Quarter Miles Travel With Annita

Radio segment from Mornings on Maine With Bill Maine

Pet travel stats, airline and national park rules, and five great Southern getaways for you and your dog

Annita and her English Lab.

By Annita Stokes Thomas

If there’s a dog riding shotgun in your car more often these days, you’re not imagining it. Americans are traveling with their pets in record numbers, and the hospitality industry is scrambling to keep up. Here’s a look at where that trend stands right now, what to know before you fly or head into a national park with your dog, and five great Southern destinations worth the trip.

Are We Really Traveling With Our Dogs?

Short answer: yes, and more every year. Multiple recent surveys peg the number of American pet owners who travel with their pets annually at right around 78 percent. More than half of dog and cat owners say they now plan their trips around their pet, not the other way around.

And it’s not just a domestic trend. A global pet-parent study out last year found that 56 percent of people worldwide now own a pet, with nearly half of those being first-time owners, a whole new generation of pet parents who don’t want to leave the dog behind. A 2025 survey of US and UK travelers found that 27 percent of pet owners who brought their pet on a big vacation last year were doing it for the very first time.

The number one reason people leave the dog at home? Fear that travel would be too stressful for the pet — that’s the top reason cited, followed by not trusting that a destination is truly pet-friendly.

How are they getting there?

The trend line is clear: dogs are road-tripping more than ever, hotels are adapting fast, and flying — while it’s growing — comes with a lot more fine print.

A little dog in an airline pet carrier sized to fit under the seat in front of you. 

Flying With Fido: What the Airlines Actually Allow

Here’s something that surprises a lot of people: as of this year, only two major U.S. airlines will still fly a dog in the cargo hold for an everyday passenger — Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. American, Delta, United, Southwest, JetBlue, Spirit, and Frontier have all discontinued or paused their pet cargo programs for the general public. If you’ve got a bigger dog who can’t fit under an airplane seat, your options for flying with them have really narrowed.

Here’s the cabin picture, airline by airline:

One more wrinkle worth knowing: the rules changed a few years back for emotional support animals. They no longer have protected status the way a trained service dog does — airlines can now treat an ESA like any other pet, subject to the regular carrier fees. A true service dog still flies free, but it needs the Department of Transportation’s standard Service Animal Air Transportation Form, usually submitted 48 hours ahead of the flight.

Bottom line: if your dog is small enough to ride under the seat, flying is very doable, just book early, since cabin pet spots are limited per flight. If you’ve got a bigger dog, ground transportation is your best bet, which most pet-travel experts say is safer and less stressful anyway.

Expert traveler tip – always call ahead to check airline rules, regulations and fees. They change and your fur baby is looking forward to the trip too.  And, always consider your pet’s temperament. Talk with your vet about the best way to ensure a pleasure flight for your pet, you and the other passengers.

National Parks and most campsites have specific rules to follow.

Can Your Dog Come to the National Park?

If your road trip includes a national park, here’s what to know before you go: most national parks allow dogs, but with real restrictions. The National Park Service uses a simple rule of thumb called B.A.R.K. — Bag your pet’s waste, Always use a leash, Respect wildlife, and Know where you can go.

Some of the more dog-friendly national parks people point to include Acadia in Maine, Shenandoah in Virginia, Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, and Cuyahoga Valley in Ohio, which welcomes just about any domesticated animal. Always check the specific park’s website before you go — rules vary park to park, and some, like Sequoia, don’t allow dogs on any trails at all.

Expert traveler tip – Check before leaving, but also check Facebook pages to see how other National Park visitors have experienced the park with their dog. Many hikers share personal experiences both challenging and excitingly fun.

America’s Most Pet-Friendly Cities: The Study

Traveling with your fur baby is fun for the whole family.

There’s a well-known study out from WalletHub called “Most Pet-Friendly Cities,” updated again for 2026. It compares the 100 largest U.S. cities across 23 different measures, grouped into three categories: pet budget, worth 25 percent of the score and covering things like vet costs and insurance; pet health and wellness, the biggest category at 50 percent, covering vets and trainers per capita and dog-friendly dining; and outdoor pet-friendliness, worth the final 25 percent, covering parks, trails, and weather.

Top five for 2026: Scottsdale, Arizona; Tampa, Florida; Cincinnati, Ohio; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Portland, Oregon.

Also cracking the top ten: Orlando, Birmingham, Lexington-Fayette, Austin — and our own Atlanta, Georgia.

Dead last, at number 100: Honolulu, Hawaii.

Here’s the catch: this study only covers the 100 largest U.S. cities, which means Charleston, Savannah, and St. Augustine are all too small to even be measured by it — Atlanta is the only one of the five Southern cities below big enough to show up on this particular list. For the smaller, more historic towns, the rankings below come from different, more specialized studies.

Bring along your fur baby with these suggestions. 

Five Of My Favorite Trips for You and Your Dog

Atlanta — The Day Trip

Atlanta ranked 9th out of the 100 largest U.S. cities in that WalletHub 2026 study — the only one of today’s five cities big enough to make that particular list. It scored well on vet access, pet businesses per capita, and walkability.

Where to walk: Piedmont Park, with its off-leash Piedmont Dog Park, and the Atlanta BeltLine, which has become the go-to spot for locals walking their dogs on weekends.

Two dog-friendly restaurants: Joy Cafe near Piedmont Park, where the chef makes food for humans and dogs alike — dogs can order burgers or grilled chicken breast off their own menu — and Hampton + Hudson in Inman Quarter, which has a big pet-friendly patio and even hosts Sunday “Doggie Mingle” hours with a signature Puppy Love Cocktail that benefits local rescues.

Two pet-friendly hotels: The Kimpton Sylvan in Buckhead, which welcomes dogs with no size limit and no pet fee at all, plus washed dog beds and treats in the room; and the Four Seasons in Midtown, which bakes a complimentary biscuit for dogs 35 pounds and under at check-in.

Athens — Game Day With the Bulldogs

Athens didn’t make the WalletHub top-100 list since it’s too small, but it did land at number 32 out of 500 cities in a separate, broader study from LawnStarter — specifically called out for its generous yard space, meaning lots of room for dogs to roam.

Dog parks: Athens has close to 20 acres of off-leash space spread across its parks. Memorial Park has a wooded, 1.5-acre off-leash dog park on a hillside, and Sandy Creek Park — a sprawling 782-acre park around Lake Chapman — has four fenced off-leash areas plus private dog parks you can rent by the hour.

Hotels: The Graduate Athens — formerly the site of an old ironworks foundry — allows two pets up to 50 pounds for a $50 fee, and Hotel Indigo downtown charges a flat $75 pet fee.

Restaurants: Mama’s Boy, the beloved Southern brunch spot, welcomes dogs on its patio — try the Georgia peach French toast; Paloma Park downtown has a spacious back patio and even features guest dogs on its own pet Instagram account; and if you want a beer after the game, Terrapin Beer Co. has a big dog-friendly yard.

Savannah — Coastal R&R

Heading to the coast for some rest and relaxation, Savannah is hard to beat. It ranked 74th out of 500 cities in that LawnStarter study, standing out for its density of dog-friendly shopping and dining.

Savannah’s famous squares are genuinely built for dog walking — 22 shaded squares under Spanish moss, connected by a walkable historic grid, with leashed dogs welcome throughout. Forsyth Park, the crown jewel at the south end, has a mile-long paved perimeter path that’s a favorite for morning walks and doubles as the site of the Saturday Forsyth Farmers’ Market, where plenty of dogs come along.

Dog parks: Herty Pines Dog Park, on the edge of Daffin Park, is the local favorite — fully fenced, well-shaded, with separate sections for big and small dogs. Mother Matilda Beasley Dog Park sits right downtown on East Broad Street if you don’t want to leave the historic district.

Hotels: The Mansion on Forsyth Park welcomes one dog up to 60 pounds for $150 per stay, right across from the park itself; and the Olde Harbour Inn, voted Savannah’s best pet-friendly hotel by the Savannah Morning News, sits directly on River Street.

Restaurants: Look for patio dining throughout the historic district — it’s genuinely common in Savannah to see a dog resting under the table while its owner has dinner. Ask when you sit down; you’ll be surprised how often the answer is yes.

Charleston — Beaches, Bars, and the Famous Dog Menu

A well-cited 2020 Vetnaturals analysis crowned Charleston the single most dog-friendly city in the entire country, measuring dog-friendly venues, hotels, and beaches per capita. Charleston had 161 dog-friendly venues per capita — the highest of any city studied — plus more dog-friendly beaches per capita than anywhere else in America.

The beaches: Isle of Palms allows dogs on the beach year-round, with off-leash hours early in the morning and evening; Folly Beach allows dogs on the sand daily before 10 a.m. and after 6 p.m., and off-leash entirely from October through April.

And then there’s Saltwater Cowboys, right on Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant. This waterfront seafood spot has a genuinely famous dog-friendly deck — dolphins and shrimp boats pass right by while you eat — and it’s one of the rare restaurants with an entire separate dog treat menu, alongside its regular food menu, drink menu, and gazebo bar menu.

What’s on the dog menu: Dog-friendly hamburgers and fish, a doggy version of a margarita, dog beer, and even puppy ice cream for dessert. Fido eats right there on the dog-friendly outdoor deck alongside you, with water service and treats provided as a matter of course.

Two Charleston hotels for your dog: The Charleston Place downtown has a whole “Pet in Residence” package, a dog bed, bowls, a leash and collar for the stay, and even a pet-sitting session arranged through Charleston Dog Walkers, all with no pet fee; and the Tides Folly Beach, Charleston’s only true oceanfront hotel, allows two dogs of any size for a flat $100 per stay, and sends up a house-made “Folly Beach Dog Rules” brochure along with bowls and a bed.

St. Augustine — Further South on the Road Trip

Keep driving south down A1A into St. Augustine — the nation’s oldest city, and one that the pet-travel site BringFido specifically calls out as a top dog-friendly destination, thanks to its historic sites, beaches, and year-round mild weather.

St. Augustine’s beaches are leashed-dog friendly along most of A1A Beach Boulevard — a real rarity, since so few Florida beaches allow dogs at all. The one exception to know: Anastasia State Park does not allow dogs, since it’s a protected bird sanctuary.

Dog parks: Treaty Park, just south of downtown, has a fully fenced, off-leash “Paws Dog Park” with separate small- and large-dog areas, watering holes, and even a mock fire hydrant; and if you’re staying at the beach, Ron Parker Park has its own off-leash dog run just off Old Beach Road.

Hotels: The Saint Augustine Beach House sits right across the street from St. Augustine Beach, with a fenced dog run and a dog-washing station on site for rinsing off sandy paws; and the historic Bayfront Marin House downtown welcomes two pets up to 75 pounds in designated rooms.

Restaurants: St. Augustine has more than 20 pet-friendly restaurants according to the local tourism board — Salt Life Food Shack and Harry’s Seafood Bar & Grille are two reliable, casual options with dog-friendly outdoor seating.

Let BringFido.com Do the Homework for You

Before you head out on any dog trip, pull up BringFido.com or the BringFido app. It’s the one resource that consistently shows up across every city covered above — Atlanta, Athens, Savannah, Charleston, and St. Augustine all have dedicated BringFido guides. You can search pet-friendly hotels with exact weight limits and fees, browse restaurants with confirmed outdoor pet policies, and filter by dog parks and beaches in whatever city you’re headed to next. It’s free, it’s specific to dogs — not just generically “pet friendly” — and it’ll save you a phone call to double-check a hotel’s policy before you arrive with a very excited Labrador in the back seat.

Check what’s allowed before you leave home.

Traveling With Your Dog: The Do’s and Don’ts

Do:

Don’t:

From the BeltLine in Atlanta to a dog beer on Shem Creek in Charleston, the South is one giant welcome mat for your four-legged travel companion. Wherever your next trip takes you and your dog, safe travels.

A girl and her dog – on Nanny Goat Beach – Sapelo Island, GA. 

COLD OPEN

[SOUND: Quill scratching on parchment. A gavel, once, distant. Silence.]

ANNITA (V.O.):

In the summer of 1787, in a locked room in Philadelphia, fifty-five men sat down to build a government. And for weeks, in that room, they talked about hundreds of thousands of human beings — argued about them, bargained over them, measured them, weighed their worth against tax revenue and political power — and not one of those human beings was ever asked what they thought. Not one of them was in the room. Not one of them had a vote, a voice, or a name that made it into the record.

They were husbands and wives. Mothers who had already buried children sold away from them. Grandfathers who remembered a homeland none of these delegates could have pointed to on a map. Blacksmiths, healers, midwives, farmers, cooks — entire lives, entire families, entire histories, reduced in that room to a single question: how much of a person should the law say they were.

The men in that room decided on three-fifths. Not because they believed it. Because it was useful.

[SOUND: Silence holds, then fades.]

This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. On this show, I always tell you — we say their names, and we tell their stories. But today, that promise is harder to keep than it’s ever been. Because the truth is, we don’t have most of their names. History didn’t record them. The Constitution didn’t ask for them. An entire population was debated, decided, and written into law — without a single one of them ever being permitted to speak for themselves in that room.

So today, we’re not just telling you what happened in Philadelphia in 1787. We’re standing in for the hundreds of thousands of voices that should have been in that room and weren’t — and we’re telling their story anyway, exactly as fully and as honestly as we can, because somebody finally should.

SEGMENT ONE: The Number That Came Before

[SOUND: Soft, sparse instrumental bed, low — something unresolved, not comforting]

ANNITA (V.O.):

This story doesn’t start in Philadelphia in 1787. It starts four years earlier, in 1783, in a much quieter argument about money.

Under the Articles of Confederation, the fledgling national government had almost no way to fund itself. It could only ask the states for money — “requisitions” — based on the value of land within each state, a system nobody could measure fairly or enforce honestly. So Congress considered a fix: base each state’s tax burden on population instead.

And here, for the first time, the question arrived — a question this country would spend the next seventy-eight years failing to answer honestly. If a state’s population determined what it owed, did enslaved people count as part of that population?

James Madison, then a young Virginia delegate to the Confederation Congress, proposed a number: three-fifths. It wasn’t drawn from any principle about human worth. It was, by most accounts, simply a number that split the difference between two sides who couldn’t agree on anything else. That 1783 proposal came up for a vote as an amendment to the Articles — and it failed, falling two states short of the unanimous approval required.

But a number, once spoken aloud in a room full of powerful men, doesn’t simply disappear. It waits.

SEGMENT TWO: The Room Reopens the Question

ANNITA (V.O.):

Four years later, delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia, in the same stifling summer heat we’ve talked about before on this show, to write an entirely new Constitution. And on June 11th, 1787, the three-fifths number walked back into the room.

It was delegate James Wilson of Pennsylvania who formally reintroduced it — proposing that enslaved people be counted at a three-fifths ratio as an amendment to the Virginia Plan, the framework then being debated for how the new government would be structured. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina seconded it.

Here’s something worth sitting with: Wilson wasn’t a slaveholder, and by most historical accounts, he wasn’t ideologically committed to protecting slavery. He appears to have simply reached for a number that had almost worked once before — a number he calculated might actually get enough votes to hold this fragile convention together. Practicality, not principle, put that fraction back on the table.

And once it was on the table, the room split — but not in the way you might expect.

SEGMENT THREE: The Argument Nobody Wants to Admit They Made

[SOUND: Music drops low, more tense]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Here is the detail that should stop you cold, and it’s the one most people never learn: the two sides of this debate did not argue from principle. They argued from advantage — and they switched sides entirely, depending on what was being counted.

When it came to representation — how many seats a state got in Congress, how many electoral votes it held — southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted as full persons. Every enslaved person counted meant more political power for the state that held them in bondage.

Northern delegates objected. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts asked the room a question that exposed the entire moral rot of the argument in a single sentence: why should “the blacks, who were property in the South, be in the rule of representation more than the cattle & horses of the North?” Notice what that question does. Gerry is arguing against the compromise — and even in his objection, he reaches for cattle and horses as his comparison. This was not, on either side of the room, a debate about the humanity of enslaved people. It was a debate about property, dressed in the language of political philosophy.

But then came taxation — and the exact same men flipped their positions entirely. When it came to how much a state would owe in federal taxes, southern delegates suddenly wanted enslaved people counted as little as possible, to keep their tax burden low. Northern delegates now wanted them counted fully, to raise it.

Let that sink in. The very same enslaved human being was, in the same room, in the same week, argued to be a full person when it helped the North, a full person when it helped the South, and no person at all when it helped either side avoid a cost. The only consistent principle in the entire debate was self-interest.

South Carolina’s John Rutledge said the quiet part aloud, telling the convention plainly: “Religion & Humanity had nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with Nations.” His fellow South Carolinian, Charles Pinckney, went further, declaring that his state would never accept Congress “meddling with the importation of negroes” — a warning that slavery, and the ongoing trade in human beings, was not up for negotiation at all.

And some southern delegates made an even starker threat. They stated outright that they would “never confederate” — that they would walk out, refuse to join this new nation entirely — unless enslaved people were counted at a ratio of at least three-fifths. The compromise, in other words, wasn’t reached through persuasion. It was reached through the threat of national collapse.

One voice in that room said something closer to the truth than almost anyone else. Gouverneur Morris of New York called slavery a “nefarious institution… the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” He attacked the compromise directly, for rewarding the act of enslaving people with more political power — the more a state enslaved, the more it would be represented in the very government built on the promise of liberty.

SEGMENT FOUR: The Compromise, Written Into Law

ANNITA (V.O.):

In the end, the room settled on the same fraction it had nearly settled on four years earlier. Article One, Section Two, Clause Three of the United States Constitution: representation and taxation would be determined “by adding to the whole Number of free Persons… three fifths of all other Persons.”

They didn’t even use the word “slave.” The Constitution never does — not once, anywhere in its original text. The framers wrote around it deliberately, using euphemism to avoid stating plainly what they had just built into the nation’s founding law. Three-fifths of all other persons. A whole system of human bondage, folded into a single evasive phrase.

And it worked — not morally, but mechanically. It held the convention together. It got the South to sign on to a union it might otherwise have refused. And it embedded, permanently, into the mathematics of American democracy, the idea that enslaved human beings were worth counting, but not worth freeing.

[SOUND: Music softens into something heavier, more solemn]

SEGMENT FIVE: What It Built — The Presidency and the Power

ANNITA (V.O.):

The effect was not abstract. It was immediate, measurable, and it shaped the government for generations.

Because House seats — and therefore Electoral College votes, since electoral votes are based on congressional representation — were calculated using three-fifths of the enslaved population, southern states received significantly more political power than their actual voting population ever justified. Not one enslaved person could cast a ballot. And yet their existence, counted at sixty percent value, inflated the power of the very people who held them in chains.

The numbers tell the story bluntly. After the 1790 census, enslaved people made up roughly 39 percent of Virginia’s population, 43 percent of South Carolina’s. Constitutional scholar Akhil Amar has pointed out that after the 1800 census, Pennsylvania’s free population was actually ten percent larger than Virginia’s — and yet Virginia received twenty percent more electoral votes. Pennsylvania’s power came from free citizens who could vote. Virginia’s came, in significant part, from human beings who could not.

The result: for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years under this Constitution, a white, slaveholding Virginian held the presidency of the United States.

And there’s one election historians point to again and again. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent, John Adams. Historian Garry Wills has argued that without the extra electoral votes Virginia and other southern states gained through the three-fifths clause, Jefferson likely does not win that election at all. Some historians trace consequences outward from that single result — the admission of Missouri as a slave state, the trajectory of Indian removal policy, decades of legislative compromises that kept expanding slavery’s reach. Whether you follow every link in that chain or not, the central fact holds: this compromise didn’t just shape political theory. It plausibly changed who held the most powerful office in the country, at a moment that shaped everything after it.

SEGMENT SIX: The Incentive Nobody Wanted to Say Out Loud

ANNITA (V.O.):

Here is where this story turns from abstract political mechanics into something that reached directly into the lives of enslaved people, and it’s a detail that deserves far more attention than it usually gets.

Some northern delegates, right there in the debate, raised an uncomfortable warning: if enslaved people counted toward political representation, it would create a direct incentive for southern states to hold — and import — more of them. Not simply because enslaved labor built plantation wealth, which it already did. But because every enslaved person now represented a literal unit of political power for the state that claimed ownership of them.

Think about what that means. A system that already reduced human beings to property now layered a second incentive on top of the first — human beings as a source of state power, not just plantation profit. And this is precisely why the Constitution’s protection of the international slave trade — the compromise that barred Congress from banning it until at least 1808 — sits alongside the three-fifths clause as two halves of the same machine. One clause protected the ongoing importation of enslaved people. The other made every one of them, once imported, worth more to the state that held them, politically as well as economically.

SEGMENT SEVEN: Did They Know?

[SOUND: Music thins to near silence]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Here’s a question worth asking honestly, and I want to answer it honestly too, rather than claim more certainty than the historical record actually gives us.

Enslaved people across the South were, by law, overwhelmingly denied literacy. The Constitutional Convention itself was conducted in near-total secrecy — the delegates didn’t release detailed records of their debates to the public at the time, let alone to enslaved communities specifically. There is no clear historical record of enslaved people referencing “three-fifths” by that specific name.

But here’s what we do know: enslaved communities maintained sophisticated, active networks of information — historians often call it the grapevine telegraph — through which news of the outside world moved by word of mouth, sometimes faster and more accurately than official channels expected. It is entirely plausible, even likely, that many enslaved people understood, in a general and deeply felt way, that the government forming around them was counting their existence for the benefit of the very people who enslaved them, while granting them nothing in return. They may not have known the fraction. They almost certainly understood the arithmetic in their bones — that they were being used, and not being freed.

SEGMENT EIGHT: The Undoing, and What Remained

ANNITA (V.O.):

The three-fifths clause survived for seventy-eight years — through the growth of the plantation economy it helped protect, through the presidencies it helped elect, through decades of laws and compromises that expanded slavery’s reach across a growing nation. It survived until the Civil War finally broke the political structure it had helped build.

In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment formally superseded the three-fifths clause, mandating that the whole number of persons in each state be counted, regardless of race. The fraction was gone from the law.

But a fraction, once written into the founding document of a nation, doesn’t simply vanish from a country’s memory the way it vanishes from a legal text.

SEGMENT NINE: What the Fraction Left Behind

ANNITA (V.O.):

I want to be careful and honest here, because this is where history stops being simple and starts being something people genuinely disagree about — and that disagreement itself is part of the story.

Some historians and legal scholars argue that the Electoral College — the very system that still elects American presidents today — carries the direct legacy of the three-fifths clause, since the compromise was built explicitly to boost slaveholding states’ influence over presidential selection, and the structure it produced has outlived the clause that shaped it. Other scholars push back on drawing too straight a line from 1787 to the present, arguing the Electoral College has evolved and been defended on other grounds since. That debate is very much alive today, and it’s not my place to settle it for you — only to tell you that serious people, looking honestly at the same history, land in different places on how much of that original architecture still shapes American elections now.

What isn’t up for debate is this: for seventeen decades and counting, American schoolchildren have learned that their country’s founding document once measured a human being’s worth as three-fifths of a whole — a number chosen not out of any belief in partial humanity, but out of naked political calculation, argued by men who, in the very same debate, revealed they saw enslaved people as comparable to cattle and horses when it suited their argument, and as full political assets when it suited their power.

That fact doesn’t stay contained in 1787. It’s part of the inheritance every American carries, whether they’ve ever heard the word “compromise” attached to it or not — a reminder, written into the mathematics of the nation’s founding, that the promise of “all men are created equal” was, from its very first draft, a promise this country chose not to keep for everyone in the room.

[SOUND: Music holds low, weighted]

CLOSE

[SOUND: Music swells softly under the narration]

ANNITA (V.O.):

There is no version of this story where a clean answer waits at the end. There’s no dog who gets his statue forty years late, no woman who wins her freedom in a single courtroom victory. This is a story about a whole population, reduced to a fraction, by men who could not even agree on their own reasons for doing it — only on the fact that doing it kept the union together.

Three-fifths of a person. Argued over, not because anyone believed it was true, but because it was useful. Used to build a government, to elect a presidency, to protect a trade in human beings for twenty more years, to give power to those who claimed ownership over people who had none.

We cannot travel to a single building and stand where this was made right, because it never fully has been. What we can do is stand in the room where it happened — Independence Hall, where this exact compromise was debated and signed — and refuse to let the fraction go quietly back into the footnotes of history.

[BEAT — sound fades to near-silence]

We say their names — the millions the Constitution reduced to three-fifths, and the delegates who wrote it, argued it, and lived with what it built. And we tell the story, fully, without looking away.

[MUSIC: Theme swells, transition out — held longer than usual before fading]

*Photos at the bottom

SEGMENT ONE — approx. 9:00

[SOUND: Show theme, warm, fades under welcome]

ANNITA:

I’m Annita with Travel With Annita, and this weekend, most of us will fire up a grill, maybe hit one last beach trip, and enjoy a day off work. Let’s talk about The History of America’s Labor Force. But Labor Day didn’t start as a cookout holiday. It started as a protest — and understanding how it became a national holiday tells you almost everything about how hard-fought every single workplace protection in this country has been.

The story actually has two men fighting for credit, and historians still argue about which one truly deserves it. Peter J. McGuire has long been called the “Father of Labor Day” — his gravestone in Pennsauken, New Jersey, is inscribed with those very words, and every year, labor leaders still gather there to honor him. McGuire’s own story is worth knowing: he was the child of Irish immigrants, and he quit school at a young age to go to work himself, long before he ever became a labor leader. He co-founded the United Brotherhood of Carpenters in 1881, and helped lead the movement that eventually became the American Federation of Labor. The AFL-CIO itself has said that McGuire “probably did more than anyone else” to convince skeptical, locally-minded union activists around the country that a national labor federation wasn’t just necessary, but actually possible.

But there’s another man in this story — Matthew Maguire, a machinist who served as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York, and many historians now believe he actually proposed the idea first. It was Maguire who sent out the announcements and invitations for that first Labor Day gathering, and Maguire who rode in the lead carriage of the parade itself. For decades, credit for founding Labor Day actually went to Maguire — it wasn’t until 1924, forty years after the fact, that the credit was formally shifted over to McGuire instead, and the debate over who truly deserves the title has never fully settled.

That first parade happened on September 5th, 1882, in New York City. Somewhere between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand workers marched that day, sponsored by an organization called the Knights of Labor — one of the largest and most influential labor organizations of the era, open to nearly all workers regardless of skill, trade, race, or gender, at a time when that kind of inclusiveness in a labor union was genuinely radical. There was no deep historical significance to that particular date, by the way — McGuire simply said it fell about halfway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, giving working families a break during that long stretch of the calendar with no holiday at all.

It took twelve more years, and something far more tragic, to turn that one parade into a national holiday. In the summer of 1894, the Pullman railroad strike erupted — and we’re going to come back to Pullman a little later in the show, because that story matters more than you might think. That strike turned violent, and federal troops were sent in to break it up. Workers died in the clashes. Congress and President Grover Cleveland, looking to make peace with an angry and grieving labor movement, rushed a bill through just days after the strike ended, and Cleveland signed Labor Day into law as a national holiday on June 28th, 1894.

Here’s a detail that doesn’t often make it into the story: Cleveland specifically chose to elevate Labor Day, held safely in September, rather than embrace May Day, the international workers’ holiday already celebrated in many countries. May Day carried socialist and radical associations in the public mind at the time, tied to earlier labor unrest, and Cleveland wanted nothing to do with that reputation. So America ended up with its own separate labor holiday, deliberately distanced from the more radical politics of the labor movements happening elsewhere in the world.

So the very holiday we use to close out summer was born, in part, out of federal troops firing on American workers, and a president trying to calm public anger without embracing the more radical wing of the movement that made the holiday necessary in the first place. When we come back, I want to take you somewhere this history rarely goes — because you cannot talk honestly about American labor without talking about Black workers, both enslaved and free.

[SOUND: Music bridge]

SEGMENT TWO — approx. 9:35

ANNITA:

Welcome back to Travel With Annita.

I want to be honest with you. For the first two hundred fifty years of this nation’s story, Black labor wasn’t paid at all — it was stolen. When emancipation finally came in 1865, the promise was freedom. What actually followed, for millions, was a different kind of chain, dressed up to look like opportunity.

It’s called sharecropping. Formerly enslaved people, with no land and no money, needed to survive. White landowners — sometimes the very people who had enslaved them — needed labor but had no cash to pay wages. So a system formed: a family would work a parcel of land, and in exchange, they’d owe the landowner a share of whatever they grew, often as much as half the harvest. On paper, that sounds almost like a fair trade. In practice, it was a trap, and here’s exactly how the trap worked. Sharecropping families had no money for seed, tools, food, or clothing until harvest time — so they had to borrow against a crop they hadn’t grown yet, usually from a store owned by the very same landlord, at interest rates that could run fifty percent or higher. This is called the crop-lien system, and it functioned like a plantation commissary designed to keep a family owing more than they could ever hope to repay. By the time harvest came and the books were “settled up,” most sharecropping families ended the year owing money, not earning it — trapped for another season, then another, then another, sometimes for generations.

In Georgia alone, by 1910, over fifty percent of Black farmers were sharecroppers or wage laborers, while more than forty percent of white farmers owned their own land outright. Across the entire South, by 1880, nearly eighty percent of Black farmers were sharecroppers or tenants, not landowners. And when Black families tried to organize together — to demand fairer terms, the same way industrial workers up north were organizing into unions — the response was often violent. In Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919. In Camp Hill, Alabama, in 1931. In Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1935. Black sharecroppers who tried to unionize were attacked, and in some cases killed, simply for asking to be paid fairly for their own labor. Historians today describe this system for exactly what it was: freedom in name, but economic bondage in practice — the plantation, rebuilt with paperwork and interest rates instead of chains.

Now let’s bring this closer to home, because Florida has its own chapter of this story, and it deserves to be told just as clearly. Starting in the late 1800s, and picking up heavily in the early 1900s, thousands of Black Bahamians began migrating to South Florida — drawn by the construction of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railroad, the rapid growth of Miami, and agricultural work in citrus groves and the pineapple industry, which the Bahamas themselves had once depended on before disease and hard winters collapsed it. Between 1900 and 1920 alone, somewhere between ten and twelve thousand Bahamians made that crossing — many settling in communities like Coconut Grove, which still carries that island heritage today, in its food, its churches, and its culture. Bahamian men cleared roads and built homes and hotels; Bahamian women staffed the hotels rising up along Florida’s booming coastline. And alongside them worked Black Americans who’d migrated down from Georgia, Mississippi, and across the South — many of them refugees from the very sharecropping system we just described, following the crops from state to state: peaches in South Carolina, cabbage in North Carolina, tomatoes and strawberries right here in Florida.

There’s a literary connection here worth knowing, too. The great Florida-born author Zora Neale Hurston wrote about exactly this world of Black migrant farmworkers in the Everglades muck, laboring around towns like Belle Glade — culminating, in her most famous novel, in the catastrophic 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, which killed thousands, a large share of them Black migrant agricultural workers whose deaths were undercounted and under-mourned for decades afterward. Hurston didn’t invent that world. She documented it.

And then there’s Florida’s sugarcane industry — this piece of the story isn’t ancient history at all. From 1941 all the way into the mid-1990s, virtually every stalk of sugarcane grown in Florida was cut entirely by hand, by workers brought in mostly from Jamaica under a federal guest worker program. Cutting cane by hand, in Florida heat, with machetes, hour after hour, is some of the most physically brutal agricultural labor in this country’s history. Workers were housed in company camps around towns like Belle Glade, paid low wages, and had little real power to push back against unsafe conditions — the same basic pattern of debt and dependency that shaped sharecropping generations earlier, simply relocated to a new crop, a new labor force, a new era.

This history isn’t finished, either. Today, in places like Immokalee, Florida, Haitian and Mexican farmworkers still fight the same fundamental battle — fair wages, humane housing, and freedom from wage theft — carrying forward a fight that Black agricultural workers in this state have been waging for well over a century.

I share all of this because Labor Day cannot only be about factory whistles and union halls in northern cities. It has to include the fields, too — the cane, the citrus, the tomatoes — and the Black hands, enslaved, sharecropped, and migrant, that worked them, mostly without recognition, and often without fair pay at all.

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SEGMENT THREE — approx. 9:35

ANNITA:

Now let’s head north, to the factories, where a different injustice was unfolding at almost exactly the same time.

Here’s a number that should stop you cold: according to the 1900 census, roughly two million American children were working — in factories, mills, mines, cotton fields, and city streets. Some were as young as six or seven years old. Factory owners actually preferred hiring children. They were cheaper to pay, less likely to organize or strike, and small enough to fit into tight spaces around dangerous machinery that adults simply couldn’t reach. A child working a factory job in this era commonly worked twelve to eighteen hours a day, six days a week, for around one dollar. Most weren’t in school. Many couldn’t read.

In 1904, reformers formed the National Child Labor Committee to fight this, and in 1908 they hired a young photographer named Lewis Hine to document what he found. Hine had actually quit his job as a New York City schoolteacher to take on this work, and he went to remarkable lengths to get his photographs — sneaking into mills and mines disguised as a Bible salesman, a postcard vendor, or an industrial photographer simply cataloguing factory machinery, because owners didn’t want the truth photographed and Hine was often thrown out or chased off by police once discovered. He photographed a six-year-old cotton picker in Comanche County, Oklahoma. A fifteen-year-old boy working as a “trapper” deep in a West Virginia coal mine. A twelve-year-old Vermont spinner named Addie Card, who told Hine she’d started working during a school vacation and simply never left the mill again. One of his most haunting images was taken at midnight in an Indiana glass factory, boys working the overnight shift lit only by the furnace glow. Hine put the purpose of his work simply: “There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers.”

Change came, but it came slowly, and it kept running into legal walls. In 1916, Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act, setting real national limits — no factory work under age fourteen, no mine work under sixteen, no more than eight hours a day, no shifts starting before six in the morning or running past seven at night. It looked like real progress. Then, in 1918, the Supreme Court struck the entire law down, in a case called Hammer v. Dagenhart, ruling that Congress had overstepped its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. Reformers tried again a few years later with a different legal approach — a tax penalty on companies that employed children — and the Supreme Court struck that down too, in 1922. Congress then attempted something even bigger: a constitutional amendment, passed by Congress in 1924, that would have explicitly given the federal government power to regulate child labor nationwide. It was sent out to the states for ratification — and it never received enough state support to actually become part of the Constitution.

It took the Great Depression, and a very different political climate, before real, lasting protection finally arrived. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established nationwide, enforceable standards on child labor, minimum wage, and the maximum work week — and this time, in 1941, the Supreme Court upheld it, in a case that explicitly overturned that earlier 1918 ruling. It had taken over three decades, from Lewis Hine’s first photographs to a Supreme Court that would finally let the protection stand.

Coming up in our final segment — how wages themselves got determined in this era, the surprising origin of the first system built to protect injured workers, and exactly where this fight for fairness stands in this country today.

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SEGMENT FOUR — approx. 9:50

ANNITA:

Welcome back, final segment of the show.

So how were wages actually decided, back before minimum wage laws existed at all? Mostly, it was whatever an employer felt like paying, and whatever a desperate worker was willing to accept. There was no floor. And in some company towns, workers weren’t even paid in ordinary cash at all — they were paid in company scrip, usable only at a company-owned store, for company-set prices, with rent for company-owned housing deducted straight from their pay before they ever saw a dime. This is actually exactly the arrangement at the heart of that Pullman strike we mentioned back in our first segment — George Pullman built an entire company town outside Chicago, controlled workers’ wages and their rent and their store prices all at once, and when he cut wages during an economic downturn without lowering rent to match, his workers had nowhere left to turn. That’s what exploded into the strike, the strike that led to federal troops, and ultimately, to the creation of Labor Day itself. It’s worth sitting with that for a second — the very holiday honoring workers exists because of a company that controlled every dollar its workers ever touched.

Now — what folks sometimes still call “old peasant insurance” is really workers’ compensation insurance, and its story actually starts in Europe, not America. Germany passed the first industrial accident insurance law back in 1884. Here in America, it took a horrifying tragedy to really move the needle. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York caught fire, and one hundred forty-six garment workers — most of them young immigrant women, some as young as fourteen — died, many of them because the factory’s exit doors had been locked to prevent unauthorized breaks and theft. Workers jumped from ninth-floor windows rather than burn. A young woman named Frances Perkins happened to witness that fire firsthand from the street below, and it changed the entire direction of her life — she went on to become the U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Roosevelt, the very first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet, and she became the chief architect behind both Social Security and, yes, that same Fair Labor Standards Act we just discussed. One factory fire, one witness, and decades of protection that followed because of what she saw that day.

The year of that fire, 1911, Wisconsin passed America’s first comprehensive workers’ compensation law, and nine more states followed within months. This was the very first social insurance program in the entire United States, arriving decades before Social Security itself — built on a simple, almost revolutionary idea for its time: if you’re hurt on the job, you shouldn’t have to sue your employer and hope to win. You should simply be covered.

And here’s the honest truth for today: this story doesn’t have a finished ending. As of Equal Pay Day this year, March 26th, 2026, U.S. Census data show that women working full-time still earned only about eighty-three cents for every dollar men earned — and that gap actually widened over the past two years, the first time that’s happened in over two decades of tracking this data. For Black women specifically, the gap is significantly worse. Equal Rights Advocates reports Black women earned just sixty-five cents on the dollar in 2024, down from sixty-nine cents just two years earlier. For Latina women, it’s worse still, around fifty-eight cents on the dollar — which adds up to more than thirty-three thousand dollars in lost income over a single year.

This is what I want you to sit with this Labor Day. The eight-hour workday. The weekend itself. Protection from being hurt on the job without recourse. The idea that a six-year-old shouldn’t be working a cotton field instead of sitting in a classroom. None of it was ever handed down out of generosity. Every piece of it was fought for, marched for, and in some cases, died for — by the sharecroppers of Elaine, Arkansas, refusing to accept a rigged system; by the Bahamian families who built Coconut Grove out of nothing; by the cane cutters of Belle Glade; by the children Lewis Hine photographed so the world couldn’t look away; and by Frances Perkins, who turned the worst thing she ever witnessed into decades of protection for working people she’d never even meet.

The fight for equal pay, and equal treatment, and fair opportunity, is still happening, right now, in workplaces all across this country.

So this Labor Day, when you’re enjoying that cookout or that last beach day of summer, take just a moment to think about all of it — the two men who couldn’t even agree on who deserved credit for the holiday, the families still working toward the promise this country made and hasn’t fully kept.

That’s our show for today. I’m Annita with Travel With Annita — join me Saturdays 1 to 2 on WDUN, always here, always local.

[SOUND: Theme swells, out]

Photos of early American labor

I’m Annita with Travel With Annita, and today we’re picking up right where the story usually stops. We all know 1776. We all know Yorktown, 1781, when the war was effectively won. But here’s the question nobody asks enough: what happened the Monday morning after?

In September of 1783, the Treaty of Paris made it official. Independence, recognized by the very king who’d refused to grant it. And here’s something that surprises a lot of people — Britain didn’t just recognize a strip of coastline. They ceded territory stretching all the way west to the Mississippi River. Overnight, this brand-new country doubled, tripled in size on paper, and had almost no way to actually govern any of it.

Because here’s the thing about winning a revolution — the fighting is, in some ways, the easy part. You know who the enemy is. You know what victory looks like. Building a government from scratch, with thirteen different states that had spent the last several years being fiercely independent of each other, and even more fiercely suspicious of any government trying to tell them what to do? That was a completely different kind of battle.

The system already in place at the time was called the Articles of Confederation, adopted back in 1781, even before the war had officially ended. And it was designed to be weak. Deliberately, intentionally weak. Think about what these people had just lived through — years under a king who taxed them without asking, who quartered soldiers in their homes, who dissolved their local governments whenever it suited him. So when it came time to build something new, the instinct was: never again. Never let one government have that much power over us again.

So the Articles gave Congress almost nothing to work with. No power to levy taxes — Congress could only ask the states nicely for money, and the states, more often than not, simply didn’t pay. No power to regulate trade between states, which meant New York could tax goods coming in from New Jersey like they were a foreign country. No real national army, no national currency worth trusting, no executive branch at all to actually enforce anything Congress did manage to agree on. Congress was, in a very real sense, a room full of representatives who could debate and recommend, but couldn’t compel anyone to do anything.

For a couple of years, the country limped along like this. States printed their own money, which lost value practically as fast as it was printed. Trade between states got tangled in a mess of competing tariffs. Soldiers who had fought the entire war often went unpaid, waiting on promises from a Congress that had no actual money to give them. There’s a reason historians often call this stretch “the critical period” — because in hindsight, it’s genuinely unclear whether this experiment survives.

And then, in the fall of 1786, that fragile situation broke wide open — not in some far-off frontier, but in Massachusetts, among ordinary farmers who had, in many cases, fought in the very war that was supposed to have earned them a better life.

These were men crushed by debt. The state was demanding taxes paid in hard currency, at a moment when currency of any kind was scarce, and courts across western Massachusetts were foreclosing on farms right and left. So a former Continental Army soldier named Daniel Shays helped lead an armed uprising — farmers marching on courthouses to physically shut them down before they could hear another foreclosure case. At one point, they even attempted to seize the federal armory at Springfield, hoping to arm themselves properly.

The rebellion itself didn’t last. Massachusetts militia put it down by early 1787. But the effect on the country’s leadership was seismic. Because think about what this proved: under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had essentially no ability to respond. Massachusetts had to handle this entirely on its own. If ordinary citizens could take up arms against courts and come dangerously close to seizing a federal armory, and the national government simply had no mechanism to help — what happened next time? What happened if it wasn’t put down so easily?

Leaders like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had already been warning for years that the Articles were too weak to survive. Shays’ Rebellion turned that warning into urgency. Even George Washington, who had largely retired from public life after the war, wrote with real alarm about what he was seeing, wondering aloud whether the revolution had been fought for nothing if the country couldn’t even govern itself in peace.

So a meeting was called. Delegates from the states would gather in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 — officially, just to revise the Articles of Confederation. Just to patch a few things up.

That is not remotely what ended up happening. When we come back, I’ll tell you exactly how that room in Philadelphia turned a modest repair job into an entirely new country.

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SEGMENT TWO — approx. 9:35

Philadelphia and the Deal That Built a Country

ANNITA:

Welcome back to Travel With Annita.

So when we left off, delegates were heading to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, technically just to revise the Articles of Confederation. Fifty-five delegates, representing twelve of the thirteen states — Rhode Island refused to send anyone at all, suspicious from the very start of where this was all heading. They weren’t entirely wrong to be suspicious.

Because almost as soon as the convention opened, the delegates quietly abandoned the idea of revising anything. Instead, under the guidance of men like James Madison — who did so much of the intellectual heavy lifting that he’s often called the Father of the Constitution — they began drafting something completely new. An entirely different framework for how this country would govern itself.

And immediately, they hit a wall. It’s a wall that, honestly, still shapes American politics today: how do you fairly represent both large states and small states in the same government? Virginia, the most populous state, proposed what’s called the Virginia Plan — representation in Congress based purely on population. Naturally, the larger states loved this. The smaller states, like New Jersey, saw exactly where that led — permanent political dominance by a handful of big states — and countered with the New Jersey Plan, which called for equal representation for every state, regardless of size.

For weeks, this genuinely threatened to collapse the entire convention. Neither side would budge, because neither side was wrong to worry about what they stood to lose. What finally broke the deadlock is what we now call the Great Compromise, or sometimes the Connecticut Compromise, since it was Connecticut’s delegates who proposed the fix: a two-chamber Congress. The House of Representatives, apportioned by population — a win for the big states. The Senate, with equal representation, two senators per state regardless of size — a win for the small states. It’s the exact structure Congress still has today, nearly two hundred and forty years later, and it exists because of a fight almost nobody remembers happened.

But there was another compromise made in that room, and this one doesn’t get to wear the word “great.” Southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted toward their state’s population — which would give them significantly more seats in the new House of Representatives, and more electoral votes down the line. Northern delegates objected, and not, it must be said, primarily out of moral conviction — mostly out of concern that it would hand the South outsized political power. The compromise they landed on was the Three-Fifths Compromise: each enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation.

Sit with that for a moment. Human beings, counted as three-fifths of a person — not because anyone believed that was a scientific or moral truth, but because it was a number two sides could agree on to settle a political fight. And those same human beings, whose bodies were being used to inflate a state’s political power, had no rights, no vote, no voice in any of it whatsoever.

This is the piece of our founding story that doesn’t get talked about enough on the average history tour, and I think it deserves to be said plainly: the contradiction between “all men are created equal” and a Constitution that quantified human beings for political convenience wasn’t an oversight. It was a choice, made deliberately, by delegates who understood exactly what they were doing and chose political expediency over the principle their own revolution had just been fought to defend. That contradiction didn’t get resolved in Philadelphia in 1787. It got postponed. And the bill for that postponement came due less than eighty years later, in a Civil War that very nearly tore this country apart for good.

By September of 1787, after months of debate, compromise, and genuine crisis, the delegates finished their draft. What emerged from that room is still, to this day, the oldest written national constitution in continuous use anywhere in the world.

But writing it was only half the battle. Now it had to be approved — by the very states whose delegates had just spent months arguing about it. And that fight was its own kind of drama. When we come back, I’ll tell you about the promise that finally got it across the finish line, and about the man who turned out to be surprisingly good at building a government nobody had ever seen before.

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SEGMENT THREE — approx. 9:35

The Bill of Rights and the First President

ANNITA:

Travel With Annita, glad to have you back with me.

So the Constitution was written. Now it needed ratification — approval from at least nine of the thirteen states before it could actually take effect. And this fight split the country into two camps almost overnight. Federalists, who supported the new, stronger government. And Anti-Federalists, who looked at this new Constitution and saw echoes of exactly the kind of centralized power they’d just spent a war trying to escape.

To make their case, three men — Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay — began writing a series of newspaper essays defending the Constitution, published under a shared pen name. We know them today as the Federalist Papers, eighty-five essays in total, and they remain, even now, one of the most important explanations ever written of how and why the American government is structured the way it is. If you’ve ever wondered why we still study these essays in law schools nearly two hundred and forty years later, it’s because they’re essentially the owner’s manual, written by the very people who built the machine.

State by state, the ratification votes trickled in. Delaware went first, in December of 1787. Some states debated for weeks; Massachusetts nearly rejected the whole thing outright. What ultimately tipped the balance, in state after state, was a promise from the Constitution’s supporters: if you ratify this document, we will immediately add a series of amendments protecting individual liberty — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial, protection against unreasonable searches. In June of 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, which technically made the Constitution law. But the two largest, most influential states — Virginia and New York — still hadn’t voted, and without them, this new government would have been fatally weakened from the start. Virginia ratified just days later. New York followed in July. And true to that promise, the very first Congress under the new Constitution proposed a Bill of Rights — ten amendments, ratified by the end of 1791, that remain the bedrock of American civil liberty to this day.

And then, in 1789, the country needed someone to actually run this thing. There was really only one candidate anyone seriously considered: George Washington, elected unanimously.

Here’s what I find remarkable about Washington’s presidency, and it’s something that doesn’t come across in most textbooks. Nearly everything he did, he was doing for the very first time, with no example to follow. There was no rulebook for how an American president should behave, because there had never been one before. Should he be addressed as “Your Excellency,” the way European heads of state were? Washington said no — plain “Mr. President” would do, a small choice that quietly set the tone for everything that followed. Should a president serve until death, the way a king would? Washington chose to step down after two terms, establishing a tradition that held for a hundred and fifty years, until it was finally written into law as an actual constitutional amendment.

He built the cabinet system essentially from scratch, appointing Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State and Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury — two brilliant men who, almost immediately, became fierce political rivals, disagreeing sharply over how much power the federal government should really have. That rivalry, in many ways, planted the seeds of the very first American political parties, something the founders hadn’t planned for and largely dreaded. Washington himself, in his Farewell Address in 1796, warned the country against exactly this — the dangers of political factionalism tearing at the fabric of the union. It’s a warning the country began ignoring almost as soon as it was spoken.

Washington also faced his own version of Shays’ Rebellion, in 1794 — the Whiskey Rebellion, when farmers in western Pennsylvania rose up against a new federal tax on liquor. But this time, the outcome looked completely different, because this time, there was a real federal government behind it. Washington personally led federal troops to put down the uprising, which sounds dramatic, but it actually proved something enormously important: this new government could maintain order without collapsing into the kind of tyranny everyone had feared. That was, in its own way, exactly the kind of precedent this fragile young country desperately needed.

By the time Washington left office in 1797, the United States had gone from a loose, nearly failed confederation of suspicious states to a functioning nation with an actual government, actual institutions, and an actual peaceful transfer of power to his successor, John Adams. That peaceful transfer — one leader stepping aside, an opponent stepping in, without a war, a coup, or a crown changing hands by force — was, at the time, almost unheard of anywhere in the world.

Coming up in our final segment — where you can go, right here in the states, to stand in the actual rooms where all of this history happened.

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SEGMENT FOUR — approx. 10:00

Where You Can Walk This History Today

ANNITA:

Welcome back, final segment of the show.

If everything we’ve talked about today has you curious, here’s the good news — you don’t have to just read about any of it. You can go stand in it, walk through it, and see the actual rooms where these decisions were made.

Start in Philadelphia, at Independence Hall. This is the building where the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, and where, eleven years later, that same room hosted the Constitutional Convention — the actual chamber where Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and fifty-two other delegates argued through that brutal Philadelphia summer, windows shut tight for secrecy, hammering out the Great Compromise and everything that came with it. You can take a guided tour through the National Park Service and stand in that exact room. Right next door, the Liberty Bell sits on permanent display — and just a short walk away, the National Constitution Center offers interactive exhibits that walk you through the entire ratification fight, state by state, in a way that makes the whole complicated drama genuinely easy to follow.

From there, head to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate along the Potomac River in Virginia. This isn’t just a historic house — it’s a genuinely moving way to understand the man behind all those precedents he set on the fly. You can walk his gardens, tour his home, and visit the museum and education center, which does an honest job of presenting the full picture of Washington’s life, including the enslaved people who lived and worked on that plantation — a part of this story that deserves to be told alongside everything else, not separately from it.

If you find yourself in New York City, don’t miss Federal Hall on Wall Street — the site where Washington actually took his first oath of office in 1789, and where the very first Congress met and drafted the Bill of Rights. The current building is a reconstruction, but a striking bronze statue of Washington marks the exact spot where he stood to take that oath, and it’s a genuinely powerful place to pause for a moment, right in the middle of the city’s financial district.

And if you’d rather trace this era through the life of a single founder, Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home outside Charlottesville, Virginia, offers an unusually honest and detailed look at both his intellectual legacy and the deeply uncomfortable truths of slavery at the heart of his household — including the increasingly well-documented story of Sally Hemings and her family. It’s not always a comfortable visit, but it’s an important one, and I’d argue that discomfort is exactly the point.

Now, closer to home — because this era isn’t just a Philadelphia and Virginia story. Right here in Georgia, and across the coastal South, you can find the fingerprints of this exact period. Savannah’s historic district, with its grid of shaded squares, was largely laid out and built up in these very decades — the streets you can walk today were being paved, quite literally, while the ink on the Constitution was barely dry. If you head down toward the Georgia coast, many of the churches, cemeteries, and town squares in towns like Midway and Darien trace their roots straight back to this founding era, when Georgia itself was still finding its footing as one of these thirteen fragile new states, wondering, right along with everyone else, whether this whole experiment was actually going to work.

This is really the heart of what I love sharing with you every single week. History isn’t just something you read about in a book, and it isn’t just something that happened once, a long time ago, in a room far away. It’s something you can walk through, touch with your own hands, and stand inside of, if you know where to look — and every one of those places I just mentioned is open to you, right now, whenever you’re ready to go find it.

That’s our show for today. I’m Annita with Travel With Annita — join me Saturdays 1 to 2 on WDUN, always here, always local.

“The Dog They Left Out of the Story”

The Story of Togo

In January of 1925, in the dead of an Alaskan winter, a twelve-year-old dog ran across frozen sea ice in the dark, in a blizzard, to save a town full of children he would never meet.

History gave the credit to someone else.

This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. Today, we’re setting the record straight on Togo.

Before there was Togo, there was Constance.

She was a young Belgian woman who’d come to Nome in 1905, drawn north during Alaska’s gold rush years like so many others. She met Leonhard Seppala at the races — in fact, she was crowned queen of the 1915 All-Alaska Sweepstakes, the very race that would one day make her husband famous. They married in 1908, and settled into a life shaped by dog sleds, harsh winters, and the rhythms of the North.

So when a sickly, undersized puppy was born in their kennel in 1913 — a puppy Seppala took one look at and wanted nothing to do with — it was Constance who stepped in. She nursed him through those fragile early weeks, when nobody expected him to survive at all. Later, when Seppala gave the troublesome young dog away as a house pet, it didn’t take. Togo escaped, jumped clean through a closed window, and ran several miles back to the only home he’d ever known.

That was the last time anyone tried to give Togo away.

Slowly, that stubbornness revealed itself as something else entirely — intelligence, instinct, an almost uncanny sense for danger on the trail. By age five, Togo wasn’t just part of the team. He was leading it.

By 1925, Togo was twelve years old — elderly for a working sled dog — and had already spent seven years as Seppala’s lead dog, guiding him to three All-Alaska Sweepstakes championships. And there’s one more detail worth knowing: Leonhard and Constance had a daughter by then, Sigrid, eight years old — living right there in Nome, in the middle of a diphtheria outbreak that was killing children exactly her age. This wasn’t just a heroic mission for Seppala. It was personal, in the most immediate way a parent can understand.

In the winter of 1925, diphtheria broke out in Nome, Alaska — a highly contagious bacterial infection, and one that kills quickly, choking its victims as infected tissue swells and blocks the airway. Nome’s only doctor had run out of antitoxin. A resupply order had gone unfulfilled before winter set in.

With more than 10,000 people at risk, children especially, and the nearest available serum sitting 674 miles away in Nenana, officials faced an impossible problem. Flying it in was ruled out — 1925 aircraft simply couldn’t reliably survive Alaska’s winter conditions, and a blizzard was already closing in.

There was only one option left: dog sled teams. A relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred dogs would carry the serum across the frozen wilderness in a race against time.

Back in Nome, Constance Seppala waited. Her husband and Togo were somewhere out in that storm, and so was her eight-year-old daughter’s fate — Sigrid was exactly the age of the children diphtheria was killing fastest. There was no way to know, in the middle of a blizzard with the phone lines down, whether either of them would come home.

Seppala and Togo were assigned what should have been a straightforward round trip — meet the incoming relay partway and bring the serum home. Instead, due to a miscommunication about timing, Seppala pushed his team over 170 miles east from Nome, expecting to travel much farther still, into some of the most dangerous terrain on the entire route: a stretch of coastline along Norton Sound that mushers had nicknamed, without exaggeration, “the ice factory.”

He found the incoming relay almost by accident — a musher named Henry Ivanoff, waving frantically through the whiteout, shouting that he had the serum. Seppala took the package and immediately turned back the way he’d come.

Now he faced the decision that would define the entire mission. Going around Norton Sound was the safe choice. It was also a full extra day slower — a day the children of Nome didn’t have. Seppala chose to cross it directly. Heading out onto the ice in the darkening afternoon, visibility dropped to nothing. The wind howled so loudly he couldn’t have heard the ice cracking even if it had been right beneath him. He couldn’t see the front of his own team. He simply trusted Togo to find the way.

And Togo did something extraordinary. At one point, in the middle of that gale, Seppala gave a command to turn — and Togo, without being told to stop, abruptly halted and somersaulted backward into the rest of the team. Seppala, furious, went to scold him. Instead, he found an open channel of water, growing wider, less than six feet from where the team stood. It wasn’t visible from the sled. Togo had sensed it, or seen it, or simply known — and stopped them from driving straight into the freezing water.

That wasn’t even the worst of it. On the return crossing, disaster nearly struck for real: the ice beneath Seppala’s sled broke free entirely, setting him, his team, and the serum adrift on a floating chunk of ice, cut off from solid ground by open water. With no other option, Seppala tied a line to Togo’s harness and threw him — a twelve-year-old dog — five feet across freezing water, hoping he could reach the far ice and pull the floe back toward shore. Togo tried. The line snapped under the strain. He tried again, and this time, it held long enough to draw the floe close enough for the team to leap across to solid ice.

After finally reaching Golovin, having crossed some of the most treacherous ground in Alaska not once but twice, Seppala and Togo still had an eight-mile ridge left to climb before they could hand off the serum — completing 260 miles in four and a half days, with dogs so exhausted they could barely stand.

A story worth sitting with: the final leg of the relay — the last 53 miles into Nome itself — was run by a different team, led by a dog named Balto.

When the serum reached Nome, the country erupted in celebration. Newspapers ran the story everywhere. A statue was even erected in Balto’s honor in New York’s Central Park, unveiled less than a year later.

There was just one problem. Balto’s leg — while real, and no small feat — was the shortest, safest, and last stretch of the run. Togo had carried the serum across the longest, most dangerous distance, through the night, across breaking sea ice, at twelve years old.

Seppala never hid his frustration. In his own memoir, he wrote plainly that he resented the statue given to Balto — arguing that if any dog deserved special recognition, it was Togo. The public, and the press, had simply gotten the story wrong — and it took decades for that mistake to be corrected in the public imagination.

Togo’s story didn’t end at the finish line in 1925.

After the serum run, Seppala took Togo on an extended tour through the United States, showing the aging dog off to a public eager to meet him. But the long journey home to Alaska would have been hard on a dog already well past his prime. So in 1927, Seppala made a difficult choice. He left Togo in the care of Elizabeth Ricker, a Maine musher who’d struck up a partnership with him at the Poland Spring Resort, where the two had competed in sled dog races together.

Seppala himself wrote about that parting: on a cold, gray March morning, Togo raised a small paw to his knee, as if asking why he wasn’t coming along. For the first time in twelve years, Seppala hit the trail without him.

But Togo’s story was far from over. At Poland Spring, he became the foundation sire of an entirely new kennel line — fathering hundreds of puppies over the following years. It’s estimated that a large majority of Siberian Huskies in the United States today can trace their lineage back to Togo. Ricker even wrote a small book about him, “Togo’s Fireside Reflections,” and sold copies “autographed” with his inked paw print.

By 1929, sixteen-year-old Togo was beginning to fail. Arthritis had settled into his joints. His eyesight was going. Age — the same relentless force that comes for every living thing — had finally caught up with the dog who once outran a blizzard.

Elizabeth Ricker, who’d cared for him for two years by then, made a decision that reflected genuine devotion, even in its difficulty. Rather than let him decline further, unable to walk without help, she chose to have him painlessly put to rest while he was still, in the newspapers’ words, “proudly alert” — his ears sharp, his poise intact, exactly as the world should remember him. On December 5th, 1929, with both Ricker and Seppala present, Togo was euthanized.

Seppala, who had run beside this dog for twelve years and trusted him with his own life more times than he could count, called Togo simply the best dog he ever had.

His mounted body eventually found a permanent home at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters in Wasilla, Alaska, and his skeleton remains today in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. In 2022, Poland Spring unveiled a bronze statue in his honor — a fitting tribute to a dog who quietly became the ancestor of a breed, long after the world had already tried to forget his name.

If you want to stand where Togo’s story is still honored, you can. Nome and the surrounding trail remain accessible to travelers, particularly around the annual Iditarod each March, when mushers still run portions of the very route Togo once led through the dark. The Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome holds photographs and artifacts from the original serum run, offering a direct link back to that winter in 1925. And in Wasilla, at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters, Togo himself — mounted, alert, unmistakably himself — still greets visitors today.

[SOUND: Music swells softly under the narration — the same instrumental thread that opened the episode, now slower]

There’s a version of this story where Togo never makes it past six months old. Small, sick, unwanted — the kind of puppy the world simply lets go of. That version almost happened. It didn’t, because one woman looked at him and decided he was worth the trouble.

Everything after that was Togo proving her right.

He ran into a blizzard so dark his own musher couldn’t see the front of his sled — and found the way anyway. He stopped a team of exhausted dogs a heartbeat before they would have vanished into open water, without anyone telling him to. When the ice broke apart beneath them, and there was nothing left to do but ask an old dog to do the impossible, he did it — twice — until the line finally held.

He covered more miles, through more danger, than any dog on that trail. And when it was over, the world put a statue on a very different dog.

Togo didn’t know that, and it wouldn’t have changed what he did. He went home to a fireplace in Maine, fathered the next generation of a breed that carries his blood to this day, and when age finally caught up with him, he went out exactly the way he’d lived — proud, alert, unmistakably himself.

Some heroes get statues. Some get a devoted woman’s decision not to give up on them, a musher who never stopped correcting the record, and, nearly a century later, a podcast still telling the truth.

We say his name, and we tell his story.

Togo’s story deserved this much care, and it shows. 🐾

Every hero has a version of the story the world remembers, and a version that’s actually true. For Togo, the twelve-year-old sled dog who led his team across the most dangerous 260 miles of the 1925 race to save the children of Nome, Alaska, those two versions couldn’t be further apart. On a recent episode of Quarter Miles Travel, “The Dog They Left Out of the Story,” we traced Togo’s journey from a sickly, unwanted puppy to the true hero of the Great Race of Mercy — and uncovered why history handed his statue, his fame, and his place in the public imagination to a different dog entirely. This guide picks up where that episode left off, mapping out the real places where Togo’s story still lives today — from the frozen coastline he once crossed in the dark, to the quiet corners of three states where his memory finally caught up with what he actually did.

Why This Guide

In January of 1925, a diphtheria outbreak threatened the town of Nome, Alaska, and a relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred sled dogs raced 674 miles across the frozen wilderness to deliver life-saving serum. Togo, the twelve-year-old lead dog of musher Leonhard Seppala, carried that serum across the longest and most dangerous stretch of the route — and for decades, watched a different dog receive most of the credit.

This guide gathers the real places where that story still lives — from the town the serum was racing to save, to the museum where Togo himself still stands watch, to the world-famous race his journey inspired. Whether you’re planning a full Alaska trip or a detour through New York City, here’s where to go to trace this remarkable piece of history for yourself.

Alaska: Where It Happened

Nome, Alaska

How to get there: Nome is not accessible by road from the rest of Alaska; visitors fly in, typically via Anchorage

This is where the story begins and ends — the isolated coastal town that a diphtheria outbreak threatened to devastate in the winter of 1925, and the town Togo, Seppala, and the rest of the relay mushers raced to save. Nome today remains a small, remote community on the Bering Sea coast, rich with Gold Rush history layered on top of this later chapter. A drive east along the Bering Sea coast follows roughly 30 miles of the historic serum run trail itself, giving visitors a genuine sense of the terrain the mushers crossed.

Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum — Nome, Alaska

Located in Nome, this local museum holds photographs and artifacts from the original 1925 serum run, offering a direct and tangible link back to that winter. It’s the natural first stop for anyone wanting to understand the event from the perspective of the town it saved, rather than just the mushers who saved it.

Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters & Museum — Wasilla, Alaska

Location: Mile 2.2 Knik Road, Wasilla, AK (near the intersection with Knik-Goose Bay Road)

Website: iditarod.com/plan-your-visit — https://iditarod.com/plan-your-visit/

Hours: Generally open year-round, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., with extended daily hours (roughly 8 a.m.–5 p.m.) during the summer season (mid-May through mid-September); confirm current hours before visiting, especially in winter

Admission: Free museum entry; dog-cart rides available for a small fee (around $10/person) during summer months

This is the single most important stop on the entire trip: Togo himself, mounted and preserved, stands on permanent display here in a glass case — the actual dog, not a replica. The headquarters also houses decades of Iditarod race memorabilia, trophies, and photographs, and offers dog-cart rides in summer so visitors can get a small taste of what it feels like to be pulled by a real sled dog team. Located about 45 minutes to an hour north of Anchorage, this is an easy and essential day trip for anyone visiting the area.

Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race

Website: iditarod.com — https://iditarod.com

The race itself is the living legacy of the 1925 serum run — a roughly 1,000-mile course from the Anchorage area to Nome, run every March by mushers and dog teams retracing much of the same historic ground Togo and Seppala once covered. The ceremonial start takes place in Anchorage, with the competitive restart currently held in Willow, about 70 miles up the Parks Highway. If your travel dates allow, visiting during the race (early March) offers a rare chance to see the modern-day version of exactly what this history was really about.

New York City: Where Togo Is Remembered in Bronze

Togo Statue — Seward Park, Manhattan

Location: Seward Park, bounded by East Broadway, Essex Street, and Canal Street, New York, NY 10002 (Lower East Side)

Tucked into a small Lower East Side park, this bronze statue of Togo has stood at the East Broadway entrance since 2001 — one of only a small handful of statues in the country dedicated to him specifically, rather than to the serum run in general. The park underwent a major renovation in recent years, and Disney partnered with NYC Parks to add an interpretive plaque alongside the statue honoring the 260 miles Togo covered to help deliver the serum. It’s a quiet, easy-to-miss corner of the city — worth deliberately seeking out rather than stumbling upon.

Balto Statue — Central Park, Manhattan

Location: Central Park, near East 67th Street, New York, NY (Doris C. Freedman Plaza area)

Worth visiting for context, even though it tells only part of the story: this statue, unveiled in December 1925, honors Balto, who led the final and shortest leg of the serum relay into Nome. It became — and remains — far more famous than any tribute to Togo, despite Togo having run the longest and most dangerous portion of the journey. Seppala himself was famously unhappy about this imbalance, writing in his own memoir that he resented the statue given to Balto, believing Togo was the dog who truly deserved it. Visiting both statues in the same trip makes for a genuinely compelling contrast — and a good conversation starter about how history remembers its heroes.

Maine: Togo’s Final Years

Poland Spring Resort & the Togo Statue — Poland Spring, Maine

After the serum run, Togo spent his retirement here, in the care of musher Elizabeth Ricker, fathering the next generation of a sled dog line before his death in 1929. In 2022, Poland Spring unveiled a bronze statue in Togo’s honor — the newest of his memorials, and a fitting tribute given that this is where he actually lived out his final, peaceful years by the fire. It’s a quieter, more personal stop than the New York statues, tied directly to the end of Togo’s story rather than its most famous chapter.

A Suggested Way to Experience This Story

If you’re able to combine stops, consider this rough arc: start in New York, comparing the Togo statue in Seward Park with the more famous Balto statue in Central Park, to understand how public memory shaped this story from the very beginning. Then travel to Alaska — Nome first, to see where the serum was actually headed and to visit the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, followed by Wasilla, to stand in front of Togo himself at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters. If your schedule allows a visit in early March, the modern Iditarod race offers a living, breathing continuation of the exact history you’ve just traced. And for those who want the quieter, final chapter, a stop in Poland Spring, Maine, completes the picture — from the dog who was almost forgotten, to the dog whose name is now remembered in three states.

For more on the U.S. Mint State and Commemorative Coins visit their website USMint.Gov

2008 50 State Quarters Coin Alaska Uncirculated Reverse

Ever wonder how travel expert Anita Thomas chooses her next destination? Well, this year she’s just flipping a coin. For eight years, Anita has been hosting her award-winning podcast, Quarter Miles Travel. And this year on Travel with Anita, she is sharing those experiences with you. This season, Anita will take you to the states commemorated on the back of a quarter, revealing hidden hotspots and don’t-miss destinations that you might not have heard about, possibly in your hometown state. The adventure begins as he reaches into her pocket. Here’s Anita Thomas.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, as you know, we are the spot where we don’t just show you a destination, we take you into its history, its heroes, and the stories that make it so unforgettable. And today, we’re heading to the twin island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, a place of quiet beaches, volcanic peaks, and one truly extraordinary claim to fame. Are you ready for this? It is the birthplace of one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton. Now, did you know that? Well, if not, that’s what today’s show is all about. Because now you know Hamilton from the $10 bill, of course we know that. And you may know him from the history books as the main man who shaped America’s financial system as its very first Secretary of the Treasury. Or you may also know him, if you’re one of the millions who have seen it, you may know him from the stage where a hip hop and R&B musical turned his story into one of the most celebrated works of theatrical performances in a generation. So let’s get to the information, though, about Hamilton. Because if you didn’t know about him being born on Nevis, this is gonna be a great show for you to find out a lot of great American history, but also Caribbean history. Born on the island of Nevis around 1757, Hamilton’s beginnings, well, they were anything but easy. Because we may think of one of the Founding Fathers as having an easy life from birth until the end. Well, he was raised in poverty, orphaned as a teenager, and yet through sheer intellect and ambition, he rose to become one of the most influential figures in early American history. He was a key author of The Federalist Papers. Yep, that was Hamilton. He was an aide to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. That was Hamilton. And he was the architect of the young American nation of their banking and financial system. That was definitely Hamilton. So it’s a remarkable journey, a remarkable story. And it all starts on a small Caribbean island to the center of American power. And it’s a story that in recent years found a whole new audience. Because in 2015, the musical Hamilton, well, it reimagined his life on Broadway, turning a Founding Father into a cultural phenomenon, and sending curious travelers looking for the real place where his story began. And that place is Nevis. And today we’re going to take you there. But now it won’t just be me. Joining me is someone who knows this island very, very well, and of course knows Hamilton’s connection to it better than, certainly better than I do, and almost anyone. And that would be Greg Phillip of Nevis Sun Tours. So I’d like to welcome Greg to the show for him to help us tell the story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis Island. So Greg, thanks for joining me today. Alexander Hamilton is celebrated as one of America’s Founding Fathers. But before America knew him, he was a young boy growing up in Nevis. So tell us-

Yes… a little bit of, about what life was like on Nevis during his childhood, and how did the island, well, how do you feel the island shaped the man that he became?

So Anita, thank you very much for having me. I’m, I’m really happy to be here with you this morning, um, to talk first of all about, um, yes, Alexander Hamilton and his role, um, living here on Nevis. But in addition to that, I’m very much happy to be here to talk about Nevis in general, and also my company, Nevis Sun Tours. Um, Nevis Sun Tours, um, really we’re both a destination management company and a luxury travel enablement platform, which basically means that where it might be difficult for people to obviously find luxury when they’re traveling, we work with, um, them and, um, their travel agencies, et cetera, to ensure that they can enjoy luxury vacations here on Nevis. Now, in relation to Alexander Hamilton, um, I, I probably spend more time with Hamilton than is normal. [laughs]

And, and, and the reason, the reason I can say that is because, you know, um, for us at Nevis Sun Tours, we’ve really, um, embraced Alexander Hamilton and, and fully incorporated him into the stories that we tell about this island of Nevis. And it’s important that we do so because, you know, many people do not realize that Alexander Hamilton was born here on the island of Nevis.  Mm.

Just the fact that he’s born here on the island of Nevis really says that, um, a small island in the Caribbean have had so much to do with the, number one, the existence of America, and number two, with the way America is with its financial systems, its defense systems, et cetera. Because Alexander Hamilton is the man that had so much to do with the origins of all those things. So your question I should, I should get to that about- [laughs]

Alex- [laughs] about how, how this island would have, um, shaped him. Absolutely.  Um, that w- without a doubt. And, and I can say this confidently, with as much confidence as it’s possible for anyone to say anything. Alexander Hamilton, the man we know for all the things he has done, could not have ever become the man he became without the island of Nevis in his background. And, and, and that’s, that’s as, that’s as sure as we can be. And, and the reason for that is because, um, so many things happened here on this island that really shaped Alexander Hamilton. This island shaped the man Alexander Hamilton became.

Well, what was life like during his childhood on Nevis at that time?  Ah. Well, [laughs] I’ll say, I’ll say this, it wasn’t easy.

00:07:03,352 –> 00:07:03,792 [speaker_1] Mm. 00:07:03,992 –> 00:07:13,892 [speaker_2] Um, and um, it, it, it begins with this, and, and y- probably for many of your listeners a little-known fact. Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock.

Really? His mother and father were not married. And because his mother and father were not married, I mean, back then any child that was born out of wedlock had a very difficult road ahead.

Mm-hmm. Um, a, number one, Alexander Hamilton would have been in a situation where he could not go to school with, with other children, um, at the school here, that he should have gone to in Nevis. And, and the schools back then, education was taken care of by the Anglican Church back then, and there was absolutely no way the church was gonna have a child from a sinful union-.. go to school with other good Christian children. So if you could imagine- Yeah. here is Alexander Hamilton starting life without a clear opportunity to be educated. That’s Hamilton’s life here on Nevis when starting. But surrounding him here on Nevis are so many other things. It’s, um, the, the vibrant, um, trade and commerce that really positioned Nevis as a, as a world economic power for Great Britain, in terms of what was contributed. And, and, um, all the trade and commerce I’m speaking of related to Nevis and Hamilton’s time here would have been, um, surrounding both sugar and slavery. And um, I, I’ll tell you this though, Anita, um, when, when we talk about Caribbean travel and people coming to enjoy the Caribbean, um, the slavery issue is not something that we can ever shy away from because it is so much a part of our history. What we’ve done though, um, and in the work that we do, is to make sure that when we tell those stories, that they’re told truthfully, but they’re not told, they’re not told in a way that’s going to alienate anyone.

Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.  Um, they’re told in a way that is, that is honest, truthful, and of course, um, w- keeping the fact in mind that this is our history, and it’s a, it’s a history that must be told in a certain way, um, so that it is honored and it is honorable. And keeping in mind that no one today was involved in what was happening back then.

Hamilton’s early childhood on Nevis is very important to the development of the man who would then become such an important part of American history. I’ll stop here, but when we come back, I will continue my conversation with Greg in talking about Hamilton and the island of Nevis on Travel with Anita and Friends. Back in a minute.  Kind of a wonder how travel expert Anita Campbell keeps her travel destinations fresh. Well, this year she’s still flipping a coin. For eight years, Anita has hosted her award-winning podcast, Quarterhouse Travel. And this year on Travel with Annita, she is sharing those experiences with you. This season, Annita will take you to the states commemorated on the back of a quarter, revealing-

[Instrumental music] We know one of our Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, as the person who helped us get a treasury system set up in the United States. But what do we know about his early childhood and the conditions under which he grew up living on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean? Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends. I asked Greg Phillip of Nevis Sun Tours to tell us more about the conditions and times when Hamilton lived on the island, what was going on, those conditions, and how they go about presenting that history as part of their tours.

We, we definitely, with our stories, keep history in its true context. Never mind that we may have feelings, but whatever we feel today, um, are things that we have to embrace because, especially when we’re talking about Alexander Hamilton. If we do not embrace the feelings that we may have about certain things from that period of time, we essentially begin to cheat ourselves out of the true effect that history should have on us.

And that, and that, it, it’s, it’s part of our responsibility when we tell the stories, and it’s part of our responsibility as travelers when we consume, um, stories of history in various parts of the world, that we, number one, keep them in their true context, and number two, that we also, um, embrace how we feel about those stories in today’s modern times. But it’s what we have to do when we think about Alexander Hamilton and his time here on Nevis, and how this island shaped the man he became.

Well, Greg, you said that so well, because I, I agree so much with you about, you know, telling the history. Because you can’t tell, like, one part of history and say that that was history. You have to tell all of it.

Right. Um-  All, all of it was history. You know, I mean, we can’t- Certainly… um, you know, we can’t be time travelers and go back and, and see if we can kind of change things. We have to accept the history that, you know, that s- sort of that we were given, uh, and that is- Yeah … you know, part, part of our, our legacy. Uh, so-

Indeed … it’s very, very well said. Very well said. Well, I wanted to ask you something though, because I didn’t realize that he was born- Mm-hmm … out of wedlock. So was his- Yes … was his mother or father a, a resident- Oh … of the island? Or do, do you have a little information on- Well … on that? [laughs] Okay. Well, so, so you’re, you’re, you’re gonna, you’re gonna make me get into the story a little bit. No problem. And this is, this is it. I- Well, just a little bit of it … um, the, the more appropriate way to put it, and, and you, and you’ll see why it would’ve been such a controversial thing, especially for the church. The more appropriate way to put it is the fact that Alexander Hamilton’s mother was married, but his father wasn’t. [laughs] So, so you, you, you can see why now. That, that that in itself, um, would’ve, would’ve been such a taboo thing and, and such a difficult thing for the church to accept, number one. But definitely because of that, because of those circumstances, um, such a difficult early life situation for Alexander Hamilton himself to navigate.

Well- Mm-hmm … talk about a lit- little unknown things probably, ’cause I, I don’t know how much, you know, Americans, uh, how much we know about that. So, but anyway, that’s, that’s good. That’s great to, to share that, ’cause that does give sort of a broader picture of his-

Yes … childhood and probably the struggles that he had to, you know, to go through. Uh, not only being, you know, a child born out of wedlock, but also other situations that probably came through with the families, you know?

Yes. And everything. So I can just, I can only imagine.

Now, many Americans know, uh, Hamilton through history books or the Broadway musical. Mm-hmm. I don’t know- … if you’ve seen that or not. But few realize that they can actually visit his birthplace. So what can we see as travelers, and what can we experience today at the-… Alexander Hamilton Museum? And why is it important that we stop?  Okay. Well, well, first of all, um, the Alexander Hamilton Museum is one of the most, if not the most popular site visited on Nevis today by travelers, and the main reason for that is because of the musical.

Now, um, so m- my little history with the musical. I saw, I saw the musical about two months after it opened on Broadway with the original cast.

And… Yeah. [laughs] And that was amazing. And then I saw it again, um, when it opened in England, in London.

Nice. Oh.

That was another, that was another amazing experience. So, um, that being said, I could see why people would leave the theater and after understanding and finding out that Alexander Hamilton would’ve come from Nevis, that they would either come here or while they’re here want to delve a bit more into his history and actually see where he came from. Um, so yes, now many people visit the museum. And, um, our most hands down most popular tour, most, um, written about tour, and the tour that we have that get the most award, it, um, is our Alexander Hamilton Island Tour.

Um, that, that’s a tour that we’re, we’re extremely proud of. Um, last year we won, um, an award. Our most international award was from Azamara Cruises.

And we won a… based on, um, feedback from their passengers to them, which we had no clue about. [laughs] But, um, we were, we were awarded the best new tour worldwide for Azamara Cruises. What it is now is as a result of why I’m spending so much time with Alexander Hamilton.

[laughs] I got you now. Okay. … but earlier this year we, we had, um, the producer of, of that play in England, um, come out and did the tour, and also loved it.

So it is through this tour, um, that we take people to the museum, the Alexander Hamilton Museum. Um, you actually get a guided tour of the museum. And guided because, um, it’s a live documentary, a story, an original story about Alexander Hamilton that is actually factual that you’re in, that, that’s gonna teach you so much about Hamilton, his life here, um, his impact, um, worldwide. But in addition to that, it’s also gonna g- give you so much information and a good, um, understanding of Nevis and what Nevis was during his time and what Nevis is today, um, because of influences from things that Alexander Hamilton have done. But when you go to the museum, um, it’s, it’s about being at his birthplace. And, and I, I make a point to say that because people who know the musical would [laughs] would realize that the musical spoke about where Alexander Hamilton was from, but they never mentioned Nevis. They said that Hamilton is from a forgotten spot in the Caribbean.

[laughs]

That’s not good. [laughs]

[laughs] Yeah. So where… Nevis is a forgotten spot in the Caribbean. So I… Listen, I just, I just laugh at that because, um, if I don’t laugh I’ll cry. [laughs] But, um, we do a very immersive tour in there and it really starts from beginning to end. We delve into, um, the very important aspects of his life and some things that, um, some people wouldn’t have known about him, um, because they’re specifically related to Nevis.

Sure. Hmm.

Um, but then there’s, there’s a few other things that, um, we delve into with, uh, I’ll say a particular twist on it that really connects- Um, his time to our time today. And, and if you don’t mind, I can give you a quick example of that.

Um, you know, w- here we are, here we are today now, um, in a world where so many people are talking about trade and tariffs. [laughs] You’ve heard that word tariffs,]Yeah

… perhaps in the past couple of years?

Right.

Yeah. Um, and immigration. And if you, if you understand the history of Alexander Hamilton and, and you’ve really gone deep into it, you would recognize that Alexander Hamilton has dealt with or had to deal with all those things, and he had, he had different philosophies on them. And interestingly, his philosophies on things like immigration and, um, and tariffs, et cetera, and trade, do not necessarily match up completely now with the take that America itself has on it. But it’s just interesting to connect those things and show people where it all started.

Alexander Hamilton, you cannot deny his importance in creating a currency, a US currency, and we’ll hear more about that. But I’ll stop here and take a break, and when I come back, I’ll speak again with Greg about Nevis and Alexander Hamilton. You’re on Travel with Anita and Friends. Back in a minute. [upbeat music] Our Founding Fathers did more than just sign the Declaration of Independence. They were very instrumental in creating many things that are today just simply parts of the US that we take for granted. Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends. And today, I’m taking you to Nevis down in the Caribbean, because that is the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, one of our Founding Fathers. And his story is very interesting on not only his life there as a child, but also the influence that he gained there that he brought to America to make us the country that we are today. I asked Greg Phillip, the owner and founder of Nevis Sun Tours, to tell us the story of Alexander Hamilton. So I continue my conversation with Greg. I asked him to share how Alexander Hamilton is connected with the US Coast Guard.

This is, this is what… This is, this is how, um, the Coast Guard came about. Hamilton is a financial guy. Um, he, he’s setting up, um, the financial system, um, that America currently stands on, that the world operates on. Um, and for example, quickly, the, the fact that America has a single currency, that was Alexander Hamilton who decided that that, that is what we’re gonna have. And the reason he had to do that is because it was the world. Um, the world back then is that every colony that became a state, they all had their own currencies. [laughs]

And Alexander resolved the co- the, the chaos of that by having one currency. But while all that is going on, there’s something else happening with America. Back then, America was not a great manufacturing nation, and America was struggling. England, America’s enemy at the time, who they just defeated, England was the great manufacturer in the world. Most of the things that are being imported into America are coming from England. Hamilton created the Coast Guard simply so that he can actually have a force to guard the coast so that they can intercept all the things, the goods that are being, um, transported into America, and actually tax them. So the first… The… That’s why the first ships that the Coast Guard, um, commissioned, you know what they were called?

Tax cutters.

Oh, tax. Yeah. Tax cutters.

So what lessons do you think that Hamilton learned from living in a colonial society that later influenced his views on the American Revolution?

Now, England wasn’t out there saving the world. I mean, England had colonies because of the fact that those colonies served England well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, back then, sugar was king.

And so m- so, so much of the trade and commerce was about, um, the sugar and enslavement. And Hamilton growing up on Nevis in the Caribbean is in the mix of all those things. Um, the stance that Hamilton have had throughout his life really, um, shows that Hamilton is by and large presented as an abolitionist, and he’s presented that way because of all that he’s dealing with, um, here in the Caribbean living on Nevis, the things he’s seeing. He would have witnessed slavery here on this island in its rawest sense because he saw when the slave ships came and when our people set foot for the first time on solid ground after leaving Africa right here on this island. Hamilton would have been there as a little boy to witness that. He saw the treatment-

… of the, of, of the enslaved.

He saw, he saw the conditions of the newly enslaved. He saw who’s coming off these ships dead, who’s chained to someone, who’s dead, who’s, who’s in very bad condition.

He hear- he, he heard the cries- Yeah

… of, of, um, of newly enslaved people who are frightened, and those things shaped him. Um, that’s why I think that he would have been an abolitionist. But then there’s another aspect of Hamilton’s life that people do not, do not recognize and do not know much about. But, um, back then- There’s a, a vibrant Jewish community here on Nevis. In fact, in the town where Hamilton is growing up in, in Nevis, there’s, um, a quarter, full quarter of the population were Jewish. And as part of our tour, we visit the, the Jewish cemetery here on Nevis. We go there because if you ever wondered, here’s a young, a young child who couldn’t go to the normal school. Well, where was he educated? Where did he get, where did he get anything resembling formal education? It would’ve been in the Jewish community.

So at, at this point, things should be co- begin to come together for you. Why does Hamilton know so much about economics and business?

Where is that coming from?

And this is, and this is not, this is not, this is not being stereotypical. This is not stereotype. These are facts-

… that Hamilton, Hamilton got a solid base because of the influence of the Jewish community right here on this island.

Um, yeah, so he experienced both wealth and those harsh realities of slavery. Um, so do you think that, that sort of been, he took that then over to America, uh, when he, when he came over with a lot of his views and his position on things?

He came to America with a lot of experience, and, and this experience that he came with would’ve been first-hand experience that he got from right here in the Caribbean, and most of it from the island of Nevis. And he was here during his formative years, so he has a base that is, um, 100% Nevisian in that sense.

And, and, and coming, coming to America now, um, he’s, he’s bringing that. And, and those are the things that are informing his, his philosophies and the way he’s actually acting and pursuing life in America and, and pursuing nation-building in America.

Well, well, tell me a little bit about his teenage years, because, uh, he left in, when he was a teenager, right? I mean, what, what led-

[laughs]

… what events led to his departure and…

Alexander Hamilton left Nevis, we’ll have to call him a preteen. He wasn’t quite a teenager yet. Um, when he, when he migrated away from Nevis with his, with his mother and father, they went to St. Croix. So, um, when he got to St. Croix, of course, St. Croix has a similar economy that is based on, um, trade and commerce, lots of, um, slavery related things going on throughout the entire Caribbean. So, um, all those, all those influences, they carried over even though he would’ve, he would’ve migrated away from Nevis. And, and back then, I mean, you’re leaving really for opportunity.

Mm-hmm.

For opportunity and what, what opportunities are available and where is the opportunity located. And, um, a, a few things back then, I mean, you, you have to realize at that time you don’t need a visa [laughs]

Yeah

… to go somewhere. You don’t need a green card to show up and, and live, [laughs] you know, as a legal resident. Um, so, you know, people, people moved. The, the, the, the effort to move was, um, very much a big, big effort because you’re on a boat.

And a boat without a boat without engine. Um, so  Yeah

…you, you see. That, but that, that was the timing, and all those things are what’s, um, really shaping Hamilton throughout his childhood in the Caribbean.

So this is another question kind of going back to, to his parents.

So you said he left with his mother and father.

Yes.

So now is he still, is he still with his, his parents, or did something happen throughout his life that separated him from his mother considering, you know, the-

Oh

… conditions that he was born under?

Well, um, so Alexander Hamilton, um, his … After they got to St. Croix, after a while, um, his father abandoned the family. His fa- his father actually died in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. By that time, Hamilton was in, in America. And Hamilton, even though, yeah, his father did that, he still supported his father, um, sending remittances to St. Croix for him. At one point he did want his father to migrate to America to live with him so that he, he can have an easier life. But, um, his mother died, um, while he was a teenager in St. Croix. As a matter of fact, they were both stricken with a fever at the same time, both of them sick on the same bed, and his mother died and he survived. So that’s why, um, they would’ve called him an orphan at that time, because really his father wasn’t there- Yeah … and his mother was dead. Yeah. After, after that, I mean, you know, he’s there, he’s working, he’s, um, he’s, he’s young still, but he eventually, um, made it to America by that time.

I’ll stop here, but I’ll be back in a few minutes with more on Alexander Hamilton and his amazing story here on Travel with Anita and Friends. [upbeat music] The life story of Alexander Hamilton doesn’t begin in the United States. It begins in Nevis. Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends, and today we’re heading over to Nevis to talk with Greg Phillip, the owner and founder of Nevis Sun Tours, where he shares the story of Alexander Hamilton and how it all began in the Caribbean island of Nevis.

Alexander Hamilton was born in 1757 … the, the Declaration of Independence is 1776.

So when that happened, um, yeah, he’s, he’s in the Revolutionary War, et cetera. Um, he’s with Washington at a very, very young age. When he started out, he’s still a teenager.

Well, te- tell me this. What, what’s one of the myths about Hamilton that, that you’d like to correct? Are there any myths out there?

[laughs] Okay. Well, yeah, I mean, there’s … I, I said there are questions about, um, whether or not Hamilton was Black. His life is going a certain way, and yes, one of the myths is that you hear them talk about, um, Hamilton being Black. But I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you this, that was something being done by his political rivals. Um, they, they, they tried to shame Hamilton, um, about his, his birth in the Caribbean. They called, they called him the West Indian interloper.

They even called him, they even called him the Creole bastard. Um, it is said that some of them wo- some people still wonder was he Jewish? And, I mean, perhaps people would have had reason, um, to ask about his Jewish heritage because they might have realized that Hamilton knew a lot about, um, Jewish life and culture.

Mm-hmm.

Knew a lot, um, probably knew Hebrew. Um, but why? Because of his upbringing on Nevis. So, so, so you see, but those are just some, some of the myths. We don’t have anything that said that Hamilton was anything but, um, a Caucasian individual, a white man.

] Did he ever come back to Nevis?

When Alexander Hamilton left Nevis, he was in the same country. You have to say he was in the same country as America. Because when he’s born here on Nevis in 1757, you do recognize that Hamilton is subject to the same king as everyone in the 13 North American colonies. Yeah.

Now, if you, if you’re born in a place with … and you have the same leader as people halfway around the world from you, you’re from the same country, which is what one of the, one of the things that we delve into in the museum to resolve actually, um, this issue of Hamilton being considered an immigrant. Why is Alexander Hamilton considered an immigrant when he’s born as part of a British colony, part of the British Empire just like everyone else? So, um, but we’re talking about him not coming back to Nevis. Um, there’s no sense of patriotism. Um, Hamilton never forgot Nevis. Um, while Hamilton didn’t come back, Hamilton is there, and Hamilton is thinking about Nevis. A- and when I say thinking about Nevis, in the sense that there’s … If you read his biography, um, this book by Ron Chernow, yes, Hamilton actually spoke about, um, the United States as his adopted country. So i- it’s, it’s not that he forgot where he was from as to why he didn’t come back.

He was in a place where he is considered an immigrant, likely not by choice, but he’s considered an immigrant, and he’s doing important work. I mean, all the things that Alexander Hamilton did, you’ll, you’ll be surprised, and you, you’ll be surprised to recognize that he’s doing those things, um, and he’s not even an elected official.

Yeah.

And that law in America where they say you have to be born there in order to become, uh, have a chance to become president, um, it’s often said that that was created politically to prevent Alexander Hamilton from having a chance at the presidency. So you, you put all those things together and you, you see, yeah, Hamilton is, um, in fact, from Nevis. He never forgot Nevis, and he went b- um, to America doing some very important things to build the America that we all know today.

Um, he was married. Did he have children?

Yes.

Tell us a little bit about his, that part of his life.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Alexander, Alexander Hamilton, um, left, left the Caribbean, and w- when he got to America, eventually he, he got married to, um, Elizabeth Sky- Schuyler, one of the Schuyler sisters. And, and this, um, and this is one of the reasons why people think that, some people think that Hamilton would’ve been involved in slavery is the fact that Alexander Hamilton, uh, married into the Schuyler family, who everyone knows, um, actually had enslaved people, owned enslaved people. And that being, that being said, um, Alexander Hamilton, um, he got married. He’s, he’s with, um, Elizabeth Schuyler. They had eight children. Oh. Eight children..

Yeah. That’s a lot, that’s a lot of children, but that’s how many children they had. Now, interestingly, um, here on Nevis, H- Hamilton’s maternal grandparents were living here on Nevis, and they would have had seven children. But back then, you know, infant mortality rates back then during his grandparents’ time here on this island were very high.

So it seems, it seems that, um, it’s his mother was the surviving child out of that seven. He had eight children with his wife.

And, uh, did they all survive? A- and are there any descendants of, uh, of, uh, of Alexander Hamilton-

… that we can point to today?

Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s … Yeah, his family, his family still lives somewhere in, in America.

Um, so, so yeah, I mean, he had, he had children. I mean, one of his, one of his sons, Philip, um, we know that he died in a duel, um, before, um, before Alexander Hamilton actually died in a duel himself.

So and so Alexander Hamilton died in a duel? So tell us a little bit about that.

00:36:27,396 –> 00:37:11,706 [speaker_2] [laughs] Yeah. It was a duel against, um, Aaron Burr. He, he and, he and Burr, they started out as good friends, and, a- and, you know, the … all that is played out in the musical. They started out as good friends. Him and Burr were lawyers together. Some people say that Burr was actually a better lawyer than him because Hamilton would show up and talk for three hours to make one point, and Burr would [laughs] use a couple of sentences and his case is closed. But, um- They got to, it got to the point where, um, Hamilton just thought that Burr was very unethical, and he wouldn’t support him, um, in presidential bid. And in fact, um, at one point Hamilton had the deciding vote about , whether or not would become president.

And so they, they, they were enemies. And, you know, back then, I, I’ll tell you this, Alexander Hamilton was not well-loved during [laughs] by, by everyone during his lifetime, you know?

A lot of people… And, and so yeah, some of it is politics, but many people didn’t, didn’t love him. And, um, yes, today many people love him because they look at history in a different way, and they love him because they love the musical, et cetera. But Hamilton wasn’t l- well-loved back then. He had lots of enemies, lots of political rivals. And it, it is in fact said that Hamilton was involved in seven different affairs of honor. These are the types of disputes that would lead to duels. Seven of them.

So I mean… But the… Dueling was so interesting that, um, dueling is, [laughs] is often described as, um, polite, well-regulated, and barbaric. [laughs] Um, sometimes it was enough just to show up, um, and sh- fire the shot in the air to say, “Well, that’s it.” Um, Hamilton showed up, and Hamilton did that. Burr didn’t do that. Burr shot at him, and Hamilton died. Best place to go for, for Nevis Sun Tours is go over to nevissuntours.com. That’s our website, nevissuntours.com. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Email address is [email protected], [email protected]. Most of what we do are gonna be things that are quite custom and definitely, um, personalized. I mean that. We, we help people, um, to create luxury experiences, um, in a very authentic way. We check four boxes with everything we do. It must be authentic, must be immersive. They also must be intimate, meaning that we don’t do very large groups with these activities. And number four, they are going to be memorable.

So a big thanks to Greg Phillip at Nevis Sun Tours. And go over to the website nevissuntours.com because Greg has created, written and created a play called The Trial of Hamilton and Nelson, where you get a chance to hear all the details about the two actual people, Hamilton and Nelson, and the audience gets to determine the verdict of the trial. Exciting and fun, right? Sounds fun to me. Well, I’m ready to book a tour, that’s for sure, and go over to Nevis, and also St. Kitts, the twin island of Nevis. And check out my website travelwithannita.com. And thanks for joining me today. I’ll be back in two weeks with another great destination and another wonderful story here on Travel with Anita and Friends. Bye-bye.

You’ve been listening to Travel with Anita. For more, log on to her website travelwithanita, with two N’s, .com, and listen to her award-winning podcast, Quarter Miles Travel, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Anita will be back in two weeks with another exciting adventure for you and your travel buddies. So keep those passports updated, and remember to always travel safe and travel smart. Right, Jack? [upbeat music]

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, Georgia has always produced more than its share of remarkable people, men and women whose ideas, courage, and craftsmanship reach far beyond our state lines and help shape the story of our entire country. We’re going to meet four of them: an industrialist who built a town from the ground up, a woman who started a movement that still shapes girls’ lives today, and a master bridge builder who connected two states with his own hands, and a woman who broke barriers as a teacher, a nurse, and author decades ahead of her time.

Now, I’m talking about some really pretty fantastic people, some that you may know very well and others that may be new to you. Henry Ford, of course, we know him from Ford Motor Company. Juliette Gordon Low of the Girl Scouts. Horace King, who built a bridge, and Susie King Taylor, the educator who worked through the Civil War to educate people in reading and writing. Now, four Georgians, four extraordinary stories that we’ll share today. So I’m ready to really get into it now, and I’d like to start with the man that I like to say is the man who built a hill. I’m talking about Henry Ford’s Georgia legacy along the Coastal Bryan Heritage Trail. Some of us may have actually driven through Richmond Hill. It’s just a little south of Savannah in a town that is so charming you’d swear it was designed that way on purpose. And, well, it kinda was. We’re talking about Richmond Hill, Georgia, that is a place that is right off of Highway 17 or Interstate 95.

And you may not realize that you just passed through a town that is one of the most famous men in America, in American history, he- that he basically built with his own two hands. Now, Henry Ford, and that is of course the Henry Ford, the Model T Henry Ford of the Ford Company. Well, that assembly line, the man who put America on wheels, and for over 20 years, this stretch of Georgia coast was where he came to slow down. So let’s back up a little because to understand why Henry Ford ended up here, you have to understand who he really was before he even set foot in Georgia. Now, back in 1914, Ford did something that shocked the entire country. He doubled his factory workers’ pay practically overnight to $5 a day. [laughs] That doesn’t seem like much now, but at that time, that was really big money, and newspapers all over the world ran the story.

Nobody had ever seen an industrialist share that kind of money with the people actually building his products. Well, now, let’s be honest, though, because it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds. It came with strings attached. Ford had inspectors checking up on workers and home lives, expecting them to save money, stay sober, keep things tidy. [laughs] Wow, that’s quite an involvement there, and people didn’t love that part. You can understand why. But at the heart of it, Ford believed something a lot of wealthy men of his era didn’t, that if you take care of the people around you, everybody does better. The company does better. The community does better. The individual people do better. So keep that in mind because that same instinct, that’s, that’s exactly what he brought with him to Georgia. And by the early 1920s, Henry and his wife, Clara, were spending their winters down in Fort Myers, Florida. But Florida was growing. It was growing fast, and the Fords started feeling really a little crowded. So what did Henry do? Well, what Henry always did. He asked someone he trusted.

His good friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, told him about a quiet stretch of the Georgia coast, a little place called Way Station. And Henry and Clara came to take a look, and from what history books tell us, it was Clara who really fell the hardest for that particular area. She loved the Spanish moss hanging off of those big live oak trees and the birds everywhere you looked, and that slow, easy, kind of low country charm that you get in that area. Of course, Henry saw something a little different. He saw opportunity, and before they even left Savannah, he told his secretary he… to start negotiating right away. And that was it.

By March of 1925, Henry Ford owned his first 100 acres in Way Station. Over the next several years, Ford just kept buying. Old rice plantations, overgrown farmlands, even the abandoned grounds of historic Fort McAllister. And by the time he was done, Henry Ford owned somewhere around 85,000 acres. Yep, you heard me right, 85,000. Now, that’s 120 square miles. That’s a lot of land, and for those of you who are keeping track at home, that’s actually larger than some countries. That’s pretty big. Henry Ford didn’t buy all of that land just to sit on it and enjoy the view. Way Station at that time was one of the poorest communities on the whole Georgia coast, and Ford, true to that same instinct that gave us the $5-a-day pay, decided he was going to change that. So he started a working farm, timber operations, a sawmill, and that sawmill alone put hundreds of local people to work who really had had really not that much opportunity in the past. But he ran into a problem.

Folks couldn’t get to the jobs that he was creating. The roads were just not built for it, so Ford solved that, too. He had his own sawmill start producing materials for tenant housing, designed so that the homes could go up quickly and also efficiently as, as well. Now, all told, they built over 200 houses, and Ford didn’t, he didn’t price poor families out, either. Some of the most struggling families in that area paid him just a dollar a month in rent. A dollar a month. And to keep going, a community center, a kindergarten, a medical clinic, a real medical care for people who rarely had had access to it before, churches, a bakery, a post office, and my favorite part, an honest-to-goodness industrial arts and trade school with science labs and auditorium, giving kids, um, an education that frankly a lot of the wealthier towns didn’t even have back then. He was really putting things on the map. And this wasn’t Henry’s writing checks from Detroit and calling it a day. By all accounts, he was out there walking the streets, talking to his neighbors, checking in on the schools and the sawmills himself. And Clara too. She was the one who brought in music programs and supported local artists, adding a little beauty and culture to go along with all of the Ford practicality.

So by 1936, the Fords decided to build themselves a proper home right on the banks of the Ogeechee River on the old site of the historic Richmond Plantation. And when I say a home, I mean a home. About 70,000 square feet, Greek Revival style, built out of that beautiful Savannah gray brick, sitting on 55 acres of manicured lawns and gardens, and they called it Richmond Hill. So you see? That’s why I said it’s a man who built a hill. Now here’s a sweet little twist, though, a little twist to the story. In 1941, the federal government needed land in the middle of Bryan County to build an Army training base, and what we now know as Fort Stewart. And that meant several small communities in the county had to be relocated, and a lot of those displaced families ended up resettling right here in the town that Henry Ford had spent 15 years building up. And later that same year, the town made its official way station’s name become Richmond Hill in honor of Henry and Clara Ford. Now, Henry Ford passed away in 1947, and a few years later in 1951, the Richmond family’s holdings were sold to the Union Camp Paper Company, and by the summer of 1952, Ford’s operations here officially came to a close. But the city remained the same name, Richmond Hill, as we know it today.

That grand Richmond Hill mansion was added to the National Registry of Historic Places back in 1978, and these days it’s part of a private community called the Ford Field and River Club. So it’s not open to just walk right in, but the Richmond Hill Historical Society does offer special tours throughout the year, so keep an eye out for those, ’cause you’ll definitely wanna go and check out that amazing Georgia history and American history. Now, I’ll stop here, but when I come back, I have another extraordinary Georgian here on Travel with Anita and Friends.

Now our next Georgian up here today on Travel with Anita and Friends, where we’re highlighting extraordinary Georgians who’ve made a difference in not only Georgia history, but American history. Well, this woman, she built something you can’t always see: confidence, independence, and purpose in generations of young girls who came after her. Juliette Gordon Low. She was deaf in one ear, restless in the drawing rooms of Savannah society, and absolutely determined to give girls a place to lead and not just follow. She started a movement in her own backyard that reached the entire world. Her name, again, Juliette Gordon Low.

Do you know that name? Well, you may not know her name, but you certainly know the Girl Scouts, the Girl Scouts of America. And I’m sure if you’re like me, you’ve bought some of those Girl Scout cookies, or you may know some young girls who’ve gone through the Girl Scout program. Here’s her story that I wanna share with you. Here’s Juliette Gordon Low. To understand Juliette Gordon Low, well, we need to step back to the early 1900s, because in those days, opportunities for women and girls w- were very limited. Women could not vote. Social expectations were very strict. Girls were often taught to be quiet, be polite, and be prepared for the traditional roles of life, and you know those traditional roles generally meant things that you did in your home. But Juliette Gordon Low believed girls deserved something, something very different, something more.

She believed that they should be curious, they should be adventurous, independent, and most of all, they should be confident. And she believed they should learn skills that would help them make a difference in the world. Well, in 1911, while traveling in England, Juliette met a man named Robert Baden-Powell. He had founded the Boy Scouts, a movement designed to teach boys outdoor skills, leadership, and service, and this idea sparked something in Juliette immediately. She saw how powerful this type of program could be, but she believed the girls deserved the same opportunities as well So she returned home to Savannah with a very, very bold plan. And on March 12th, 1912, Juliette Gordon Low gathered 18 girls in Savannah, and those girls, they became the very first troop of what would become the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.

Now let’s think about that for a minute, though, because at this time, the organization was first called Girl Guides, modeled after a similar group in Britain, but the name soon changed to Girl Scouts. Those first meetings, though, focused on things that were unusual for girls at the time, things like hiking, camping, first aid, leadership, community service, and perhaps most importantly, learning the skills or learning how to become very confident. And Juliette Gordon Low, well, she encouraged these girls to believe that they could do anything, because what started with just 18 girls in Savannah, well, it quickly began to grow. Girls across the country were drawn to this idea of adventure and service. They learned to build campfires, to navigate outdoors, to work together in teams, and to serve their communities. Now keep in mind this part about communities, ’cause that will come up again and again. Now these were skills that prepared girls not just for childhood, but for their lives. The movement quickly spread. In the 1920s, Girl Scout troops began appearing beyond the United States. There were troops formed in places like China, Syria, Mexico, and one of the earliest Native American girl troops formed on the Onondaga Nation Reservation in New York in 1921. And Mexican American girls formed a troop in Houston in 1922. So by 1925, a troop was even registered in Shanghai, showing just how quickly the movement had grown and how it had taken on a life of its own, a very good life of its own.

But now what Juliette Gordon Low started in Savannah had really become international by any stretch of the imagination. And when the Great Depression struck in the 1930s, Girl Scout troops stepped forward to help. The Girl Scout troops, they collected food, clothing, supplies for all of the families in need. They also worked to welcome immigrants into their communities, because they learned all about the importance of community service. And the Girl Scouts even printed information about their organization in several languages, including Yiddish, Italian, Polish. Now this became very helpful for the new immigrant families, because not only did this just help them understand what was being said, understand what they needed so that they could be successful now in America, and also to help them join the movement. Now inclusiveness actually became one of the organization’s core values.

And during World War II, the Girl Scouts once again stepped forward to serve. Troops across the country participated in national war efforts. The Girl Scout troops collected scrap metal, cooking fats, clothing, and they also planted victory gardens to help support food supplies. Wow. Now some of the Girl Scout troops even operated bicycle courier services, delivering important messages and supplies. Wow, just so fascinating. And the Girl Scouts, they also organized defense institutes where women learned emergency skills and ways to help children remain calm during the air raids. Even Japanese American girls held in wartime internment camps in Utah and California, they formed Girl Scout troops, demonstrating really the power of community even during difficult times for the country as well as for themselves. Now this spirit of service continued after the war. It didn’t just stop there. During the Korean War, Girl Scouts assembled Kits for Korea. Now these packages were filled with supplies for Korean citizens and Korean civilians. The organization also continued pushing for equality and inclusion.

By the early 1950s, progress toward racial integration was already happening within the Girl Scouts, even in the segregated South. And in the 1960s, Girl Scouts became increasingly active in conversations about equality and social change. The organization held Speak Out conferences across the country where girls could discuss issues of race and justice. A national program called Action 70 encouraged girls to work toward overcoming prejudice and building stronger relationships among communities. Girl Scouts were also invited guests of NASA to witness the launch activities surrounding the Apollo 12 moon mission. So you can see here, the message was very clear. Girls can dream big, and they can reach for the stars. Wow. The legacy of Juliette Gordon Low, well, it’s a really powerful one. Although she passed away in 1927, her legacy continued to grow. And today, when you think of the Girl Scouts and the organization, well, it includes millions of girls worldwide. And they continue learning those very same values that Juliette believed in and that she set as the foundation of the Girl Scouts: leadership, courage, friendship, self-reliance, and community service. And it all began with a simple gathering of 18 girls in Savannah. So the next time you find yourself in Savannah, walk through its historic streets and imagine that small gathering in 1912 with just 18 girls and one determined woman. And while you’re doing that while you’re in Savannah, make sure and go by and visit the Juliette Gordon Low home. You can visit her birthplace. It is located at 10 East Oglethorpe Avenue in the heart of the historic district of Savannah, Georgia. And it is Savannah’s first registered national historic landmark. Knowing this history should make those Girl Scout cookies taste even better.

I’ll stop here. I’ll be back in a minute here on Travel with Anita and Friends.

When you think of things that are left behind after we have made this journey here on Earth, you don’t always think of bridges being left behind. But here is the story of a man that that’s exactly what he left behind: bridges. Here’s the story of Horace King, the master bridge builder. Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, today I want to take you on a stretch of the Chattahoochee River, that long, winding waterway that splits Georgia and through Alabama as well. And if you’ve ever driven across it without giving it a second thought, well, I understand because [laughs] I drive across it quite often and don’t really think about that I’m driving over it, because most of us just do that.

But there was a time, not that long ago really, when getting a wagon, a family, or an entire town’s commerce across that river wasn’t something that you just took for granted. It took an engineer. It took vision. It took a whole lot more than just taking it for granted. And in this part of the South, for most of the 19th century, it took one particular man. His name, Horace King. Now, let’s back up a little bit and let’s talk a little bit more about Horace King before he was that bridge builder, because Horace King was born enslaved on September 8th, 1807, in Chesterfield District, South Carolina. He carried African, European, and Catawba ancestry.

So  he was quite mixed there with some of his ancestry, but he did have that desire to do something more. He had a heritage as layered and complex as the structures that he would go on to build. And in the 1820s, a contractor named John Godwin purchased Horace and brought him to Columbus, Georgia, to that area. He had land and a contract to build the very first public bridge connecting Georgia and Alabama across the Chattahoochee. And it didn’t take that long for Godwin to realize something remarkable. This wasn’t just a laborer. This was a person with a great mind. Horace mastered a design called the Town Lattice Trestle, a system of wooden planks crossed and interlocked like a woven basket pinned together with wooden pegs. But it was that way. It was very simple with the woven pattern and those wooden pegs that were pinning it together, but the math behind it isn’t simple at all. It let a bridge carry enormous weight while still being light, elegant, and really almost graceful looking. We’ve seen those covered bridges, and we’re intrigued by those.

And by the time Horace reached adulthood, he wasn’t just building bridges. He was managing entire crews of workers, solving structural problems that stumped men who’d gone to school for exactly that purpose. Now, just imagine that. Well, Godwin did. He took notice. And to his credit, he gave Horace something unusual for the time: real independence. He let Horace travel and oversee projects largely on his own. And through the early 1840s, Horace served as superintendent and architect on major bridges in Alabama and Columbus, m- and even Mississippi, without Godwin standing over him, over his shoulder at all. And in 1846, with Godwin’s backing, the Alabama legislature approved Horace’s freedom. He walked out of slavery not as a man starting from nothing, but as one of the most respected builders in the entire region, already known, already trusted, already changing the landscape of two states.

Now, I want you to pause here and be honest with yourself about something, because the full story does matter. Even after Horace gained his freedom, his relationship with Godwin stayed complicated. When he died, when Godwin died in 1859, Horace actually built a monument over his grave describing the love and the gratitude he felt for a man… History remembers as being his former enslaver. Oh, it can be very complex. Now, historians, they’ve wrestled with that for years. Some have pointed to it as proof that Harris’ story softens how he understands slavery, but I would gently push back on that a little bit, because what’s really going on, I think, is far more human, more human nature, and far more complicated. A man building a life and a reputation inside a system designed to deny him both? Okay. But his genius was real, and the fact that someone recognized it, not only recognized it, valued it, and put forth for him to be freed because of it. Now, the system that held him was still real, too, so both of these things are true all at once. But once free, Harris’s career did go on. It grew, and over the next four decades, he designed and built bridges, mills, warehouses, and public buildings across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. His work even touched portions of the Alabama State Capitol, including some of those graceful spiral staircases that visitors will stop and admire and get those selfies on. [laughs]

Yep, those. And he built massive lattice truss bridges over nearly every major river between Oconee in Georgia and onto Mississippi as well, and across the Chattahoochee itself at almost every port between Carroll County and Fort Gaines. In the mid-1850s, he built a bridge over the Chattahoochee between Newnan and Carrollton, this time accepting stock in the company as payment instead of a straightforward fee, a sign of just how much trust and standing he had earned as a free businessman. And his wife, Frances, and their five children, well, they eventually made a home right there at the bridge site, farming the land until the Union cavalry burned the span during the Civil War in 1864.

Now, the war years, well, they were complicated for Harris, as they were for so many, so not just only Harris. Columbus, well, it boomed economically supplying the Confederacy, and Harris, like other contractors in the area, he found himself pulled into that work, supplying, supplying timber, erecting buildings for the Confederate Navy, and the Alabama governor even pressed him into service against his will to place defense obstructions in the Alabama River. And yet, Harris later claimed Unionist sympathies, saying that the federal government owed him for property that the Union troops had taken. It’s a reminder that Black southerners navigating that war rarely had a luxury of simple, clean alliances. After the war and during Reconstruction, Harris even served two terms in the Alabama House of Representatives as a Republican. Though most accounts, he found politics far less interesting than his true calling. He was too busy still rebuilding wooden bridges, railroad bridges, mills, warehouses, and public buildings across a region still recovering from the war. Well, in 1872, Harris and his family settled in LaGrange, Georgia, where he continued designing and building until his death on May 28th in 1885. Newspapers in Atlanta, LaGrange, and Columbus all ran his obituary, praising his skills and marking him as someone who was very widely respected.

Now, here’s the part of the story that I really want you to sit with, because Harris’ legacy didn’t end with him. It kept building, quite literally, through his children. Harris and Frances had five children, Washington, Marshall, John Thomas, Ann Elizabeth, and George. After Harris passed, his sons carried the family trade forward under the name King Brothers Bridge Company, continuing to build bridges and structures across LaGrange, Atlanta, and East Alabama. So what’s left for us to see today? Well, honestly, less than you hope. Harris King built somewhere around 100 bridges in his lifetime. War, floods, and simple modern progress have claimed almost all of them, but not quite all, because if you make your way to Meriwether County, you can still drive across, or better yet, park and walk through the Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge, the only bridge still standing and still in use that is directly connected to Harris King himself. Standing inside it, looking up at that interlocking lattice of wooden planks, you’re looking at the very same engineering genius that once connected two states and helped bring a man to freedom. Head over to my website, travelwithanita.com, where you’ll find some photos of the Mulberry Street Cemetery project that was built in honor of Harris King. You’ll also find photos of my visit to the cemetery, as well as how you can visit LaGrange, Georgia. I’ll stop here, but I’ll be back in a minute here on Travel with Anita and Friends. Sometimes there’s a legacy that gets buried deep in the books, so much so that all of the greatness you don’t know about at all.

Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends, but here on today’s show, we are highlighting four Georgians that have done extraordinary things with their lives and made not only Georgia history, but American history. We’ve talked about Juliette Gordon Low with the American Girl Scouts. We’ve also talked about Henry Ford, who actually built a city, Richmond Hill, Georgia, and Horace King, who was a bridge builder, not only in Georgia, but across several states. Next up is Susie King Taylor. Her life was extraordinary, and her legacy still lives on. Here to help me tell the story is Hermina Glass Hill, the executive director of the Susie King Taylor Institute. Like myself, I was not familiar with, with Sus- with Susie King Taylor, so I’m thinking that there are probably some listeners who may not know her story as well, and why her life is so important to share.

She is Georgia’s Harriet Tubman.

Her life, having been enslaved, having been a freedom seeker

… having been, um, educated during the antebellum period, um, and then she goes on to become one of the first Black nurses, and m- and even more importantly, she, her life has this divine, um, providence that’s at work because not only does she self-liberate and flee and winds up in a contraband camp in this, on St. Simon’s Island, she becomes embedded in the very first army regiment in the history of our nation, which is the first South Carolina volunteers-

… which eventually becomes the 33rd United States Colored Troops. Now, they are the very first, during the American Civil War, they are the very first Black, colored, African-descended regiment. When the 1st, uh, when the 54th Massachusetts come down and, uh, they’re involved in, you know, Fort Wagner, they are the first Black regiment from the North.

Yes. But Hollywood has told the t- the, the, the TV version of it that they are the first Black regiment.

But actually, it was these formerly enslaved men, women, who fled from their plantations, who-

Right

… it just makes sense that they are the first to create-

… um, to become involved in what was called Hunter’s regiment. Hunter was a, a Northern abolitionist turned soldier. Uh, and, and, and she becomes embedded in that, bringing with her all sorts of cultural aspects, religion, songs, uh, food ways, of what we know today as Geechee culture.

She was, she was a part of that because her en- her entire life, we know it again today as the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, but she lived within that geographic space.

And so her life is just a, uh, just a fascinating saga, if you will. Um, every aspect of, of her life is, is actually very, very important and, and history-making.

It, I mean, it, it definitely is history-making, and it’s just so, it’s actually s- very inspiring even today.

You know, to hear of someone who against all odds was able to do all the things she was able to do. And, uh, I understand as well, she, didn’t she teach some of the soldiers to read and write?

Yes, she did, and-

See, that’s phenomenal right there, that she knew how to read and write.

And then she could teach it.

Right. Absolutely. So when she escapes and the Union Navy and Army are protecting the South Atlantic coast, which is called the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, she is rescued by one of those huge ships. And they, uh, the, the people, the freedom seekers who are picked up on these barrier islands, they are taken to St. Simon’s Island, where there is a Navy/Army base, but also there is a contraband camp in which, um, this term developed from, um, General Benjamin Butler, um, who, uh, who stated that, you know, the Emancipation Proclamation had not been issued yet. So they have escaped, but their legal status is not as free. Uh, but they are not slaves, ’cause they have left the plantation. So he termed, coined this contraband. Uh, they were contraband of war-

… until the Emancipation Proclamation. But on St. Simon’s Island-

That’s good… there is a contraband camp. These are people who have been following the Union Army. Um, they have set up camp where the Union Army is. And so in this dynamic period, um, schools are being established because the United States government has a responsibility to these people who are now following them.

And so she, a 13, 14-year-old girl, who has had six, seven years of secret education in Savannah, she’s asked, any, everybody is asked, “Is there anybody among us who can teach?” And of course, Susie King Taylor, who has had this incredible life getting an education when it was against the law to get an education, here she is a 14-year-old girl, 14-year-old girl, who’s had geography and literature and mathematics because she’s- That’s amazing.

Yes, it’s amazing. She’s teaching these people who have never touched a pencil before.

Who have never had a slate or chalk or, you know, been able to, um, uh, access the written … heard, and she begins teaching them. So that’s her first, um, uh, point of historical significance. She becomes one of the… She actually becomes Georgia’s first federally funded teacher during the war, because the, the War Department is furnishing all of the supplies that she needs to t- teach these, uh, um, freedom seekers who were in the contraband camp on St. Simons Island. So it’s just incredible. Susie King Taylor and her grandmother were enslaved here in Liberty County.

Um, on the east end of the county, uh, on a small place called Isle of Wight. It’s a small island within the, um, eastern mainland of, uh, Liberty County. Um, heavily populated because there are numerous plantations, and she and her grandmother, um, they, along with her parents and her siblings, as well as other, uh, people in their quarters or living community, were enslaved, but they were just that. They were a community, and she actually was from a relatively intact family. She had her parents, her immediate family. She had her grandmother, which is very typical in our Black community, that our grandmother-

… was a part of our household.

Um, and, and they were extremely close. So Liberty County on the Isle of Wight, which is here in Midway, um, is where, um, she was from. And recently, um, the Liberty County Board of Commissioners, the Liberty County government, has, um, invested, uh, a significant amount of, um, funds into a park and renamed the park Susie King Taylor Freedom Park-

… on the island in which she was born. And so, uh, we are just really excited about, um, this park that is named for freedom, named for someone who was born in, uh, uh, born enslaved on that island, lived on that island, and then when the war actually takes place, her big mama, her grandmama Dolly, sends her right back to Liberty County on the Isle of Wight, um, to wait out the war. Uh, but, uh, she doesn’t wait out the war. She takes the risks, and it is from this place on the Isle of Wight that she actually escapes. And so with this new park, the Susie King Taylor Freedom Park, as it relates to America 250, we are celebrating freedom in a completely, from a completely different perspective, um, from, you know, the, the, the second American revolution, uh, revolutionary war, which was the Civil War, where-

Right… life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is something that is achievable and does happen- … because we know that the Emancipation Proclamation is issued, and then eventually, um, the end of slavery in 1865. And so she is the, um, the epitome, a perfect example of, um, this iconic figure, um, who seizes liberty at her own terms. She takes the risk, and we’re just so happy that Liberty County has named this park in her honor-

Absolutely

… um, uh, and in honor of freedom.

Mm-hmm. And there, there’s a place now where people can go and actually stand-

Mm-hmm

… and, and, and read about her and know about her, uh, today. So it is definitely spreading her, her story, uh, wide and far.

Yes.

Head over to my website, travelwithanita.com, where you can hear the full interview that I had with Hermina. We talked about a lot of things, more than I could fit in one segment. Also, head over to the website susiekingtaylorinstitute.org where you can learn more about visiting the museum. Uh, thanks for joining me today. I’ll be back in two weeks with another great destination and story here on Travel with Anita and Friends. Bye bye.

Version 1.0.0

[SOUND: River current, low ambient water sound. A single hammer strike on wood, echoing. Then silence.]

ANNITA (V.O.)

Somewhere along the Chattahoochee River, there’s a bridge that isn’t there anymore. Most of them aren’t. Floods took some. War took others. Time took the rest.

But the man who built them? History almost took him too.

[SOUND: River fades under.]

This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. And today, we’re going looking for Horace King.

[SOUND: Soft acoustic guitar bed, low, under narration]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Before we get to the man, I want you to understand the river.

The Chattahoochee cuts a long, winding line between Georgia and Alabama, nearly 450 miles of water that, in the early 1800s, was less a landmark than an obstacle. If you wanted to move goods, families, or an entire town’s commerce from one side to the other, you needed a way across. And building something strong enough to survive that river, its floods, its currents, its width, required real engineering skill.

In the growing antebellum South, that skill was in short supply. The man who had it in greater measure than almost anyone else in the region was, by law, someone’s property.

[SOUND: Guitar]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Horace King was born enslaved on September 8th, 1807, in Chesterfield District, South Carolina. His ancestry was African, European, and Catawba, a heritage as layered as the structures he’d spend his life constructing.

In the 1820s, contractor John Godwin purchased Horace and brought him to Alabama, to help build bridges across the Chattahoochee. Together, in 1832, they completed the first bridge to span the river and connect Georgia and Alabama at what’s now Columbus and Phenix City.

Even in bondage, Horace’s intellect was unmistakable. He mastered the Town lattice truss, a design patented just a few years earlier, using interlocking wooden planks pegged together in a diagonal pattern, strong enough to carry enormous weight with real structural grace. It was a relatively new technique even among trained engineers. Horace didn’t just learn it, he mastered it well enough to teach it, adapt it, and improve on it.

By adulthood, he wasn’t just following instructions on a job site. He was managing entire work crews. He was solving structural problems that stumped men with formal engineering educations he never had access to.

Godwin recognized what he had. He allowed Horace to travel and build alone across the region, an almost unheard-of freedom of movement for an enslaved man in the Deep South.

[SOUND: Guitar fades]

ANNITA (V.O.):

In 1846, with Godwin’s support, the Alabama legislature passed a special act approving Horace King’s manumission.

Sit with that for a moment. A state legislature, in a state built on the institution of slavery, passed a law to free one specific man, because his talent had become too significant, too visible, too undeniable to leave unrecognized.

He didn’t step into freedom uncertain of his path. He stepped into it already renowned, a craftsman actively shaping the built environment of two states, about to expand into a third.

Over the next four decades, King designed and built bridges, mills, and public buildings across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. He constructed massive Town lattice truss bridges across nearly every major river between west Georgia and northeastern Mississippi, including almost every crossing of the Chattahoochee between Carroll County and Fort Gaines. In the mid-1850s, he built Moore’s Creek Bridge over the Chattahoochee, between Newnan and Carrollton. He worked on portions of the Alabama State Capitol, including intricate spiral staircases that still draw visitors’ awe today.

By some counts, across his lifetime, he built more than 100 bridges.

A story worth sitting with: for years, many of King’s structures were credited only to the contractors or firms that employed him — a common erasure for Black craftsmen of the era, one that often continued well after emancipation. Part of why we tell this story today is to put his name back where it belonged all along.

[SOUND: Music softens, holds low]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Here’s the hard truth about building things out of wood, along a river prone to flooding, in a region that would soon be torn apart by war: most of it doesn’t survive.

Most of what Horace King built is gone now. Lost to war. Lost to flood. Lost to the simple passage of modern development, as newer bridges replaced the old ones he’d built by hand.

Of the roughly hundred covered bridges he constructed, only one remains standing and still in use today, the Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge, in Meriwether County, Georgia.

Horace King died in LaGrange, Georgia, in 1885. His five children carried his work forward after him, including his son, George King, who continued building in his father’s tradition. In 2004, the Horace King Overlook was dedicated at Riverfront Park in Albany, Georgia, a permanent marker for a man whose actual bridges mostly didn’t survive to mark themselves.

[SOUND: soft music]

ANNITA (V.O.):

If you want to stand where Horace King stood, you still can.

Start in LaGrange, Georgia, at Mulberry Street Cemetery, recently restored, with accessible pathways and interpretive markers throughout the grounds. King’s family gravesite is there, marked with a dignified granite monument. And just steps away stands something remarkable: a section of an actual covered bridge, rebuilt by his son George and now permanently installed at the cemetery, after decades on display at Callaway Gardens.

It is, quite literally, a piece of what he built, still here, still standing, still telling his story to anyone who takes the time to look.

Seasonal walking tours in LaGrange often weave King’s story into a broader exploration of the town’s history, a chance to turn a quiet Georgia visit into something that connects directly back to the man himself.

[SOUND: Music swells slightly, then settles]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Horace King built the crossings that let a divided landscape become passable — river by river, county by county, state by state. He did it while enslaved. He did it after freedom. And most of what he built didn’t survive him.

But he did. His name did. And today, we made sure you heard it too.

We say his name, and we tell his story.

To visit the Mulberry Street Cemetery visit the website www.VisitLaGrange.com

Photos

Quarter Miles Travel shares a powerful story – Susie King Taylor – From Slavery to Civil War to her own school. Born into slavery in Liberty County, Georgia, in 1848, Susie King Taylor taught herself to read in secret, at a time when it was illegal for an enslaved child to do so.

After escaping to freedom in 1862, she became the first Black woman to teach openly in a school for African American children in Georgia — and then served through the Civil War as a nurse and laundress with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, tending wounded soldiers in the field.

In 1902, she published her memoir, making her the first African American woman to write and publish an account of her own experience during the Civil War.

Her story is finally getting the recognition it deserves — right here in her home state, in Hinesville, Georgia.

And to help us tell it properly, I’m joined by the woman who has spent years bringing that story home: the founder and executive director of the Susie King Taylor Women’s Institute and Ecology Center, and curator of the Susie King Taylor Museum in Hinesville — Hermina Glass-Hill.

Hermina, welcome to the show.

Interview with Hermina

She wrote it all down. Her own memoir — one of the only firsthand accounts by a Black woman who lived the Civil War from inside a military camp, not from a distance.

And still — most people have never heard her name.

This is Quarter Miles Travel. Today, we’re tracing the coastline she once called home — the islands, the schools, the quiet places where a girl with a stolen education became a woman history almost forgot.

If you want to walk where she walked, start in Liberty County. Waterways, historic landmarks, and the Georgia coast she knew are still waiting to be explored. Plan your trip at libertycounty — that’s L-I-B-E-R-T-Y-C-O-U-N-T-Y dot org.

Go to my website, Travel With Annita dot com, for photos of the museum.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast, and share it with other history buffs — and anyone who loves finding the little-known stories.

We say her name, and we tell her story.

Quarter Miles Travel and the U.S. Mint’s Georgia National Historic Site quarter highlight the beautiful Georgia coast.  The marine life, shore birds, natural habitat and the space where many Blacks have called the area home for generations. Among the sweet grasses, dunes and Atlantic Ocean shores men and women like Susie King Taylor have built their lives and left a legacy.

Photos from the Susie King Taylor Museum in Hinesville, GA

Susie King Taylor’s Autobiography which you can purchase on Amazon.

Susie King Taylor’s autobiography

33rd US Colored Troops

*Affiliate link to Amazon.