A sun-bleached motel sign leaning behind a feed store. A stone monument with half its inscription buried in weeds. The concrete footprint of a roadside attraction that once promised dinosaurs, miracles, or the world’s biggest something.
These are the places that turn a drive into a story. And they’re not as hard to find as you’d think. Forgotten landmarks leave a paper trail — in old maps, newspaper archives, county records, and the odd gaps beside modern highways. Here’s how to follow it.
Why Landmarks Get Forgotten in the First Place
Most forgotten landmarks weren’t abandoned because people stopped caring. They were bypassed. When the Interstate Highway System started reshaping American travel in 1956, traffic drained off older two-lane highways almost overnight. The tourist courts, curiosity shops, and roadside zoos that depended on that traffic withered where they stood — often within sight of the new freeway.
That’s why the original road is always your starting point. The old highway usually survives nearby as a frontage road, a business loop, a county road, or a strangely wide strip of pavement leading nowhere in particular. Find the old alignment and you’ve found the hunting ground.
Step 1: Compare Old Maps to New Ones
The single most powerful tool for this is free: the USGS topoView archive at ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview, which holds scanned topographic maps going back to 1884. Pull up a topo map of an area from the 1950s or 1960s and compare it to the current map. Look for things that appear on the old map and not the new one: a labeled spring, a tourist camp, a roadside park, a picnic ground, a “point of interest” symbol sitting on a road that’s since been straightened.
Bends that were cut off by newer construction are gold. The abandoned curve of an old highway often still holds a sign foundation, a cracked parking pad, or the remains of a service station just beyond the modern traffic.
Step 2: Dig Through Old Newspapers
The Library of Congress runs Chronicling America, a free searchable archive of historic American newspapers. Search the town or county name paired with terms like “tourist court,” “motor lodge,” “curio,” “trading post,” “roadside park,” or “grand opening.” Add a decade if you know the era.
Newspaper archives reveal the business side of roadside history: grand openings, fires, auctions, ownership disputes, and small ads for places that vanished from every travel guide. An ad for “air-cooled cabins” from 1954 can lead you to a motel whose neon sign still stands behind a chain pharmacy. A dedication article can pin a monument to an exact intersection.
Step 3: Check the Oddball Databases
Roadside America has spent decades cataloging the country’s weird and wonderful roadside attractions — and crucially, it maintains a “Gone But Not Forgotten” category for places that have closed or been demolished. It’s the fastest way to check whether a rumor has a real address attached.
Atlas Obscura is the other essential stop: its entries lean toward the strange and the overlooked, and the comments often contain better directions than the article.
Step 4: Ask Locals the Right Way
County historical societies, small-town libraries, and local museums hold archives that will never be searchable from your phone. The volunteers staffing them often know exactly which old sites are still standing.
Ask specific questions. “What are the hidden gems around here?” gets you a brochure. “Are there any old roadside attractions or tourist cabins along the old highway that disappeared from the maps?” gets you a story — and maybe directions.
Step 5: Read Old Photographs Like a Detective
Vintage postcards are field guides disguised as souvenirs. Study the background, not the attraction: mountain profiles, bridge rails, utility poles, paint colors, road curvature, signs pointing toward towns. A postcard labeled only “Greetings from Arizona” might have a gas station name in the corner that places it within a few miles. Then compare it against satellite imagery. Buildings change, but terrain is stubborn — a cliff face, river bend, or railroad line can outlast a landmark by a century.
A Real Example: Two Guns, Arizona
Here’s what the method finds. On old Route 66 in northern Arizona, on the east rim of Canyon Diablo in Coconino County, sits Two Guns — a defunct roadside attraction that peaked in the 1940s. In the 1920s, a promoter named Harry E. Miller built a zoo, trading post, and gas station there, drawing Route 66 travelers at the height of the Mother Road era. When the interstate arrived, the traffic — and the town — died. Today the ruins of the trading post, campground, and service station are still walkable from the old alignment.
Two Guns is the pattern: a real place, a real boom, a real bypass. The ruins are the receipt.
Want more stops like this? Our Ep. 143 — Route 66 Turns 100 walks the full Mother Road, and Ep. 127 — Road Trip 2.0: Oddball Stops of the Southwest is built for exactly this kind of detour.
Step 6: Verify Before You Drive
A pin on a map is not a destination plan. Before driving two hours down a dead-end road:
- Check recent satellite imagery — the “abandoned motel” may have been demolished last year.
- Check road conditions. In the Southwest, a route that looks fine online can turn impassable after a storm. In the Great Plains, a forgotten landmark may sit miles from the nearest services.
- Check property status. If a structure sits on private land, the county assessor’s office can identify the owner. That doesn’t grant permission — it tells you whether to admire from the road or knock on a door.
- Bring water, a spare tire’s worth of patience, and a full tank. The best finds are never near a gas station.
The Point
Forgotten landmarks reward the driver who treats the highway as an archive. The old maps are free. The newspapers are free. The ruins are still out there, waiting for someone who knows where the road used to go.