Mark G Simon

I've read them with great pleasure. That's a terrific site you have!

I also had difficulty locating Stewart's "Highway and Tree" in Ohio, not too far from Lafeyette and the Red Brick Tavern. The picture here is certainly the same spot, but alas neither the tree nor the "attractive bit of masonry" are still there. A clump of trees still occupies the general spot of Stewart's tree, but a close inspection on foot showed no trace of the wall. The house to the left of the highway is the same as in the Vales' 1980 picture.

This past summer I had reason to travel to Kansas City from my home near DC, so naturally I followed the National Road. One site from Stewart's U.S. 40 which is hard to recognize today is no. 29, "Farm on the National Road", which is located "near Belleville". I cannot be 100% certain that this is it, but it fit the description given in the Vales' U.S. 40 Today as "just west of the town limit and beyond a small new housing development". In any case there didn't seem to be any other place around that could possibly be the place. A photo from the same angle Stewart used would be impossible due to the increased vegetation. This, if it is indeed the spot, is a head-on view. None of the buildings from Stewart's photo are still there, but I believe the brown garage in my photo is the same as the structure just in front of the pre-fab home in the Vales' picture. That, and possibly the utility pole to the left of the house.

Thomas & Geraldine Vale's U.S. 40 Today shows that the Tie House had burned down by 1980. "Two of the four planted poplars that drew water from the spring were destroyed by the fire; one is standing, and the other is reduced to a blackened stump. The two pines at the left in the earlier photo, which Stewart observed to be less typical of the region and not thriving, have been replaced by native cottonwoods. The grass growing around the spring and previously protected from wayward cattle now has thickened and spread beyond the downed barbed wire fence and into the foreground..." In the 1980 photo, there is a cement foundation that looks like what appears in DaleS's picture. Two strips of (presumably) interstate highway cross the picture in the middle distance.