Markers of History

So this past week­end, my wife and I headed out of town for a church retreat, and I was amazed by the num­ber of mark­ers we saw on our route. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to stop for any pho­tos, but I was cer­tainly mak­ing note for a return drive.

I saw a “marker field” with three state his­toric mark­ers all next to each other. In total, I think there were 11 state his­toric mark­ers that we passed, another within a tenth of a mile of where we left one route, as well as one mon­u­ment in Surry, and an appar­ent marker for a for­mer church loca­tion. While it sad­dens me to not have snarfed all these over the week­end, it has turned into a plan­ning ses­sion for a snarf­ing expedition.

When com­bined with some travel we’d pre­vi­ously planned, we could log these as well as the poten­tial for four oth­ers along our likely route (which would sex­tu­ple my cur­rent total!). I’m look­ing for­ward to that and prepar­ing the GPS with points from the state marker web site (so that we don’t have to spend the entire trip strain­ing to see the signs in time to stop for them with­out backtracking).

I also ended up e-mailing the Department of Historic Resources (who run the state marker pro­gram) to ask about a prob­lem with their web site: the four cities clos­est to me have no mark­ers that turn up on that data­base, which is sur­pris­ing – espe­cially since I’ve already snarfed two of them for Markeroni and know I’ve seen oth­ers. So I sent a quick note ask­ing if it’s a known issue and won­der­ing whether they have an esti­mate for when I could access the list­ings for those sites.

I will also prob­a­bly try to get to the pub­lic library some­time this week to look at their copy of the book with all the Virginia state mark­ers. Unfortunately (for me), the book is in the ref­er­ence sec­tion, so I can’t bring it home. (That said, I know it will be a pur­chase in the not too dis­tant future, with a sim­i­lar book for North Carolina likely to be pur­chased, also.)