Hard Roads The Trail US 1 · the marked miles
A trail down the marked miles
Hard Roads

Route 1 keeps its hardest stories at the roadside: a plank road men died holding in 1864, a beach where a record run came apart at 202 miles an hour, burial grounds the cities built over and had to find again. This trail reads the markers.

01
Chapter I

The Marked Miles

The highway itself remembers nothing. Every name on it was put there by somebody who refused to let it go — cast into iron, cut into granite, planted in wire grass at the edge of the pavement.

The state marker for the Boydton & Petersburg Plank Road · Dinwiddie County, VA
Charles Stewart, the enslaved horseman, remembered at the roadside
The memorial walk at Court & Chestnut · Portsmouth, NH
Southbound, the long way down

The geography of loss →

ARLINGTON
Freedman’s Village, when it was fifty houses and a hospital · 1860s
RICHMOND
The penitentiary courtyard, when Route 1 had walls · archival
PETERSBURG
The Burgess Mill marker, near where the plank road fighting ended · Dinwiddie County
RALEIGH
A sunflower field planted for healing, the skyline behind it · Raleigh, NC
AUGUSTA
The Bell Auditorium, when Ray Charles played it · Augusta, GA
02
Chapter III

The Road Kept Taking

It did not stop with the war. In March 1929 a Daytona garage mechanic named Lee Bible took a seven-ton car called the Triplex past 200 miles an hour on the beach, chasing the world speed record; the car came apart, and it killed the cameraman filming it too. In June 1946, Jack Johnson — the first Black heavyweight champion — drove away from a restaurant that refused to serve him and met a light pole outside Franklinton, North Carolina. And on the evening of January 30, 2025, a passenger jet and an Army helicopter met over the Potomac, a few hundred yards off Route 1. The road keeps taking. What changes is how carefully we mark the spot.

03
Chapter IV

What Was Built in Answer

The dead get buildings too. Richmond raised a church over the ashes of its burned theatre. Black Stafford County raised its own school. And the Hampton-Preston House — all veranda and chandeliers — finally tells the whole story of the enslaved people who built it. Memory, when it comes, comes as architecture.

Box pews and blue columns · the Monumental Church, Richmond
The county training school Black Stafford built for its own · Stafford, VA
The Hampton-Preston House, telling the whole story now · Columbia, SC
1864 photograph: Battery B, 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery, in the field south of Petersburg, Virginia.
1864 · Timothy H. O’Sullivan / Library of Congress · public domain
The Boydton Plank Road 1864

Route 1 south of Petersburg still rides the plank road laid in 1851. In the fall of 1864 it was the city’s last lifeline — and men died in the ditches beside it.

Lee Bible March 1929

A Daytona garage mechanic, past 200 miles an hour in the seven-ton Triplex, chasing the world record on the beach. The car came apart. Charles Traub, the cameraman filming him, died too.

Jack Johnson at the wheel of his 90-horsepower Thomas Flyer.
Louis Van Oeyen / Library of Congress · public domain
Jack Johnson June 10, 1946

Refused service at a roadside restaurant, the Galveston Giant drove away angry and met a light pole outside Franklinton, NC. He was 68. A wreath still appears at the pole once a year.

The African Burial Ground site in lower Manhattan.
Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress · public domain
The African Burial Ground found again · 1991

Over 20,000 free and enslaved Africans were buried here between the 1630s and 1795, less than a mile from the Holland Tunnel. The city built over them, then dug the truth back up.

Freedman's Village, Arlington, Virginia, during the Civil War.
Civil War glass negatives / Library of Congress · public domain
Freedman’s Village 1863

On land seized from Robert E. Lee’s estate: fifty houses, farms, a hospital, an orphanage, a home for the elderly. The village is gone; a bridge a mile off Route 1 carries the name.

The African Burying Ground Portsmouth, NH

New England’s oldest known African American cemetery, at the corner of Court and Chestnut. Built over, forgotten, found again — now a memorial walk in the middle of town.

The verge keeps what the road won’t.
0 Stops where the road remembers
0 Miles an hour when the Triplex let go · 1929
0 Souls in the Manhattan ground, found again in 1991
Every stop on the trail

The road keeps
the names.

The verge is still out there

Pass a marker lately?

Walk the whole trail → Add one you remember
Know a roadside that remembers something? It belongs on the trail.