In 1693, a Spanish galleon called the Santo Cristo vanished somewhere off the Oregon coast. She was running the Manila trade route, and her cargo was beeswax…which doesn’t occur naturally anywhere in the Americas.
So when this valuable cargo started washing ashore, the local tribes salvaged it and traded it for years. Even Lewis and Clark ended up with some of it. Two hundred years of coastal treasure stories grew out of that wreck…and those stories are where a fictional pirate named One-Eyed Willy eventually came from.
The Goonies house is still standing in Astoria. So is the “Goonies jail” (now a museum) downtown.
Both of them went on the History or Drive map this week, along with 17 other new places.
What we just added
Nineteen new points of interest, from four creators, across nine states and three countries. They’re the featured locations in the app right now, which means you can go look at them today whether or not you have an account. More on that in a second.
Here’s what’s in there.
From Walk With History, six new spots.
The two Goonies locations in Astoria. The O.K. Corral in Tombstone, where the most famous gunfight in the West didn’t actually happen in the corral at all, but in an 18-foot empty lot next door. Thirty bullets in thirty seconds, three dead, three wounded, and Wyatt Earp walked out without a scratch.
We also mapped Gary Gordon’s gravesite in Lincoln, Maine. As depicted in the movie ‘Black Hawk Down’, he died in Mogadishu in 1993 and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. And in Sweetwater, Texas, we added Avenger Field, the only all-woman military training airfield in history, where the WASPs trained to the same standard as the men and then got written out of the story for decades.
From The History Underground, five locations in France and Poland.
JD walked the ground at Pozières, where the ruined windmill cost the Australian Second Division nearly 7,000 casualties and where men fell more thickly than anywhere else on the Western Front. He stood at Thiepval, which is a common grave for 72,000 British and Commonwealth men who have no known resting place.
He also found the cemetery tied to C.S. Lewis, who at eighteen made a promise to his roommate that whichever of them survived the war would look after the other’s family. Moore was killed in 1918. Lewis kept that promise to Moore’s mother for more than thirty years. And in Poland, Westerplatte, where the war in Europe opened at 4:45 in the morning on September 1, 1939, and the Polish Post Office in Danzig, where fifty-six volunteers held out until the Germans pumped gasoline into the basement.
From History Hunters, six places across California, Georgia and Alabama.
A 1911 hatchet murder in Stockton that reads like Lizzie Borden. FDR’s Little White House at Warm Springs. The grave of Joanna Moore, Andy Griffith’s TV girlfriend, whose real life went somewhere much darker than Mayberry. Two stops in Jimmy Carter’s Plains, including the drugstore in Richland where he saw his grandfather for the last time. And Jim Nabors’ hometown of Sylacauga, Alabama, which is also where a woman was struck by a meteorite in her own living room in 1954.
From Addressing Gettysburg
Two more battlefield locations: the Wheatfield, and the ground that decided the first day. If you’ve ever stood in the Wheatfield and wondered how 26 acres of farmland turned into that, the short answer is Dan Sickles disobeyed an order.
Go look at them right now
You don’t need an account to explore the map.
Open HistoryOrDrive.com and the new locations are sitting right there as the featured set. Tap any one of them, read the story, watch the video that goes with it. No signup, no download, nothing to install. It runs in your browser on whatever you’re holding.
If you only do one thing today, do that one.
And if you want the whole map
That’s what a membership is for. Members get all 1,400 locations we’ve mapped so far, with one-tap directions to every single one of them, so the gap between “huh, that’s interesting” and “I’m in the car” is about two seconds wide.
I add a new batch every month. These nineteen are this month’s.
That’s really the whole idea behind this thing. Everything Jenn and I make comes back to the same place…we want to inspire you to get out there and find the history around you. The app is just the part that makes it easy when you’re forty minutes from somewhere and you don’t know what you’re driving past. (and if it’s a Spanish galleon full of beeswax, you’ll want to know)
Thanks, as always, for coming along. 😊
–Scott
