Raleigh/Durham, NC
Opened 1943 as a joint Army Air Forces and civilian training base. Commercial operations expanded post-war. Serves the Research Triangle — Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, anchored by NC State, Duke, and UNC. North Carolina's "First in Flight" plate honors the Wright Brothers' 1903 Kitty Hawk flight 200 miles east.
Moored across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington, USS North Carolina (BB-55) was the first of the fast new battleships to join the fleet in World War II and, at her commissioning in 1941, considered the world's greatest sea weapon. She earned 15 battle stars across the Pacific — more than almost any other US battleship — screening carriers at Guadalcanal, the Philippine Sea, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and was rumored sunk so often the Japanese nicknamed her the "Showboat." Slated for scrap in 1960, she was saved by a statewide campaign in which North Carolina schoolchildren donated their dimes to bring her home. She's now a memorial to the state's 11,000 WWII dead, open to walk her decks, turrets, and engine rooms.
A 215-foot limestone arch — twenty stories tall — spanning a gorge cut by little Cedar Creek, so massive that US Route 11 runs across the top and most drivers never realize they're crossing it. For two centuries it was as famous as Niagara, billed as one of the "Seven Natural Wonders of the World." Thomas Jefferson loved it so much he bought it from King George III in 1774 — 157 acres including the bridge — and built a cabin to host visitors; he called it "the most sublime of Nature's works." Legend (unproven but enduring) says a young George Washington surveyed it and carved his initials into the rock wall. It's now a Virginia state park in the Shenandoah Valley.
Thomas Jefferson spent forty years designing, building, tearing down, and rebuilding Monticello — "little mountain" in Italian — on a hilltop outside Charlottesville. It's the only private home in America on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and the only one on a U.S. coin (look at the back of the nickel). The neoclassical house is a self-portrait of his mind: the dome, the hidden dumbwaiters and clever gadgets, the entrance-hall "museum" of fossils and Native American artifacts, the seven-day clock. It's also the place that holds his contradictions most plainly — the author of "all men are created equal" enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime, and the plantation that the modern site now interprets honestly was worked by them. Jefferson is buried in the family graveyard on the slope below.
The largest living-history museum in the world — 301 acres restoring Virginia's 18th-century colonial capital, where costumed interpreters work as blacksmiths, printers, and silversmiths, fife-and-drum corps march the streets, and the daily drama of the run-up to revolution plays out in the Capitol and the Governor's Palace. Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1780, the largest and most influential of the colonies; Patrick Henry, Washington, and Jefferson all argued here. By the 1920s the old town had decayed; John D. Rockefeller Jr. quietly funded a massive restoration, and the result anchors the "Historic Triangle" with Jamestown (first permanent English settlement, 1607) and Yorktown (where the British surrendered in 1781) nearby.