami and Erie Canal, the great 274-mile waterway that once linked Cincinnati on the Ohio River to Toledo on Lake Erie. Begun in the 1820s and completed in the 1840s, the canal climbed Ohio's interior through a chain of numbered locks like this one, each a stone-and-timber chamber that raised and lowered boats step by step across the landscape. Lock 8 sat in the summit region near St. Marys, where feeder reservoirs kept the channel full at its highest elevation. The signs here, placed by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, guide visitors along the towpath from one surviving lock and mile marker to the next.

Miami, TX

The town of Miami took shape when the Santa Fe's Southern Kansas branch pushed through in 1887, and its cemetery followed close behind, with pioneer William T. Lard's reinterred grave among the earliest. In 1900 the Scottish-owned Cresswell Ranche & Cattle Company sold Roberts County several acres for a burying ground, deeded to Judge S.G. Carter for a single dollar. Shaded by cedar and cypress in the open Panhandle style, it holds Civil War veterans, soldiers of two world wars and Korea, and two Texas Rangers.

Miami, TX

When the Southern Kansas Railway Company of Texas laid track through Roberts County in 1887, the town of Miami sprang up at the end of the line as a workers' camp with a tent hotel and a field kitchen. The railroad sank a public water well and strung telegraph lines to nearby Fort Elliott, and passengers and supplies for the fort and the town of Mobeetie began arriving by rail. This depot was built in 1888, passed to the Santa Fe Railroad in 1899, and stayed in service until 1978.

Auglaize Township, OH

In the boom years of American canal-building, two great artificial waterways—the Miami & Erie, linking Lake Erie to the Ohio River, and the Wabash & Erie, reaching west toward Indiana—came together at the aptly named town of Junction. For roughly four decades the meeting point pulsed with barge traffic, timber, and freight, drawing settlers and commerce deep into the wet, forested flatlands of northwest Ohio. The canals also offered quiet passage to freedom seekers moving north, a reminder that these ditches carried people as well as cargo. When the railroads arrived, the slow-moving canal economy withered, and the towpaths that once bustled now serve hikers tracing the old route.