Altoona, PA
Six miles east of Altoona, the railroad town built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1850s to service trains tackling the Allegheny Front. Horseshoe Curve sits 5 miles west of downtown — for a century, every PRR freight movement between Philadelphia and the Midwest rounded that curve, and Altoona's railroad shops were the largest in the world by the 1920s. Single 5,470ft runway, Class D, modest commercial service from regional carriers. The Railroaders Memorial Museum downtown is the city's anchor attraction.
A 220-degree railroad curve completed in 1854 to get the Pennsylvania Railroad over the Allegheny Front without using a tunnel — the line wraps around three sides of a natural amphitheater, gaining 122 feet of elevation in 2,375 feet of track. The curve made it possible to ship freight from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and on to the Midwest, cementing Pennsylvania as the industrial spine of 19th-century America. Norfolk Southern still runs 50-plus trains a day around the curve. The Nazi sabotage plot Operation Pastorius (1942) had Horseshoe Curve on its target list — three German agents landed by U-boat with explosives, but turned themselves in before getting near it.
The crash site of United Flight 93, the fourth hijacked aircraft on September 11, 2001 — and the only one not to reach its target, brought down in a Pennsylvania field after the 40 passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers. The plane impacted at 563 mph into reclaimed strip-mine land near Shanksville. The memorial design is restrained and powerful: a Tower of Voices with 40 wind chimes (one per passenger and crew member), a curving white marble Wall of Names along the flight path, and a black slate boulder marking the impact point. Visitor center opened on the tenth anniversary.
The small western-PA town where, every February 2 since 1887, a groundhog named Phil emerges from a stump on a forested knoll called Gobbler's Knob to forecast six more weeks of winter or an early spring. The tradition descends from German immigrant folklore (Candlemas Day, badger weather-forecasting) brought to Pennsylvania in the 18th century. The 1993 Bill Murray film made the town a worldwide brand. Punxsutawney sits on the edge of the bituminous coal fields that powered Pittsburgh steel. The Knob itself is two miles outside town, an unassuming wooded hill the rest of the year.
Three miles south of Sharpsburg, Maryland — the site of the September 17, 1862 Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day in American military history. 22,717 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing in twelve hours of fighting along Antietam Creek and the cornfields, sunken road ("Bloody Lane"), and stone bridge ("Burnside Bridge") that anchor today's preserved battlefield. The tactical result was a draw, but the strategic result was Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North turned back — which gave President Lincoln the political cover to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later, on September 22, 1862, transforming the Civil War from a war to preserve the Union into a war to end slavery. The battlefield preserves 3,250 acres and most major terrain features look essentially as they did in 1862 — the Dunker Church (the photograph reference point for one of the most-published images of the Civil War), the cornfield, the sunken road, Burnside Bridge over Antietam Creek. The National Cemetery on the hill holds 4,776 Union dead. Photographer Alexander Gardner's images of the battlefield dead, displayed at Mathew Brady's New York studio in October 1862, were the first time the American public saw the dead of war — and arguably the moment war photography was invented.