Skip to main content

NC 172's long-ago partner in crime

One of the interesting things about North Carolina is, almost to a T, any intersection at a very small angle (10 degrees or so) almost always indicates an old alignment of a roadway. I've noticed that NC 133 has one of these intersections just south of a bridge and a sharp curve about halfway between Leland and Southport, and assumed that the roadway used to continue straight ahead. So I decided to trace a route along this roadway, now called Plantation Road after the Orton Plantation located nearby, and lo and behold...

First, here is the intersection of 133 and Plantation. Notice how it's almost straight on with the northern stretch of 133 from the intersection, even though Plantation itself curves to the left to meet 133.

Follow Plantation south, and eventually you cross into land occupied by Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal. Keep going south, and switch over to the Satellite view after the mapped road ends, and you'll come to this point where the road seems to be closed but there's obviously an old roadbed in place, and while there's no bridge over the small creek it's obvious that one existed at some point. After the second waterway (which is an intake canal for the nuclear plant that would have been built well after this road was abandoned), another road picks up, and this one eventually becomes NC 211 near the Southport ferry dock, running straight into downtown Southport.

So at some point, the road from Leland to Southport ran through what's now Sunny Point, and was probably relocated in the late '40s when Sunny Point was being built. It was never NC 133 because that numbering didn't come along until the late '50s, but it could have been the original routing of NC 130 before it was renumbered to NC 40 -- right around 1950, that stretch was given a number for the first time, and it existed unnumbered before then.

With all the military bases in eastern North Carolina, I'm sure this road isn't the only one that was necessarily rerouted to avoid a base. (NC 172, obviously, wasn't rerouted per se, but it was closed as a through route through Camp Lejeune.) Are there any other roads that were rerouted around a base?

Comments

Unknown said…
NC-111 was rerouted when Seymour Johnson AFB was built. If you look at it on Google maps it's pretty clear that "Old NC-111" used to connect to Slocumb Street, which intersects with Ash Street (which at the time would have been US-70 and today is US-70 Business).
Mapmikey said…
The 1930 Brunswick County Map supports the pre-NC 133 routing through Sunny Point

NC 111 has been rerouted twice for the AFB. See the map shown at http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Goldsboro,+NC&ie=UTF8&ll=35.341035,-77.944393&spn=0.04936,0.084715&z=14&om=1
which shows two different older NC 111 routings...one onto Slocumb St, and another using Piedmont Airlane Rd to meet 70 business...

Popular posts from this blog

Old River Lock & Control Structure (Lettsworth, LA)

  The Old River Control Structure (ORCS) and its connecting satellite facilities combine to form one of the most impressive flood control complexes in North America. Located along the west bank of the Mississippi River near the confluence with the Red River and Atchafalaya River nearby, this structure system was fundamentally made possible by the Flood Control Act of 1928 that was passed by the United States Congress in the aftermath of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 however a second, less obvious motivation influenced the construction here. The Mississippi River’s channel has gradually elongated and meandered in the area over the centuries, creating new oxbows and sandbars that made navigation of the river challenging and time-consuming through the steamboat era of the 1800s. This treacherous area of the river known as “Turnbull’s Bend” was where the mouth of the Red River was located that the upriver end of the bend and the Atchafalaya River, then effectively an outflow

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

California State Route 203 the proposed Minaret Summit Highway

California State Route 203 is an approximately nine-mile State Highway located near Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Mono County.  California State Route 203 as presently configured begins at US Route 395, passes through Mammoth Lakes and terminates at the Madera County line at Minaret Summit.  What is now California State Route 203 was added to the State Highway System in 1933 as Legislative Route Number 112.  The original Mammoth Lakes State Highway ended at Lake Mary near the site of Old Mammoth and was renumbered to California State Route 203 in 1964.  The modern alignment of the highway to Minaret Summit was adopted during 1967.   The corridor of Minaret Summit and Mammoth Pass have been subject to numerous proposed Trans-Sierra Highways.  The first corridor was proposed over Mammoth Pass following a Southern Pacific Railroad survey in 1901.  In 1931 a corridor between the Minarets Wilderness and High Sierra Peaks Wilderness was reserved by the Forest Service for po