Half of the presidents to die in office were from Ohio.
Oberlin College, founded in 1833, was the first college in the United States to admit women.
Only two zoos outside of Florida have manatees, both in Ohio.
The first successful (as in “the patient left the hospital alive”) appendectomy was performed in Davenport, Iowa in the 1880s.
Flooding was so common in Sacramento, California that in 1873, the entire city’s downtown was raised one entire story. What had originally been the first floor of every downtown building became the basement, and the second stories became the ground floors. You can still visit Sacramento Underground.
The original California state grizzly bear flag was designed by William Todd, the nephew of Mary Todd Lincoln.
About 40 miles south of here is the town of Quantico, VA: surrounded by Marines on three sides and the Potomac on the fourth.
You can go hiking in the snow just fifteen miles from downtown L.A. at times in the winter.
The first newspaper in the United States dedicated to the abolition of slavery was Manumission Intelligencer, published in Jonesborough, Tennessee. It continued publishing as The Emancipator.
Jonesborough is also the oldest town in what is now Tennessee. For a time it was the capital of the short lived State of Franklin movement, which never achieved statehood in its own right.
Kansas City came within a hair’s breadth of being named Possum Trot.
I bet you would do well on Jeopardy.
mmm
I was reading a biography on Grizzly Adams (John “Grizzly” Adams - the man the movie and TV show is based upon) and it said that his bear Sampson was the bear used on the state flag, or more specifically Charles Nahl’s painting of Sampson was transposed onto the state flag.
Suffolk, Virginia, is home to both a Planters Peanuts plant and a Lipton Iced Tea headquarters.
On some days, you can smell the delightful aroma of roasted peanuts throughout downtown.
I much prefer it to the nearby city of Franklin, which has a paper mill.
I’m pretty certain that most state capitols don’t have a McDonalds inside, or as part of the building in any other way.
Now if you’re talking about state capitals…yes, I can pick nits with the best of them.
Chesapeake Beach, MD, where I live, has become just one more bedroom suburb of the Washington, DC megalopolis.
But 25 years or so ago, it used to be a big biker town.
And way back before that, before the Chesapeake Bay Bridge was built, it used to be a summer resort destination for people living in DC, and you could take the train out here.
Maine is bigger than New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut combined. The largest county, Aroostook County, is larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.
Maine’s forests cover 86% of the state, a higher percentage than any other state.
There are several towns in northernmost Maine where French is more widely spoken than English, including the appropriately named Frenchville.
The northernmost settlement in Maine, Estcourt Station, can’t be reached by public road from the rest of the state. There are several houses there, built before a good survey was made, that are crossed by the International Boundary with Canada.
Maine was the site of the first English settlement in the Northeast at Popham Beach in 1607. The colony was abandoned the next year.
There is a street in Portland named "Couch St." Most people who are not locals don’t know that it’s pronounced Kooch. And this is why: John H. Couch - Wikipedia
My town/small city of Franklin, MA was named after Benjamin Franklin because he donated a collection of books to the town to become the first public library in the U.S. The town library still has them as a historical collection. It is also one of the safest places in the U.S. in terms of crime. It was #1 most crime free a couple of years ago and #4 this year. I could kick the kids that took the bicycles for a joyride to drive the crime stats up but that could result in an additional assault charge on our report card.
The Hudson River does the same–for 134 miles, from the mouth at New York City to the Troy Dam.
Think you’ve got a big basket? Well, the world’s largest is in Newark, Ohio. It’s seven stories high, and is the home of the Longaberger Basket Company.
The crescent in the South Carolina State Flag was originally meant to represent a gorget, not a crescent moon. However, it has undergone several design modifications, and it’s not clear whether the last designer intended it to be viewed as a crescent moon or a gorget.
They’re trying to sell, it though, to avoid it being seized for back property taxes. I’m not sure that there’s a big market for giant basket-shaped buildings.
My hometown of Toronto has more than a few streets that are not pronounced as they are spelled:
Strachan Avenue: “Strawn.”
Yonge Street: “Young.”
Baby Point Road: “Bobby Point”
Bloor Street: “Blue-er”
Then there are the roads that take an article, that you’ll never see noted as such on a map:
Danforth Avenue: “The Danforth.”
Lakeshore Boulevard: “The Lakeshore.”
Esplanade (street? avenue? road? nobody quite knows): “The Esplanade.”
And the Toronto street that confuses everybody: Avenue Road. Is it an avenue? Is it a road? You might find understanding if you give an address of “2221 Yonge,” but you’ll never get away with an address of “1975 Avenue.” It has to be “1975 Avenue Road.”
As well as the name of the city itself. Native-born Torontonians will call it “Taronna,” or in more formal situations, “Torondo.” Only non-Torontonians will ever pronounce the second T–which make us Torontonians laugh when American sportscasters are broadcasting an event from Toronto: "Here we are in ToronTo for the Blue Jays game…