Forever Blooming

Posted by Louise Story

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wyoming-and-what-happens-when-you-pull-over

On her quest to visit all 50 states by July 4th, Atlas Obscura's CEO pulled over for a bicycle sculpture, a plane on a pole, and a mountain lion being skinned in a Wyoming backroom, and came away with something unexpected.

I had not planned to stop in Pringle, South Dakota. We were driving west through the Black Hills to take a day trip to Wyoming when … I spotted it — a large sculpture made entirely of bicycles, welded together on the roadside outside of town, going nowhere and completely magnificent. We pulled over. My kids ran through its arches and tunnels. We took pictures. We left 10 minutes later having seen something none of us expected.

That stop set the tone for the next two days.

Just off I-90 near Sundance, Wyoming, I pulled off at a spot I'd found in the Atlas Obscura database: the Quaal Windsock — a 1950s Beechcraft Twin Bonanza airplane, 45-foot wingspan, mounted on a 70-foot pole above the highway. Mick and Jean Quaal loved the old plane but couldn't justify the $200,000 it would have cost to restore it to flying condition. So instead, they put it back in the sky another way. It pivots with the wind. The propellers still spin. We stood there and watched it turn for a while, and then we got back in the car.

We had come to this corner of Wyoming for Devils Tower, the strange flat-topped rock column that erupts from the plains northeast of Hulett like something from another planet — which, if you grew up watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it essentially is. In Lakota tradition it's called Bear Lodge, and the grooves running down its sides are the claw marks of a great bear who chased children to the top while the rock rose to protect them. Prayer flags tied by Native visitors flutter at its base. Rock climbers (I'm one of them) move slowly up its columnar basalt faces far above. It is one of the more genuinely strange and beautiful places in America, and it deserves every word that has been written about it.

But this essay is not about Devils Tower.

Hulett is a small, old-timey Wyoming town about 20 minutes from the Tower. We were driving through it, windows down, when I saw the sign: Deer Creek Taxidermy. I said what I always say in these moments: Can we stop?

We stopped.

Atlas Obscura has hundreds of taxidermy places in its database. Our community has written about anthropomorphic Victorian taxidermy — dead kittens at tea parties, dead hamsters playing cricket — and about taxidermy loan libraries where you can check out a full-grown tom turkey the way you'd check out a book. We have taught bird taxidermy and mammal taxidermy online to thousands of students. One of our most dedicated community members — a woman named Caroline Mazel-Carlton who has visited more than 1,000 Atlas Obscura locations — told me she has loved taxidermy since she was 2 years old, and that her friends have, on multiple occasions, had to extract her from taxidermy backrooms while on trips.

I had always found this odd. I had not yet understood it.

Bobbi Butler was behind the counter at Deer Creek when we walked in, keeping an eye on her granddaughter at the same time. She gave us the tour without hesitation. The walls were covered: deer, elk, bears, steers, animals arranged in postures of frozen alertness. Some looked calm. Some looked intense, even furious. My 8-year-old, a vegetarian, moved quietly from mount to mount, studying each one.

Then Bobbi said: "So the guys are out back, and they're actually, I don't know if you'd like to see, but they are skinning a mountain lion."

Of course, I said yes.

Outside, a mountain lion lay on its back, legs suspended in the air. Blood across the chest, deep red at the neck. Two men worked efficiently and without ceremony. My son looked at it and said, "That's disgusting."

One of the men looked up. "Good, we needed more help. If everybody holds a leg we have enough people."

Bobbi explained: the animal had been harvested by a hunter who'd brought it to Deer Creek to be mounted. "When it comes back from the tannery," she said, "then we do all the artistic stuff." One of the men popped out a claw — enormous, curved — and held it toward us. "You want to see the dangerous stuff? Look at this."

My son, the vegetarian, looked at the claw. He did not look away.

Back inside, Bobbi walked us through the full process. Animals come in wet and go straight into the freezer. When it's time to work, they thaw the skin and glue it over a high-density foam form sculpted by specialists to the exact shape of the animal. "We order the foam," she said, "then we take the skin out of the freezer and thaw it out, put glue all over the form, stretch the skin over it, sew it up down the back, put glass eyes in, and tuck the nostrils and eyelashes in." She showed us mounts mid-process, pins still holding the skin in place while it dried. I asked whether the eyelashes were preserved from the actual animal. Yes, she said.

My son asked if they'd done a cow. They were working on one. A monkey? Yes. A whale? No.

He thought about this. "I think it would be cool to do a rat."

I had come to Wyoming for Devil's Tower. I left thinking about what Bobbi Butler's work actually is — not preservation of death, exactly, but an argument that something was worth remembering and looking at in new form. The foam form. The glass eyes. The real eyelashes tucked carefully into place. Someone decided this animal's specific likeness, its particular claw, deserved to last.

The Quaals' windsock had been put in the sky because they loved a plane too much to let it rust on the ground. The bicycle sculpture in Pringle was welded to the roadside for no navigational reason whatsoever. Bobbi's mountain lion will hang on someone's wall for decades.

Maybe the purpose is the same in all three cases. Someone saw something worth presenting in a new way. Someone said: Look at this, and look what I did with it.

Caroline would have stayed for hours. I think I'm starting to understand why.

— Louise

Ps - I hope you are enjoying my quest to complete my 50 states. Email me anytime with your own questing stories or travel suggestions at ceo@atlasobscura.com.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wyoming-and-what-happens-when-you-pull-over

Posted by Louise Story

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wonder-interrupted

An Atlas Obscura map led to a joyful stop at Mickey Mantle’s childhood home, and a haunting visit to the abandoned mining town just up the road.

The Atlas Obscura map led me to two places in the same corner of northeast Oklahoma on the same afternoon. I didn't plan it as a journey from joy to grief. But that's what it became.

The first stop was Commerce, Oklahoma, population around 2,400, a town so modest you could drive through it in under two minutes and think nothing of it. I pulled up to 319 South Quincy Street with my eleven-year-old son, and we got out of the car into the bright afternoon and stood there in front of a small white house, taking it all in. This is where Mickey Mantle grew up. The Commerce Comet. One of the greatest baseball players who ever lived.

I told my son the story the way it deserves to be told: like a fairy tale. Mickey's father, Mutt, was so certain of his son's destiny that he named him after a Hall of Fame catcher before he was even born. When Mickey was a boy, Mutt would come home from work every afternoon at four o'clock, and the baseball lessons would begin. Mutt pitched right-handed. Mickey's grandfather pitched left-handed. They engineered a switch-hitter on purpose, right there in that yard. Below the windows was a single. Above them, a double. The roof, a triple. Clear the house entirely and you had a home run. Mickey once said he was "the only kid in town that didn't get in trouble for breaking a window."

My son and I walked around the yard. We peered into the old tin shed that served as Mickey's backstop. We stood where Mickey stood, and I tried to explain what it meant, that from this unremarkable house on this unremarkable street, in a small town most people have never heard of, something extraordinary grew. That greatness doesn't wait for the right zip code or the right circumstances. That you can come from anywhere, from very little, and still become something magnificent. A Yankees center fielder even. He nodded. We skipped around the yard a little, goofing off in the way that eleven-year-olds do when something connects with them but they don't quite have the words for it yet.

We got back in the car. I told him our next stop was just up the road. I knew it wouldn't be a happy place. Atlas Obscura’s entry about the town of Picher had made that clear.

We drove north on the small Highway 69, past flat green fields and bare trees, and then the landscape began to change. Gray mountains appeared, massive, looming, wrong. These were the chat piles: seventy million tons of toxic mining waste, the crushed and poisoned remnants of a century of lead and zinc extraction. As we rolled slowly into Picher, I was livestreaming on Instagram. Almost immediately, a viewer from Oklahoma appeared in the comments, urgent, almost scolding: Why are you going there? There are so many nicer places to visit. I kept driving deeper into the toxic town.

The houses came into view. Deserted. Every one of them. "KEEP OUT" spray-painted across doors and windows, faded but legible. Yards still faintly shaped by the people who had tended them, a walkway here, a porch railing there, the ghost of a garden. This didn't feel like some picturesque old mining ghost town from the 1880s, the kind you visit out west with a gift shop nearby. Picher had been a living community until very recently. In 1983, the EPA designated it part of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, one of the most toxic places in America, it turned out, surpassing even the Love Canal. By the mid-1990s, studies found that 34% of the children in Picher had dangerous levels of lead in their blood, a contamination that could cause lifelong neurological damage. An Army Corps of Engineers study in 2006 found that 86% of the town's buildings were badly undermined by mine shafts and at risk of sudden collapse. Then, in May 2008, an EF4 tornado tore through what remained, killing six people and destroying 150 homes. The government stopped offering to help people rebuild and started offering to pay them to leave. By June 2009, the last residents had accepted buyouts. On September 1, 2009, Picher was officially dissolved as a municipality. Sixteen years ago.

That's what I kept thinking. Sixteen years ago, people lived here. Children played in these yards. A high school class graduated — eleven seniors, the last class in Picher-Cardin High School's history — and then the doors closed forever.

"Can we go faster?" my son asked. "Can we leave?"

We stayed in the car. I didn't roll down the windows, having read on Atlas Obscura that the wind could carry harzardous material. I told my son what I tell myself about travel: that it's not just about the beautiful places and the perfect photos. It's about seeing many angles on the world, including what's hard and strange and broken. And that we owed it to the people who lived here not to look away.

He nodded again. Less convinced this time.

Picher stayed with us for days afterward. We kept talking about "that toxic town." And, honestly, I couldn't decide what to share about it with Atlas Obscura's community. Should I even write about it?

Then, I sat down to write about Mickey's house in Commerce. I was writing the story about the balls thrown over the house with his father, and I looked up more about Mutt. Wow. Mutt died in 1952, at forty years old, when Mickey was twenty. The cause was Hodgkin's disease. Mutt's father Charlie, the same man who had pitched left-handed to Mickey in that yard every afternoon, had also worked in the mines of northeast Oklahoma and also died of Hodgkin's disease before he was fifty. Mickey spent his whole life assuming it was family fate — that the Mantle men simply didn't make it past forty. He didn't know, until much later, that inhaling lead and zinc dust in the mines can lead to Hodgkin's disease. Mutt had worked specifically at the Eagle-Picher Company, the mining operation whose waste became the toxic mountains I had driven through that same afternoon, a few miles up the same road.

And here is what stopped me cold when I worked out the timeline. The Eagle-Picher mines didn't close until 1967, fifteen years after Mutt was already dead. The EPA didn't declare the area a Superfund site until 1983, thirty-one years after Mutt died. And the last residents weren't cleared out until 2009, fifty-seven years after Mutt's death. The mine that in all likelihood killed him, just kept going. More workers. More families. More dust. And the town built on top of all that poison wasn't fully evacuated until more than half a century after Mutt Mantle was buried. When all that happened, people weren’t talking about Mutt Mantle or the connection the mine had to the famous Yankee’s baseball star.

Today, most people who make the pilgrimage to Mickey Mantle's boyhood home in Commerce never drive the few minutes north to Picher. Why would they? Mickey's house draws baseball fans and history lovers who want to stand where a legend stood. They skip around the yard, peer into the old tin shed, feel the warmth of the American dream — and then they get back in the car and drive away, the story intact, the fairy tale complete. But the full story isn't in Commerce. It's also in the journey to Picher. Until you've sat in that toxic town and felt the eerie silence of those deserted streets, you haven't really understood what it meant for Mutt Mantle to come home from work every afternoon at four o'clock.

"That's so sad," my son said, when I told him that Mickey’s father worked there.

"Are you okay that I took you to Picher?" I asked him.

He thought about it for a moment. Then he nodded, slowly, solemnly, a little wiser.

Wonder, I've come to believe, isn't only the beautiful and the marvelous. Sometimes it's the terrible thing you finally understand. Sometimes it's the two places on the map that turn out to be, quietly, the same story.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wonder-interrupted

Posted by Holyn Thigpen

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/these-historic-d-c-spots-tell-america-s-story

Celebrate 250 years of red, white, and blue at these hidden and unusual places.

This year, the United States celebrates a major milestone: 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed and America became an independent nation. The country’s Semiquincentennial is an important time to reflect on the people, ideals, and events that have shaped it, as well as what the future holds.

And what better place to celebrate the U.S. than its capital city? D.C. is home to America’s federal government, national monuments, and prominent political figures, but it’s also the site of some truly incredible, lesser-known U.S. history. Since July 4, 1776, the story of America has been written largely by its unsung heroes and enlivened by the unique places and moments often left out of history books. At these six sites, America’s past, present, and future converge in vivid color against D.C.’s lively cultural backdrop.

National Herb Garden

Inside the U.S. National Arboretum lies the National Herb Garden, one of the most extensive collections of its kind in the country. Established in 1980 by the Herb Society of America, the garden is divided into thematic “rooms” and specialty sections that trace the roles that herbs have played in culture and history. Informational plaques throughout the garden showcase each plant’s practical, medicinal, or cultural significance, from those brewed into beverages to the dyes drawn from blossoms. The garden also contains collections of specific genera such as lavender, rosemary, and chili peppers, allowing visitors to experience the taxonomic diversity within plant families.

Frederick Douglass’s Growlery

This small stone cabin on the grounds of Douglass’s Cedar Hill home became the reformer’s favorite place to read, write, and think in peace throughout his career. Douglass kept the single-room structure simply furnished with a couch, stool, and desk filled with his books and papers. It is likely that many of Douglass’s most famous works were first drafted in this space, which has been jokingly called a “19th-century man cave.” Today, visitors can step inside the reconstruction of this cozy abode, which uses materials from the original Growlery and sits in its original location.

USS Maine Memorial (Mast of the Maine)

The mast of the USS Maine, an armored cruiser that exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898, stands proud in Arlington National Cemetery, commemorating the over 260 people who died in the tragedy. It was first raised from the sea in 1911 and brought to Arlington in 1912. Now, the mast sits atop a large granite base, designed to resemble a battleship gun turret. It contains inscriptions of the names and ranks of those lost in the wreck, as well as a welded depiction of the Maine’s bell. Above the door, another inscription reads, “Erected in memory of the officers and men who lost their lives in the destruction of the USS Maine at Havana Cuba, February Fifteenth MDCCCXCVIII.”

Zero Milestone

This small granite structure symbolized lofty goals for America’s future when it was erected in 1923. Championed by Dr. S. M. Johnson, an advocate of the burgeoning Good Roads Movement, the marker was intended to show the central point from which one could measure highway distances throughout the country—a timely aim in the early days of America’s booming automobile age. Johnson took inspiration from ancient Rome’s Golden Milestone, located in the Forum, which marked the origin point of the Roman Empire’s extensive road system. While the Milestone’s great vision never quite caught on, it’s still technically a geodetic benchmark for some local measurements.

Statue of General Comte de Rochambeau

This statue of the famous French Revolutionary War hero was erected in Lafayette Park to affirm positive Franco-American relations. Following tensions between the two countries during the 1898 Spanish-American War, France sought to show that it held no grudges and was ready to restore friendly diplomacy. President Theodore Roosevelt and members of Congress, along with French military and civil delegations, dedicated the Rochambeau statue in 1902 in the southwest corner of the park.

Peirce Mill Spy Station

During the Cold War, D.C. was full of covert spaces for top-secret operations, such as this unadorned attic space in Rock Creek Park. The small nook atop a former carriage house became a site for intelligence officers to monitor bugging equipment directed at the diplomatic consulates (and snap the occasional sneaky photos). Meanwhile, the ground floor of the space became home to an alternative art collective called the Art Barn. The building’s use as a spy station was not revealed until 1992, when the Washington Post interviewed the Art Barn’s executive director about her unusual upstairs neighbors. In the same article, the Post reported that all spy equipment had been removed from the mill the previous year when the Cold War came to an end.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/these-historic-d-c-spots-tell-america-s-story

Posted by Holyn Thigpen

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/i-asked-you-answered-50-state-quest

Here is what you told me about the 11 states I am racing to visit before July 4th. And here is what I am still wondering.

A few weeks ago, I announced my quest: Visit all 50 states before America’s 250th birthday on July 4th. I had 11 remaining—Arkansas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska—and I asked if you had suggestions.

What arrived was not a trickle. It was a flood. Hundreds of emails, from readers in Fairbanks and Visby, Sweden; from retired wildlife biologists and Jesuit priests and 87-year-olds and environmental science teachers in Phoenix. You have collectively produced what might be the most detailed, lovingly opinionated, off-the-beaten-path guide to these 11 states I have ever encountered.

I want to share what you said. And then I want to ask you something.

What You Told Me

The single most-recommended destination in my entire inbox was Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. A world-class art museum in the Ozarks, built by the Walton family—and apparently, it is exactly as extraordinary as its reputation. Consider that recommendation well and truly made. It also has a special exhibit showing for the 250th.

South Dakota produced the most passionate emails. The Badlands—“badass, take water”—came up from many readers. Mt. Rushmore came up almost as much, though almost always with a counterpoint: Crazy Horse, which multiple readers called more meaningful; or Custer State Park, where one reader used to pay her kids for animal sightings to keep their eyes off their screens. One reader admitted he was dead set against visiting Rushmore—saying “a bunch of stone heads defacing a beautiful mountain, who cares?”—and then was completely won over after hiking the trail up close.

Washington produced more recommendations than any other state. The ferry system. The Olympic Peninsula. The Hoh Rain Forest. Mt. Rainier. Mt. St. Helens. The Underground Seattle tour. The LIGO gravitational wave observatory on the Hanford nuclear site, which has monthly public tours and which I am not missing. Eastern Washington’s Yakima Valley, where one reader described apple orchards on volcanic soil and hop fields carrying “the foreshadowing fragrance of future IPAs.” And the Moccasin Bar in Hayward, Wisconsin—cash only, taxidermy animals staged in dioramas playing poker and boxing, a world-record musky on the wall. No website.

For Nebraska: Several of you mentioned Carhenge. Several more mentioned the sandhill crane migration along the Platte River in March—which, as I write this, is happening right now. A Jesuit priest from Omaha described driving up through the Sandhills toward the Badlands as “a different kind of stunning beauty you won’t see anywhere else.” I believe him.

Iowa kept surprising me. Mason City came up from numerous readers independently: It has the last surviving Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel, the hometown of Meredith Willson (who wrote The Music Man), and puppets from The Sound of Music on display at the local art museum. I did not know any of this. The future birthplace of Captain Kirk is also in Iowa, in the town of Riverside, which I find deeply wonderful.

Idaho, I am told, contains incredible nature. A retired wildlife biologist sent me a list of fifteen places that don’t appear in any guidebook, including rivers that vanish underground and a fault scarp still visible from the 1983 earthquake. Craters of the Moon came up four times. The town of Arco—the first city in the world powered by atomic energy—sits right next door.

For Alaska, the advice was nearly unanimous: Go. Just go. One reader who has lived there 45 years wrote: “We love Atlas Obscura, but you don’t need smoke and mirrors in Alaska.” I believe him, too.

What I Notice Across All of It

Reading through hundreds of recommendations, a few themes emerge that say something about how this community thinks about travel.

Almost everyone pushes past the obvious. The marquee attraction gets mentioned, and then immediately qualified or redirected. Go to Rushmore, but Crazy Horse. Visit Seattle, but cross the Cascades. The instinct to find the less-trodden version runs deep in this inbox. It is, I think, the Atlas Obscura instinct made explicit.

Indigenous history comes up again and again, and always with moral weight. The flooding of Ojibwe land to create the Chippewa Flowage in Wisconsin. The Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma. The First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City. Multiple readers specifically suggested skipping the Mt. Rushmore tourist shops and buying from Native artisans instead. This isn’t incidental. It feels like something this community carries collectively.

Food is always specific, never generic. Nobody says “eat at a good restaurant.” They say: Get a Maid-Rite in Iowa, a loose-meat sandwich served since 1926. Eat cheese curds in Wisconsin—“the squeakier, the fresher.” Get pie at Norske Nook. Have a coney dog at Coney Island on 104 E 3rd St in Grand Island, Nebraska, run by the original owner’s son, interior unchanged. These aren’t Yelp recommendations. They’re heirlooms.

And this surprised me: Frank Lloyd Wright is a secret connective thread through the whole trip. His last surviving hotel is in Mason City, Iowa. His Allen House is in Wichita, Kansas. His Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, has hotel rooms and a bar. His Taliesin is in Spring Green, Wisconsin. I could build an entire itinerary around one architect across four states. I might.

Where I’m Still Looking for More

I want to be honest: Kansas and Indiana got thinner treatment in the inbox than the other nine states. Kansas carries a reputation—“it’s flat,” multiple readers noted, often before and sometimes after their recommendations—that seems to suppress enthusiasm even among people who clearly love it. I know Monument Rocks exists. I know Lawrence has some of the richest Civil War history in America. But I want more. What are you not telling me about Kansas? Here is a video of one interesting little place I visited there so far.

Indiana also feels like it has secrets I haven’t unlocked. The dunes, the caves, the West Baden Springs Hotel with its extraordinary domed atrium—those came up. But I suspect there’s an Indiana that doesn’t get written about, and I want to know what it is. So here is my ask: What did I miss? What did your fellow readers get wrong, or underrate, or skip entirely on the above states? Are there places on this list you’d push back on? And what would you add?

Why I Trust You

Studies consistently find that friends and community members—people who share your values, your curiosity, your sense of what a good trip means—are the most reliable predictors of whether you’ll love a place. One analysis of millions of travel check-ins found that the people in your community shape your destination choices more powerfully than any algorithm. The intangibility of travel makes us especially dependent on the testimony of someone who has actually been there—not descriptions, but the lived experience of a person saying: Go, it surprised me, do not miss it.

The Atlas Obscura community self-selects for a particular kind of curiosity. You are not here for the obvious. You are not here for the sanitized version. The recommendations you sent are, almost without exception, from people who went somewhere, were surprised by it, and wanted to hand that surprise to someone else. That is an act of generosity. That is also, I think, why it feels so trustworthy—because it comes from the same place that wonder does.

I am going to all 11 states. I have four months. And I am taking your list with me.

Tell me what I missed. I’m at ceo@atlasobscura.com.

— Louise

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/i-asked-you-answered-50-state-quest