Skip to main content

No particular place to go

A good road trip doesn't have to be 30 hours of non-stop cross country driving or with a particular destination in mind.

Sometimes, a very good road trip is right in your backyard and without a map - just by going on a turn here this road looks good without any maps.

And yesterday that was exactly what I did. Fellow blogger Brian LeBlanc and I roamed around some of the counties east of Raleigh on back roads and secondary roads, forgotten US highways, and the Interstate. What we saw were old corner stores, small North Carolina towns, and an old road that used to be pretty important.

For the entire set on flickr - go here.

The first stop is in Wake County - at the intersection of Poole and Smithfield Roads - this old corner store.

Eastern Wake County is not an area I get to explore much - and there seems to be a number of great old rural buildings and general stores out here. A few miles down pool road is a now abandoned lakehouse at Lake Myra.

After hitting a number of backroads and state routes from Archer Lodge to Middlesex. We picked up US 264 Alternate and headed east towards Wilson. At the begining of the Wilson bypass there's this leftover sign.

It's kinda hard to be on West US 264A when the road is blocked off. (It's a former alignment of the road prior to the construction of the bypass interchange).

From Wilson, we headed south on US 301 towards I-95 and Kenly. Until about 1978, I-95 wasn't complete from Rocky Mount to Kenly. Interstate traffic would move onto US 301 until I-95 was opened. US 301 is full of old motor lodges and truck stops a great look at how things used to be prior to the Interstate. This trip didn't get photos of all the old pieces of travel history - but it was decided to have another trip that would document US 301 throughout North Carolina.

In Kenly, there was a rare North Carolina sign find, an Interstate 95 North Carolina shield. I think that the sign may have been there from prior to I-95 being opened in the late 70s. (This is where traffic would rejoin I-95 from US 301.

We continued south on US 301 and stopped in the town of Micro. Originally called Jerome, the town was renamed 'Micro' in 1905. It seems to be a fitting name for a small town that was bypassed by the Interstate.



Further down US 301, and just outside of Selma, we spotted a rather old Mountain Dew sign.

This is the first time I have ever seen this version before - is this the original?

After looping through Smithfield and Selma it wass off to Pine Level and that's where this abandoned find was. It appears to be an old Feed Mill and it's name was Edward's (something) - the building with the title of the property has collapsed. It was a great late summer find.




Looped back through Princeton and headed south on I-95 to Dunn from there we headed West on US 421/NC 55 to Erwin and picked up Old Stage Road to Raleigh. Near the end of Old Stage Road at the intersection with Ten Ten Road was this Ruritan Community sign. This is only the second such sign I have ever seen. The other is just a few miles away at Ten Ten Road and US 401. Do any more of these exist or were there plenty of these throughout rural NC in the past?


From here it was back home and the end of the trip. Still a nice five and a half hour ride through the local countryside!

Comments

Rob Adams said…
Great stuff. I remember having to use US 301 during the 70's as we made our way to and from Florida, and how barren it was on 95 in the early 80's because all of the businesses were on US 301. We'd always have to use Exit 145 (Gold Rock) to find the Howard Johnson's.

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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