In 1903, the Smithsonian's own chief scientist crashed a $50,000 federally funded flying machine into the Potomac River. Nine days later, two bicycle mechanics with no government money and no formal training got a machine off the ground on a North Carolina sand dune and kept it there. The actual field is still marked today, exactly where they landed.

In September 1942, a Japanese pilot named Nobuo Fujita dropped incendiary bombs on the Oregon forest outside Brookings — the only enemy bombing of the continental United States during World War II. Twenty years later he came back, stood before the town, and gave them his family's 400-year-old samurai sword as a pledge of peace. He kept returning for the rest of his life. The sword is still at the Brookings library.

In September 1942, the only enemy pilot to bomb the continental United States used the Cape Blanco Lighthouse as a navigation fix to find his target. He came back three weeks later — the entire Oregon coast was blacked out, except for Cape Blanco, which was still lit. Five miles south, Port Orford is the westernmost incorporated city in the lower 48, with a commercial fishing harbor so exposed to the open Pacific that every boat in the fleet gets lifted in and out of the ocean by crane.

In the 1880s, a wealthy young woman attended a girls' school in a small Connecticut town, fell in love with it, taught herself architecture, and designed her parents' retirement home on a hilltop there — filling it with Impressionist paintings by Monet, Degas, Whistler, and Cassatt. She survived the Lusitania. She became the first licensed female architect in Connecticut. When she died, she left instructions that nothing be moved. The Hill-Stead Museum is exactly as she left it.

In 1973, a broke Vietnam veteran couldn't afford new tools for his salvage logging company, so he started collecting the old junk nobody else wanted. Decades later, that accidental collection became one of the last working Victorian machine shops in America — using the exact kind of equipment that built this redwood lumber town's ornate mansions in the first place.

In 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, a college theater teacher convinced his town to let him stage Shakespeare in the crumbling remains of an old Chautauqua tabernacle. It grew into one of the largest professional repertory theaters in the country, still drawing over a hundred thousand people a year to a town of barely twenty thousand.

John Brown Herreshoff went blind in his twenties. In 1878, he and his brother Nathanael opened a boatbuilding company in this Rhode Island town anyway — and for the next forty years, every single winning America's Cup yacht, eight consecutive defenses in a row, came out of their shipyard.

In 1837, three brothers named George, Clark, and Thomas Greenman opened a shipyard on the Mystic River — one yard that alone built more than a hundred ships before the century was out. When steam power made wooden sailing ships obsolete, a group of locals founded what's now the largest maritime museum in the country, still holding the last surviving wooden whaling ship from America's entire commercial whaling era.

In 1820, Washington Irving wrote a ghost story set around an old churchyard on the Hudson River. Decades later he helped found the cemetery built right next door — and was buried there himself when he died, fulfilling a wish he'd written down years before.

In 1874, an inventor and a Methodist bishop started a summer training camp for Sunday school teachers on a lake in western New York. It grew into something so influential that the word "Chautauqua" became the generic name for traveling educational assemblies that toured small towns across the country for decades.