16. The Jolly Green Giant, standing in Green Giant Park [Back]
17. Vermont, from the French vert mont [Back]
18. New York City [Back]
19. The Blue Ridge [Back]
20. Alabama [Back]
21. South Dakota and Wyoming [Back]
22. The White Mountains [Back]
23. Bryce Canyon [Back]
24. Orange [Back]
25. The Red River (not the same as the one in question 2) [Back]
Funny Names on the Map // Answers
1. Hawaii [Back]
2. Texas; Scurry is a top oil-producing county. [Back]
3. Truth or Consequences, named for a show hosted by Ralph Edwards; the town was originally named Hot Springs. [Back]
4. The Okefenokee [Back]
5. Kentucky; it’s a state park in the southwestern part of the state. [Back]
6. Florida; they are towns on the Atlantic Coast. [Back]
7. In northern Alabama; the residents of Winston County voted to secede from Alabama after the state seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. Winston County became (never officially) the state of Nickajack. [Back]
8. New Orleans, of course [Back]
9. Lake Okeechobee [Back]
10. On a Civil War battlefield; Chick-Chatt is the short name for Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in Tennessee and Georgia. [Back]
11. The Amish [Back]
12. The Moose (Did anyone miss this?) [Back]
13. Pittsburgh; both give excellent views of the city. [Back]
14. Sand dunes, which many people use for hang gliding [Back]
15. Michigan; some of the large dunes supposedly resemble sleeping bears. [Back]
16. Maryland [Back]
17. Muscle Shoals [Back]
18. Louisiana, noted for its French connections [Back]
19. Sweden; it was settled by a Swedish religious sect. Bishopskuna means “Bishop Hill.” [Back]
On the Road Again // Answers
1. 0 [Back]
2. Shenandoah (in Virginia) and Great Smoky Mountains (in Tennessee and North Carolina) [Back]
3. Chinatown [Back]
4. The Colonial Parkway [Back]
5. The Redwood Highway [Back]
6. Elvis Presley Boulevard, which runs past Presley’s home, Graceland [Back]
7. The cloverleaf interchange [Back]
8. Key West, the “end of the road” (or the beginning) for the eastern U.S. [Back]
9. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania [Back]
10. The famous (and infamous) Bourbon Street [Back]
11. San Francisco [Back]
12. Yellowstone [Back]
13. Pennsylvania [Back]
14. Salt Lake City, Utah [Back]
15. U.S. Highway 1 [Back]
16. Interstates [Back]
17. Billy Graham, a native of the area [Back]
18. Montana [Back]
19. It was 55 mph. This was changed in 1995. [Back]
20. The Keys [Back]
21. Memphis [Back]
22. Washington, D.C., or near it; the Capital Beltway is the heavily traveled freeway encircling the city. [Back]
23. Austin, Texas; Pecan Street is Austin’s version of New Orleans’s Bourbon Street. [Back]
24. California; it’s a forty-five-mile mountain road near San Bernardino. [Back]
Beantown, Barb City, and Other City Nicknames // Answers
1. Chicago, Illinois, of course [Back]
2. Boston (as in “Boston baked beans”) [Back]
3. Nashville, Tennessee [Back]
4. Detroit, the “Motor Town” [Back]
5. Denver, Colorado, whose elevation is (surprise!) about 5,280 feet [Back]
6. Durham, home of Duke University; the Duke family, wealthy tobacco farmers, gave millions of dollars to the college. [Back]
7. Louisiana, noted for its use of crawfish in cooking [Back]
8. Lexington; the Bluegrass refers to the region of north central Kentucky. [Back]
9. Branson, noted for its many country music concert halls [Back]
10. Palm Springs, California [Back]
11. The nation’s first barbed-wire manufacturing company was there. [Back]
12. Colorado [Back]
13. Florida; Valdosta is near the heavily traveled I-75. [Back]
14. New Orleans [Back]
15. Huntsville, home of the NASA Space Flight Center [Back]
16. William Penn [Back]
17. New York; whether the rudeness is real or imaginary is a matter of opinion. [Back]
18. Pittsburgh [Back]
19. Nashville, Tennessee, which has the national offices of several Protestant denominations [Back]
20. San Jose, center of the state’s computer industry [Back]
21. Vermont [Back]
22. Soybean [Back]
23. The capital, Sacramento [Back]
24. Chicago, formerly second in population to New York, is now third. [Back]
25. Maine [Back]
26. New Orleans (or, if you prefer, N’awlins) [Back]
27. Tulsa [Back]
Notable Purchases // Answers
1. Manhattan Island, bought from Native Americans for twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads and trinkets [Back]
2. Thomas Jefferson’s [Back]
3. Florida [Back]
4. Norfolk [Back]
5. The Gadsden Purchase [Back]
6. Central Park [Back]
7. James Monroe, who negotiated the purchase as Thomas Jefferson’s diplomat to France [Back]
8. Florida; after Disston’s purchase, the development of southern Florida proceeded rapidly. [Back]
9. Richmond, Virginia [Back]
10. Walt Disney, who purchased the land for Disney World in 1965 [Back]
11. The Louisiana Purchase [Back]
12. Alaska, purchased at the urging of Secretary of State William Seward; people thought he was a fool to want the chilly wilderness. It was also called “Seward’s Folly.” [Back]
Little Egypt, Big Muddy, and Other Place Nicknames // Answers
2. Yankee Stadium—or, to be precise, the old Yankee Stadium, which was demolished in 2009 (the new Yankee opened that same year). Ruth was, of course, “the Babe,” the Yankee legend. [Back]
3. Louisiana, which excels in both fishing and hunting [Back]
4. Rhode Island, naturally [Back]
5. Philadelphia [Back]
6. Salmon [Back]
7. Ohio [Back]
8. Georgia; if you’d noticed all the streets named “Peachtree” in Atlanta, you’d know this. [Back]
9. Chicago [Back]
10. Alabama [Back]
11. New Jersey [Back]
12. Louisiana; the name refers to a wide area of sugarcane plantations. [Back]
13. Tennessee [Back]
14. Illinois’s; several town names are Cairo, Thebes, and Karnak, all places in Egypt. The farmland supposedly reminded settlers of the fertile Nile River plains. [Back]
15. Wisconsin’s; for their resemblance to ground-dwelling badgers, the miners were called “badgers,” thus Wisconsin is the “Badger State.” [Back]
16. Arkansas [Back]
17. California, naturally [Back]
18. The five-hundred-mile-long Natchez Trace, running from Nashville to the Mississippi River [Back]
19. Virginia [Back]
20. “Mighty Mac” [Back]
21. New Mexico [Back]
22. Atlantic City [Back]
23. “The Prairie State,” besides being called “Land of Lincoln” [Back]
24. The Missouri [Back]
25. Washington [Back]
26. The Pocono Mountains [Back]
27. The Erie Canal, which connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie, opening up the western lands of the U.S. [Back]
28. Boston, Massachusetts [Back]
29. “The Old Man of the Mountain,” sometimes called the “Great Stone Face”; sadly, the granite formation suffered breakage in 2003, so the Old Man no longer exists. [Back]
30. Vermont, whose name in French, vert mont, means “green mountain” [Back]
31. Canada [Back]
32. Alabama, so called because of its central location in the South [Back]
33. Louisiana [Back]
Scraping the Sky: Tall Buildings // Answers
1. TCBY (The Country’s Best Yogurt); the forty-story TCBY Tower is now the Metropolitan Tower. [Back]
2. Xerox; the Xerox Tower is thirty stories. [Back]
3. The University of Pittsburgh; the Cathedral is one of the tallest college buildings in the world. [Back]
4. The Mormons; it’s the LDS (Latter-Day Saints) Church Office Building. [Back]
5. San Francisco, California [Back]
6. Thirteen stories (Can you guess the significance of thirteen?) [Back]
7. Honolulu, of course [Back]
8. A Virginian (naturally), James Monroe [Back]
9. Massachusetts; it’s in Boston. [Back]
10. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the second-tallest building is Two Liberty Place. [Back]
11. The Empire State Building [Back]
12. U.S. Steel [Back]
13. The Gateway Arch, symbol of the westward expansion of the U.S. [Back]
14. The National Cathedral, in its central bell tower [Back]
16. The Empire State Building [Back]
17. Atlanta, Georgia [Back]
18. Wells Fargo [Back]
19. Hotels—or, to be specific, hotel-casinos [Back]
20. The Statue of Liberty [Back]
More Funny Names on the Map // Answers
1. Nevada, of course, notorious for its gambling [Back]
2. Hot Springs, in Arkansas [Back]
3. Boca Raton; the name refers to pointed rocks near the entrance of the site’s inlet. [Back]
4. Missouri; there are several amusing theories about how the town got its name. [Back]
5. The Everglades [Back]
6. Othello [Back]
7. Texas [Back]
8. Calistoga (Get it? California + Saratoga = Calistoga.) [Back]
9. God—to be specific, the “Great Spirit,” which is what the Native American word Manitou means [Back]
10. Arizona [Back]
11. Raleigh, North Carolina; the town was named by a Raleigh native who apparently spelled the name as he pronounced it. [Back]
12. Utah [Back]
13. Los Angeles; the old Spanish name means “The town of our Lady the Queen of the angels of Porciuncula.” [Back]
14. They gave up their life jackets so other passengers could have them. [Back]
15. Albany, New York, held by the Dutch until 1664 [Back]
16. Hackensack [Back]
17. King of Prussia—which was actually named not for the king but for the sign on a local inn [Back]
18. Missouri [Back]
19. North Carolina [Back]
Replicas: When You Can’t Have the Real Thing . . . // Answers
1. The appropriately named New York-New York [Back]
2. The Parthenon—or, at least, a full-size replica of it; it is in much better condition than the one in Athens, Greece. [Back]
3. The U.S. Capitol; Little Rock’s is smaller. [Back]
4. Washington, D.C.; it is found at the city’s Franciscan Monastery. [Back]
5. Jamestown, Virginia; they are replicas of the ships that brought the first English colonists to Jamestown in 1607. [Back]
6. North Carolina; the replicas are at the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills. [Back]
7. Dallas; the center also has a painting of Pentecost that is 20 feet wide and 124 feet long. [Back]
8. The Alamo, part of the leftover set from the 1959 John Wayne movie [Back]
9. Walden Pond; Thoreau’s time there led him to write the classic book Walden. [Back]
10. The American Bible Society’s; the significance is, of course, that a Gutenberg press produced the first printed Bible. [Back]
11. The Globe, home to Shakespeare’s plays; the city hosts an annual Shakespeare Festival. [Back]
12. The Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria, replicas of Columbus’s three ships; they were sent out in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage. [Back]
13. George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon [Back]
14. Eureka Springs, Arkansas; the late Gerald L. K. Smith pioneered the project of building replicas of Old Jerusalem sites in Arkansas. The walls, at present, are all that have been completed. [Back]
Happy Trails to You // Answers
1. The Appalachian Trail (known as the AT to seasoned hikers) [Back]
2. The Trail of Tears [Back]
3. Cattle (plus human beings, of course) [Back]
4. The Natchez Trace, a Native-American trail that is now administered by the National Park Service [Back]