Visit the art studio of an early 20th-century painter, hidden amid the Great Smoky Mountains.

An abandoned town is hidden in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

This high point in the Great Smoky Mountains is said to be home to the chief of all bears.

Herbert Hoover's "Brown House" rural presidential retreat was a PR disaster amid the start of the Great Depression.

The hippo that stands on this university campus was once a drunken flea market purchase.

A tiny piece of the Moon is embedded in this stained glass masterpiece.

The sci-fi villain is a little-known inhabitant of the U.S. capital's largest cathedral.

The location where the American Revolution ended.

This functioning mill was built in the 1970s using parts from several other West Virginia mills.

The resting place of a Civil War celebrity's amputated limb.

These trees are living witnesses to events that inspired poet Walt Whitman’s service during the American Civil War.

A home that witnessed Civil War combat on the Sunken Road has the battle scars to prove it.

The Kirkland Monument remembers a selfless Civil War hero who braved the battlefield to give water to his dying enemies.

A girls' boarding school inspired by the Chicago World's Fair, once abandoned, now restored to strange and scenic glory.

An astounding collection of medical specimens, including bits of President Lincoln.

Artist James Turrell's ode to dawn and dusk on the campus of Rice University.

The romance of early commercial flight still fills this Art Deco destination.

A memorial dedicated to a highly decorated Marine and Korean War veteran, who also happened to be a horse.

This bug-eyed water wheel uses the power of the Sun to clean up Baltimore Harbor.

A traveling postal dog covered 48 states and more than 140,000 miles, and he lives on as taxidermy, patched up with a rabbit's foot and a pig's ear.

One of the largest artillery pieces in the world sits in a Washington D.C. parking lot.

Fittingly, America's museum of architecture is itself a magnificently designed old building.

One of the only memorials dedicated to journalists who died in combat.

This 19th-century museum inside of a lighthouse is only accessible during low tide.