Quarter Miles Travel With Annita

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Quarter Miles Travel With Annita is a society podcast hosted by Travel With Annita and Friends, with 69 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Travel With Annita and Friends hosts Quarter Miles Travel With Annita, a society show with 69 episodes published.

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  Quarter Miles Travel With Annita

  Dogs on the Road: The South’s Best Cities for Travel With Your Pup

  Sep 20, 20268 min

  Radio segment from Mornings on Maine With Bill Maine Dogs on the Road: The South’s Best Cities for Travel With Your Pup Pet travel stats, airline and national park rules, and five great Southern getaways for you and your dog Annita and her English Lab . By Annita Stokes Thomas If there’s a dog riding shotgun in your car more often these days, you’re not imagining it. Americans are traveling with their pets in record numbers, and the hospitality industry is scrambling to keep up. Here’s a look at where that trend stands right now, what to know before you fly or head into a national park with your dog, and five great Southern destinations worth the trip. Are We Really Traveling With Our Dogs? Short answer: yes, and more every year. Multiple recent surveys peg the number of American pet owners who travel with their pets annually at right around 78 percent. More than half of dog and cat owners say they now plan their trips around their pet, not the other way around. And it’s not just a domestic trend. A global pet-parent study out last year found that 56 percent of people worldwide now own a pet, with nearly half of those being first-time owners, a whole new generation of pet parents who don’t want to leave the dog behind. A 2025 survey of US and UK travelers found that 27 percent of pet owners who brought their pet on a big vacation last year were doing it for the very first time. The number one reason people leave the dog at home? Fear that travel would be too stressful for the pet — that’s the top reason cited, followed by not trusting that a destination is truly pet-friendly. How are they getting there? Road trips still win, hands down — nearly two-thirds of pet owners, right around 64 percent, say they prefer traveling with their dog by car. Flying is a distant second, with roughly a third of pet owners saying they’ve flown with a pet. About 75 percent of hotels nationwide — luxury, midscale, and economy — now allow pets in some form, and the vast majority of pet parents say they’d choose a pet-friendly hotel over any other option. RVs and camping are part of that road-trip boom too — pet owners increasingly point to hiking and fresh-air destinations as their top pick for a pet-friendly trip, right up there with beaches. The trend line is clear: dogs are road-tripping more than ever, hotels are adapting fast, and flying — while it’s growing — comes with a lot more fine print. A little dog in an airline pet carrier sized to fit under the seat in front of you. Flying With Fido: What the Airlines Actually Allow Here’s something that surprises a lot of people: as of this year, only two major U.S. airlines will still fly a dog in the cargo hold for an everyday passenger — Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. American, Delta, United, Southwest, JetBlue, Spirit, and Frontier have all discontinued or paused their pet cargo programs for the general public. If you’ve got a bigger dog who can’t fit under an airplane seat, your options for flying with them have really narrowed. Here’s the cabin picture, airline by airline: Delta: small dogs, cats, and household birds only, in a ventilated carrier under the seat in front of you. No cargo option for regular travelers. American Airlines: small cats and dogs in the cabin only, around $150 each way, first-come first-served with a limited number of pet spots per flight. United: dogs, cats, rabbits, and household birds allowed in an approved hard- or soft-sided kennel under the seat, roughly $125 each way, advance reservation required. Southwest: small cats and dogs only, in a carrier under the seat, about $95 each way — and no pets on international flights. JetBlue: small dogs and cats, combined pet-and-carrier weight can’t exceed 20 pounds, about $125 each way. One more wrinkle worth knowing: the rules changed a few years back for emotional support animals. They no longer have protected status the way a trained service dog does — airlines can now treat an ESA like any other pet, subject to the regular carrier fees. A true service dog still flies free, but it needs the Department of Transportation’s standard Service Animal Air Transportation Form, usually submitted 48 hours ahead of the flight. Bottom line: if your dog is small enough to ride under the seat, flying is very doable, just book early, since cabin pet spots are limited per flight. If you’ve got a bigger dog, ground transportation is your best bet, which most pet-travel experts say is safer and less stressful anyway. Expert traveler tip – always call ahead to check airline rules, regulations and fees. They change and your fur baby is looking forward to the trip too. And, always consider your pet’s temperament. Talk with your vet about the best way to ensure a pleasure flight for your pet, you and the other passengers. National Parks and most campsites have specific rules to follow. Can Your Dog Come to the National Park? If your road trip includes a national park, here’s what to know before you go: most national parks allow dogs, but with real restrictions. The National Park Service uses a simple rule of thumb called B.A.R.K. — Bag your pet’s waste, Always use a leash, Respect wildlife, and Know where you can go. Leashes are required almost everywhere dogs are allowed, and that leash can’t be longer than six feet. In most national parks, dogs are limited to paved roads, parking lots, picnic areas, and campgrounds — they generally are not allowed on backcountry or wilderness trails, since their scent and noise can disturb wildlife. Pet-friendly campgrounds are common inside national parks, but your dog can never be left unattended at the site, even for a quick walk to the restroom. National forests and national recreation areas are typically much more permissive, with most trails open to leashed dogs. If the park itself is restrictive, check whether there’s a national forest right next door. Some of the more dog-friendly national parks people point to include Acadia in Maine, Shenandoah in Virginia, Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, and Cuyahoga Valley in Ohio, which welcomes just about any domesticated animal. Always check the specific park’s website before you go — rules vary park to park, and some, like Sequoia, don’t allow dogs on any trails at all. Expert traveler tip – Check before leaving, but also check Facebook pages to see how other National Park visitors have experienced the park with their dog. Many hikers share personal experiences both challenging and excitingly fun. America’s Most Pet-Friendly Cities: The Study Traveling with your fur baby is fun for the whole family. There’s a well-known study out from WalletHub called “Most Pet-Friendly Cities,” updated again for 2026. It compares the 100 largest U.S. cities across 23 different measures, grouped into three categories: pet budget, worth 25 percent of the score and covering things like vet costs and insurance; pet health and wellness, the biggest category at 50 percent, covering vets and trainers per capita and dog-friendly dining; and outdoor pet-friendliness, worth the final 25 percent, covering parks, trails, and weather. Top five for 2026: Scottsdale, Arizona; Tampa, Florida; Cincinnati, Ohio; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Portland, Oregon. Also cracking the top ten: Orlando, Birmingham, Lexington-Fayette, Austin — and our own Atlanta, Georgia. Dead last, at number 100: Honolulu, Hawaii. Here’s the catch: this study only covers the 100 largest U.S. cities, which means Charleston, Savannah, and St. Augustine are all too small to even be measured by it — Atlanta is the only one of the five Southern cities below big enough to show up on this particular list. For the smaller, more historic towns, the rankings below come from different, more specialized studies. Bring along your fur baby with these suggestions. Five Of My Favorite Trips for You and Your Dog Atlanta — The Day Trip Atlanta ranked 9th out of the 100 largest U.S. cities in that WalletHub 2026 study — the only one of today’s five cities big enough to make that particular list. It scored well on vet access, pet businesses per capita, and walkability. Where to walk: Piedmont Park, with its off-leash Piedmont Dog Park, and the Atlanta BeltLine, which has become the go-to spot for locals walking their dogs on weekends. Two dog-friendly restaurants: Joy Cafe near Piedmont Park, where the chef makes food for humans and dogs alike — dogs can order burgers or grilled chicken breast off their own menu — and Hampton + Hudson in Inman Quarter, which has a big pet-friendly patio and even hosts Sunday “Doggie Mingle” hours with a signature Puppy Love Cocktail that benefits local rescues. Two pet-friendly hotels: The Kimpton Sylvan in Buckhead, which welcomes dogs with no size limit and no pet fee at all, plus washed dog beds and treats in the room; and the Four Seasons in Midtown, which bakes a complimentary biscuit for dogs 35 pounds and under at check-in. Athens — Game Day With the Bulldogs Athens didn’t make the WalletHub top-100 list since it’s too small, but it did land at number 32 out of 500 cities in a separate, broader study from LawnStarter — specifically called out for its generous yard space, meaning lots of room for dogs to roam. Dog parks: Athens has close to 20 acres of off-leash space spread across its parks. Memorial Park has a wooded, 1.5-acre off-leash dog park on a hillside, and Sandy Creek Park — a sprawling 782-acre park around Lake Chapman — has four fenced off-leash areas plus private dog parks you can rent by the hour. Hotels: The Graduate Athens — formerly the site of an old ironworks foundry — allows two pets up to 50 pounds for a $50 fee, and Hotel Indigo downtown charges a flat $75 pet fee. Restaurants: Mama’s Boy, the beloved Southern brunch spot, welcomes dogs on its patio — try the Georgia peach French toast; Paloma Park downtown has a spacious back patio and even features guest dogs on its own pet Instagram account; and if you want a beer after the game, Terrapin Beer Co. has a big dog-friendly yard. Savannah — Coastal R&R Heading to the coast for some rest and relaxation, Savannah is hard to beat. It ranked 74th out of 500 cities in that LawnStarter study, standing out for its density of dog-friendly shopping and dining. Savannah’s famous squares are genuinely built for dog walking — 22 shaded squares under Spanish moss, connected by a walkable historic grid, with leashed dogs welcome throughout. Forsyth Park, the crown jewel at the south end, has a mile-long paved perimeter path that’s a favorite for morning walks and doubles as the site of the Saturday Forsyth Farmers’ Market, where plenty of dogs come along. Dog parks: Herty Pines Dog Park, on the edge of Daffin Park, is the local favorite — fully fenced, well-shaded, with separate sections for big and small dogs. Mother Matilda Beasley Dog Park sits right downtown on East Broad Street if you don’t want to leave the historic district. Hotels: The Mansion on Forsyth Park welcomes one dog up to 60 pounds for $150 per stay, right across from the park itself; and the Olde Harbour Inn, voted Savannah’s best pet-friendly hotel by the Savannah Morning News, sits directly on River Street. Restaurants: Look for patio dining throughout the historic district — it’s genuinely common in Savannah to see a dog resting under the table while its owner has dinner. Ask when you sit down; you’ll be surprised how often the answer is yes. Charleston — Beaches, Bars, and the Famous Dog Menu A well-cited 2020 Vetnaturals analysis crowned Charleston the single most dog-friendly city in the entire country, measuring dog-friendly venues, hotels, and beaches per capita. Charleston had 161 dog-friendly venues per capita — the highest of any city studied — plus more dog-friendly beaches per capita than anywhere else in America. The beaches: Isle of Palms allows dogs on the beach year-round, with off-leash hours early in the morning and evening; Folly Beach allows dogs on the sand daily before 10 a.m. and after 6 p.m., and off-leash entirely from October through April. And then there’s Saltwater Cowboys, right on Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant. This waterfront seafood spot has a genuinely famous dog-friendly deck — dolphins and shrimp boats pass right by while you eat — and it’s one of the rare restaurants with an entire separate dog treat menu, alongside its regular food menu, drink menu, and gazebo bar menu. What’s on the dog menu: Dog-friendly hamburgers and fish, a doggy version of a margarita, dog beer, and even puppy ice cream for dessert. Fido eats right there on the dog-friendly outdoor deck alongside you, with water service and treats provided as a matter of course. Two Charleston hotels for your dog: The Charleston Place downtown has a whole “Pet in Residence” package, a dog bed, bowls, a leash and collar for the stay, and even a pet-sitting session arranged through Charleston Dog Walkers, all with no pet fee; and the Tides Folly Beach, Charleston’s only true oceanfront hotel, allows two dogs of any size for a flat $100 per stay, and sends up a house-made “Folly Beach Dog Rules” brochure along with bowls and a bed. St. Augustine — Further South on the Road Trip Keep driving south down A1A into St. Augustine — the nation’s oldest city, and one that the pet-travel site BringFido specifically calls out as a top dog-friendly destination, thanks to its historic sites, beaches, and year-round mild weather. St. Augustine’s beaches are leashed-dog friendly along most of A1A Beach Boulevard — a real rarity, since so few Florida beaches allow dogs at all. The one exception to know: Anastasia State Park does not allow dogs, since it’s a protected bird sanctuary. Dog parks: Treaty Park, just south of downtown, has a fully fenced, off-leash “Paws Dog Park” with separate small- and large-dog areas, watering holes, and even a mock fire hydrant; and if you’re staying at the beach, Ron Parker Park has its own off-leash dog run just off Old Beach Road. Hotels: The Saint Augustine Beach House sits right across the street from St. Augustine Beach, with a fenced dog run and a dog-washing station on site for rinsing off sandy paws; and the historic Bayfront Marin House downtown welcomes two pets up to 75 pounds in designated rooms. Restaurants: St. Augustine has more than 20 pet-friendly restaurants according to the local tourism board — Salt Life Food Shack and Harry’s Seafood Bar & Grille are two reliable, casual options with dog-friendly outdoor seating. Let BringFido.com Do the Homework for You Before you head out on any dog trip, pull up BringFido.com or the BringFido app. It’s the one resource that consistently shows up across every city covered above — Atlanta, Athens, Savannah, Charleston, and St. Augustine all have dedicated BringFido guides. You can search pet-friendly hotels with exact weight limits and fees, browse restaurants with confirmed outdoor pet policies, and filter by dog parks and beaches in whatever city you’re headed to next. It’s free, it’s specific to dogs — not just generically “pet friendly” — and it’ll save you a phone call to double-check a hotel’s policy before you arrive with a very excited Labrador in the back seat. Check what’s allowed before you leave home. Traveling With Your Dog: The Do’s and Don’ts Do: Call ahead, even when a hotel or restaurant is listed as pet-friendly — weight limits, breed restrictions, and fees vary widely and change without notice. Pack a copy of your dog’s vaccination records, especially if you’re crossing state lines or flying — some airlines and campgrounds will ask for it. Make sure your dog’s collar tag has a current phone number, and consider a microchip if you don’t already have one — new environments are exactly when dogs slip away. Bring your own water and a collapsible bowl for the car and any hike — don’t count on a park having a working water fountain. Book pet-friendly hotel rooms and flight pet spots as early as possible — most airlines cap the number of pets per flight, and the best pet rooms at popular hotels book up first. Don’t: Don’t leave your dog alone in a national park campsite, even briefly — it’s against the rules almost everywhere and it’s not safe for your dog either. Don’t assume a beach, trail, or park is dog-friendly just because the town is — check current signage and hours, since rules like Isle of Palms’ seasonal off-leash windows change throughout the year. Don’t skip the leash on a hiking trail in a national park, even if you don’t see another soul around — most parks require a six-foot leash at all times outside of designated off-leash areas. Don’t leave your dog in a parked car, even for a quick errand — temperatures inside a car climb dangerously fast, even on a mild day. Don’t wait until the day of your flight to check your airline’s current pet policy — with several major carriers having recently dropped cargo programs, last year’s rules may no longer apply. From the BeltLine in Atlanta to a dog beer on Shem Creek in Charleston, the South is one giant welcome mat for your four-legged travel companion. Wherever your next trip takes you and your dog, safe travels. A girl and her dog – on Nanny Goat Beach – Sapelo Island, GA.

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  Quarter Miles Travel With Annita

  Episode 56: The Three Fifths Compromise

  Sep 16, 202627 min

  The Three Fifths Compromise What it was and who benefited COLD OPEN [SOUND: Quill scratching on parchment. A gavel, once, distant. Silence.] ANNITA (V.O.): In the summer of 1787, in a locked room in Philadelphia, fifty-five men sat down to build a government. And for weeks, in that room, they talked about hundreds of thousands of human beings — argued about them, bargained over them, measured them, weighed their worth against tax revenue and political power — and not one of those human beings was ever asked what they thought. Not one of them was in the room. Not one of them had a vote, a voice, or a name that made it into the record. They were husbands and wives. Mothers who had already buried children sold away from them. Grandfathers who remembered a homeland none of these delegates could have pointed to on a map. Blacksmiths, healers, midwives, farmers, cooks — entire lives, entire families, entire histories, reduced in that room to a single question: how much of a person should the law say they were. The men in that room decided on three-fifths. Not because they believed it. Because it was useful. [SOUND: Silence holds, then fades.] This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. On this show, I always tell you — we say their names, and we tell their stories. But today, that promise is harder to keep than it’s ever been. Because the truth is, we don’t have most of their names. History didn’t record them. The Constitution didn’t ask for them. An entire population was debated, decided, and written into law — without a single one of them ever being permitted to speak for themselves in that room. So today, we’re not just telling you what happened in Philadelphia in 1787. We’re standing in for the hundreds of thousands of voices that should have been in that room and weren’t — and we’re telling their story anyway, exactly as fully and as honestly as we can, because somebody finally should. SEGMENT ONE: The Number That Came Before [SOUND: Soft, sparse instrumental bed, low — something unresolved, not comforting] ANNITA (V.O.): This story doesn’t start in Philadelphia in 1787. It starts four years earlier, in 1783, in a much quieter argument about money. Under the Articles of Confederation, the fledgling national government had almost no way to fund itself. It could only ask the states for money — “requisitions” — based on the value of land within each state, a system nobody could measure fairly or enforce honestly. So Congress considered a fix: base each state’s tax burden on population instead. And here, for the first time, the question arrived — a question this country would spend the next seventy-eight years failing to answer honestly. If a state’s population determined what it owed, did enslaved people count as part of that population? James Madison, then a young Virginia delegate to the Confederation Congress, proposed a number: three-fifths. It wasn’t drawn from any principle about human worth. It was, by most accounts, simply a number that split the difference between two sides who couldn’t agree on anything else. That 1783 proposal came up for a vote as an amendment to the Articles — and it failed, falling two states short of the unanimous approval required. But a number, once spoken aloud in a room full of powerful men, doesn’t simply disappear. It waits. SEGMENT TWO: The Room Reopens the Question ANNITA (V.O.): Four years later, delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia, in the same stifling summer heat we’ve talked about before on this show, to write an entirely new Constitution. And on June 11th, 1787, the three-fifths number walked back into the room. It was delegate James Wilson of Pennsylvania who formally reintroduced it — proposing that enslaved people be counted at a three-fifths ratio as an amendment to the Virginia Plan, the framework then being debated for how the new government would be structured. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina seconded it. Here’s something worth sitting with: Wilson wasn’t a slaveholder, and by most historical accounts, he wasn’t ideologically committed to protecting slavery. He appears to have simply reached for a number that had almost worked once before — a number he calculated might actually get enough votes to hold this fragile convention together. Practicality, not principle, put that fraction back on the table. And once it was on the table, the room split — but not in the way you might expect. SEGMENT THREE: The Argument Nobody Wants to Admit They Made [SOUND: Music drops low, more tense] ANNITA (V.O.): Here is the detail that should stop you cold, and it’s the one most people never learn: the two sides of this debate did not argue from principle. They argued from advantage — and they switched sides entirely, depending on what was being counted. When it came to representation — how many seats a state got in Congress, how many electoral votes it held — southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted as full persons. Every enslaved person counted meant more political power for the state that held them in bondage. Northern delegates objected. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts asked the room a question that exposed the entire moral rot of the argument in a single sentence: why should “the blacks, who were property in the South, be in the rule of representation more than the cattle & horses of the North?” Notice what that question does. Gerry is arguing against the compromise — and even in his objection, he reaches for cattle and horses as his comparison. This was not, on either side of the room, a debate about the humanity of enslaved people. It was a debate about property, dressed in the language of political philosophy. But then came taxation — and the exact same men flipped their positions entirely. When it came to how much a state would owe in federal taxes, southern delegates suddenly wanted enslaved people counted as little as possible, to keep their tax burden low. Northern delegates now wanted them counted fully, to raise it. Let that sink in. The very same enslaved human being was, in the same room, in the same week, argued to be a full person when it helped the North, a full person when it helped the South, and no person at all when it helped either side avoid a cost. The only consistent principle in the entire debate was self-interest. South Carolina’s John Rutledge said the quiet part aloud, telling the convention plainly: “Religion & Humanity had nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with Nations.” His fellow South Carolinian, Charles Pinckney, went further, declaring that his state would never accept Congress “meddling with the importation of negroes” — a warning that slavery, and the ongoing trade in human beings, was not up for negotiation at all. And some southern delegates made an even starker threat. They stated outright that they would “never confederate” — that they would walk out, refuse to join this new nation entirely — unless enslaved people were counted at a ratio of at least three-fifths. The compromise, in other words, wasn’t reached through persuasion. It was reached through the threat of national collapse. One voice in that room said something closer to the truth than almost anyone else. Gouverneur Morris of New York called slavery a “nefarious institution… the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” He attacked the compromise directly, for rewarding the act of enslaving people with more political power — the more a state enslaved, the more it would be represented in the very government built on the promise of liberty. SEGMENT FOUR: The Compromise, Written Into Law ANNITA (V.O.): In the end, the room settled on the same fraction it had nearly settled on four years earlier. Article One, Section Two, Clause Three of the United States Constitution: representation and taxation would be determined “by adding to the whole Number of free Persons… three fifths of all other Persons.” They didn’t even use the word “slave.” The Constitution never does — not once, anywhere in its original text. The framers wrote around it deliberately, using euphemism to avoid stating plainly what they had just built into the nation’s founding law. Three-fifths of all other persons. A whole system of human bondage, folded into a single evasive phrase. And it worked — not morally, but mechanically. It held the convention together. It got the South to sign on to a union it might otherwise have refused. And it embedded, permanently, into the mathematics of American democracy, the idea that enslaved human beings were worth counting, but not worth freeing. [SOUND: Music softens into something heavier, more solemn] SEGMENT FIVE: What It Built — The Presidency and the Power ANNITA (V.O.): The effect was not abstract. It was immediate, measurable, and it shaped the government for generations. Because House seats — and therefore Electoral College votes, since electoral votes are based on congressional representation — were calculated using three-fifths of the enslaved population, southern states received significantly more political power than their actual voting population ever justified. Not one enslaved person could cast a ballot. And yet their existence, counted at sixty percent value, inflated the power of the very people who held them in chains. The numbers tell the story bluntly. After the 1790 census, enslaved people made up roughly 39 percent of Virginia’s population, 43 percent of South Carolina’s. Constitutional scholar Akhil Amar has pointed out that after the 1800 census, Pennsylvania’s free population was actually ten percent larger than Virginia’s — and yet Virginia received twenty percent more electoral votes. Pennsylvania’s power came from free citizens who could vote. Virginia’s came, in significant part, from human beings who could not. The result: for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years under this Constitution, a white, slaveholding Virginian held the presidency of the United States. And there’s one election historians point to again and again. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent, John Adams. Historian Garry Wills has argued that without the extra electoral votes Virginia and other southern states gained through the three-fifths clause, Jefferson likely does not win that election at all. Some historians trace consequences outward from that single result — the admission of Missouri as a slave state, the trajectory of Indian removal policy, decades of legislative compromises that kept expanding slavery’s reach. Whether you follow every link in that chain or not, the central fact holds: this compromise didn’t just shape political theory. It plausibly changed who held the most powerful office in the country, at a moment that shaped everything after it. SEGMENT SIX: The Incentive Nobody Wanted to Say Out Loud ANNITA (V.O.): Here is where this story turns from abstract political mechanics into something that reached directly into the lives of enslaved people, and it’s a detail that deserves far more attention than it usually gets. Some northern delegates, right there in the debate, raised an uncomfortable warning: if enslaved people counted toward political representation, it would create a direct incentive for southern states to hold — and import — more of them. Not simply because enslaved labor built plantation wealth, which it already did. But because every enslaved person now represented a literal unit of political power for the state that claimed ownership of them. Think about what that means. A system that already reduced human beings to property now layered a second incentive on top of the first — human beings as a source of state power, not just plantation profit. And this is precisely why the Constitution’s protection of the international slave trade — the compromise that barred Congress from banning it until at least 1808 — sits alongside the three-fifths clause as two halves of the same machine. One clause protected the ongoing importation of enslaved people. The other made every one of them, once imported, worth more to the state that held them, politically as well as economically. SEGMENT SEVEN: Did They Know? [SOUND: Music thins to near silence] ANNITA (V.O.): Here’s a question worth asking honestly, and I want to answer it honestly too, rather than claim more certainty than the historical record actually gives us. Enslaved people across the South were, by law, overwhelmingly denied literacy. The Constitutional Convention itself was conducted in near-total secrecy — the delegates didn’t release detailed records of their debates to the public at the time, let alone to enslaved communities specifically. There is no clear historical record of enslaved people referencing “three-fifths” by that specific name. But here’s what we do know: enslaved communities maintained sophisticated, active networks of information — historians often call it the grapevine telegraph — through which news of the outside world moved by word of mouth, sometimes faster and more accurately than official channels expected. It is entirely plausible, even likely, that many enslaved people understood, in a general and deeply felt way, that the government forming around them was counting their existence for the benefit of the very people who enslaved them, while granting them nothing in return. They may not have known the fraction. They almost certainly understood the arithmetic in their bones — that they were being used, and not being freed. SEGMENT EIGHT: The Undoing, and What Remained ANNITA (V.O.): The three-fifths clause survived for seventy-eight years — through the growth of the plantation economy it helped protect, through the presidencies it helped elect, through decades of laws and compromises that expanded slavery’s reach across a growing nation. It survived until the Civil War finally broke the political structure it had helped build. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment formally superseded the three-fifths clause, mandating that the whole number of persons in each state be counted, regardless of race. The fraction was gone from the law. But a fraction, once written into the founding document of a nation, doesn’t simply vanish from a country’s memory the way it vanishes from a legal text. SEGMENT NINE: What the Fraction Left Behind ANNITA (V.O.): I want to be careful and honest here, because this is where history stops being simple and starts being something people genuinely disagree about — and that disagreement itself is part of the story. Some historians and legal scholars argue that the Electoral College — the very system that still elects American presidents today — carries the direct legacy of the three-fifths clause, since the compromise was built explicitly to boost slaveholding states’ influence over presidential selection, and the structure it produced has outlived the clause that shaped it. Other scholars push back on drawing too straight a line from 1787 to the present, arguing the Electoral College has evolved and been defended on other grounds since. That debate is very much alive today, and it’s not my place to settle it for you — only to tell you that serious people, looking honestly at the same history, land in different places on how much of that original architecture still shapes American elections now. What isn’t up for debate is this: for seventeen decades and counting, American schoolchildren have learned that their country’s founding document once measured a human being’s worth as three-fifths of a whole — a number chosen not out of any belief in partial humanity, but out of naked political calculation, argued by men who, in the very same debate, revealed they saw enslaved people as comparable to cattle and horses when it suited their argument, and as full political assets when it suited their power. That fact doesn’t stay contained in 1787. It’s part of the inheritance every American carries, whether they’ve ever heard the word “compromise” attached to it or not — a reminder, written into the mathematics of the nation’s founding, that the promise of “all men are created equal” was, from its very first draft, a promise this country chose not to keep for everyone in the room. [SOUND: Music holds low, weighted] CLOSE [SOUND: Music swells softly under the narration] ANNITA (V.O.): There is no version of this story where a clean answer waits at the end. There’s no dog who gets his statue forty years late, no woman who wins her freedom in a single courtroom victory. This is a story about a whole population, reduced to a fraction, by men who could not even agree on their own reasons for doing it — only on the fact that doing it kept the union together. Three-fifths of a person. Argued over, not because anyone believed it was true, but because it was useful. Used to build a government, to elect a presidency, to protect a trade in human beings for twenty more years, to give power to those who claimed ownership over people who had none. We cannot travel to a single building and stand where this was made right, because it never fully has been. What we can do is stand in the room where it happened — Independence Hall, where this exact compromise was debated and signed — and refuse to let the fraction go quietly back into the footnotes of history. [BEAT — sound fades to near-silence] We say their names — the millions the Constitution reduced to three-fifths, and the delegates who wrote it, argued it, and lived with what it built. And we tell the story, fully, without looking away. [MUSIC: Theme swells, transition out — held longer than usual before fading]

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  Quarter Miles Travel With Annita

  Destination: America A Young Nation – The War Was Won — Now What?

  Sep 4, 202641 min

  America A Young Nation – The War Was Won — Now What? I’m Annita with Travel With Annita, and today we’re picking up right where the story usually stops. We all know 1776. We all know Yorktown, 1781, when the war was effectively won. But here’s the question nobody asks enough: what happened the Monday morning after? In September of 1783, the Treaty of Paris made it official. Independence, recognized by the very king who’d refused to grant it. And here’s something that surprises a lot of people — Britain didn’t just recognize a strip of coastline. They ceded territory stretching all the way west to the Mississippi River. Overnight, this brand-new country doubled, tripled in size on paper, and had almost no way to actually govern any of it. Because here’s the thing about winning a revolution — the fighting is, in some ways, the easy part. You know who the enemy is. You know what victory looks like. Building a government from scratch, with thirteen different states that had spent the last several years being fiercely independent of each other, and even more fiercely suspicious of any government trying to tell them what to do? That was a completely different kind of battle. The system already in place at the time was called the Articles of Confederation, adopted back in 1781, even before the war had officially ended. And it was designed to be weak. Deliberately, intentionally weak. Think about what these people had just lived through — years under a king who taxed them without asking, who quartered soldiers in their homes, who dissolved their local governments whenever it suited him. So when it came time to build something new, the instinct was: never again. Never let one government have that much power over us again. So the Articles gave Congress almost nothing to work with. No power to levy taxes — Congress could only ask the states nicely for money, and the states, more often than not, simply didn’t pay. No power to regulate trade between states, which meant New York could tax goods coming in from New Jersey like they were a foreign country. No real national army, no national currency worth trusting, no executive branch at all to actually enforce anything Congress did manage to agree on. Congress was, in a very real sense, a room full of representatives who could debate and recommend, but couldn’t compel anyone to do anything. For a couple of years, the country limped along like this. States printed their own money, which lost value practically as fast as it was printed. Trade between states got tangled in a mess of competing tariffs. Soldiers who had fought the entire war often went unpaid, waiting on promises from a Congress that had no actual money to give them. There’s a reason historians often call this stretch “the critical period” — because in hindsight, it’s genuinely unclear whether this experiment survives. And then, in the fall of 1786, that fragile situation broke wide open — not in some far-off frontier, but in Massachusetts, among ordinary farmers who had, in many cases, fought in the very war that was supposed to have earned them a better life. These were men crushed by debt. The state was demanding taxes paid in hard currency, at a moment when currency of any kind was scarce, and courts across western Massachusetts were foreclosing on farms right and left. So a former Continental Army soldier named Daniel Shays helped lead an armed uprising — farmers marching on courthouses to physically shut them down before they could hear another foreclosure case. At one point, they even attempted to seize the federal armory at Springfield, hoping to arm themselves properly. The rebellion itself didn’t last. Massachusetts militia put it down by early 1787. But the effect on the country’s leadership was seismic. Because think about what this proved: under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had essentially no ability to respond. Massachusetts had to handle this entirely on its own. If ordinary citizens could take up arms against courts and come dangerously close to seizing a federal armory, and the national government simply had no mechanism to help — what happened next time? What happened if it wasn’t put down so easily? Leaders like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had already been warning for years that the Articles were too weak to survive. Shays’ Rebellion turned that warning into urgency. Even George Washington, who had largely retired from public life after the war, wrote with real alarm about what he was seeing, wondering aloud whether the revolution had been fought for nothing if the country couldn’t even govern itself in peace. So a meeting was called. Delegates from the states would gather in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 — officially, just to revise the Articles of Confederation. Just to patch a few things up. That is not remotely what ended up happening. When we come back, I’ll tell you exactly how that room in Philadelphia turned a modest repair job into an entirely new country. [SOUND: Music bridge] SEGMENT TWO — approx. 9:35 Philadelphia and the Deal That Built a Country ANNITA: Welcome back to Travel With Annita. So when we left off, delegates were heading to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, technically just to revise the Articles of Confederation. Fifty-five delegates, representing twelve of the thirteen states — Rhode Island refused to send anyone at all, suspicious from the very start of where this was all heading. They weren’t entirely wrong to be suspicious. Because almost as soon as the convention opened, the delegates quietly abandoned the idea of revising anything. Instead, under the guidance of men like James Madison — who did so much of the intellectual heavy lifting that he’s often called the Father of the Constitution — they began drafting something completely new. An entirely different framework for how this country would govern itself. And immediately, they hit a wall. It’s a wall that, honestly, still shapes American politics today: how do you fairly represent both large states and small states in the same government? Virginia, the most populous state, proposed what’s called the Virginia Plan — representation in Congress based purely on population. Naturally, the larger states loved this. The smaller states, like New Jersey, saw exactly where that led — permanent political dominance by a handful of big states — and countered with the New Jersey Plan, which called for equal representation for every state, regardless of size. For weeks, this genuinely threatened to collapse the entire convention. Neither side would budge, because neither side was wrong to worry about what they stood to lose. What finally broke the deadlock is what we now call the Great Compromise, or sometimes the Connecticut Compromise, since it was Connecticut’s delegates who proposed the fix: a two-chamber Congress. The House of Representatives, apportioned by population — a win for the big states. The Senate, with equal representation, two senators per state regardless of size — a win for the small states. It’s the exact structure Congress still has today, nearly two hundred and forty years later, and it exists because of a fight almost nobody remembers happened. But there was another compromise made in that room, and this one doesn’t get to wear the word “great.” Southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted toward their state’s population — which would give them significantly more seats in the new House of Representatives, and more electoral votes down the line. Northern delegates objected, and not, it must be said, primarily out of moral conviction — mostly out of concern that it would hand the South outsized political power. The compromise they landed on was the Three-Fifths Compromise: each enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation. Sit with that for a moment. Human beings, counted as three-fifths of a person — not because anyone believed that was a scientific or moral truth, but because it was a number two sides could agree on to settle a political fight. And those same human beings, whose bodies were being used to inflate a state’s political power, had no rights, no vote, no voice in any of it whatsoever. This is the piece of our founding story that doesn’t get talked about enough on the average history tour, and I think it deserves to be said plainly: the contradiction between “all men are created equal” and a Constitution that quantified human beings for political convenience wasn’t an oversight. It was a choice, made deliberately, by delegates who understood exactly what they were doing and chose political expediency over the principle their own revolution had just been fought to defend. That contradiction didn’t get resolved in Philadelphia in 1787. It got postponed. And the bill for that postponement came due less than eighty years later, in a Civil War that very nearly tore this country apart for good. By September of 1787, after months of debate, compromise, and genuine crisis, the delegates finished their draft. What emerged from that room is still, to this day, the oldest written national constitution in continuous use anywhere in the world. But writing it was only half the battle. Now it had to be approved — by the very states whose delegates had just spent months arguing about it. And that fight was its own kind of drama. When we come back, I’ll tell you about the promise that finally got it across the finish line, and about the man who turned out to be surprisingly good at building a government nobody had ever seen before. [SOUND: Music bridge] SEGMENT THREE — approx. 9:35 The Bill of Rights and the First President ANNITA: Travel With Annita, glad to have you back with me. So the Constitution was written. Now it needed ratification — approval from at least nine of the thirteen states before it could actually take effect. And this fight split the country into two camps almost overnight. Federalists, who supported the new, stronger government. And Anti-Federalists, who looked at this new Constitution and saw echoes of exactly the kind of centralized power they’d just spent a war trying to escape. To make their case, three men — Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay — began writing a series of newspaper essays defending the Constitution, published under a shared pen name. We know them today as the Federalist Papers, eighty-five essays in total, and they remain, even now, one of the most important explanations ever written of how and why the American government is structured the way it is. If you’ve ever wondered why we still study these essays in law schools nearly two hundred and forty years later, it’s because they’re essentially the owner’s manual, written by the very people who built the machine. State by state, the ratification votes trickled in. Delaware went first, in December of 1787. Some states debated for weeks; Massachusetts nearly rejected the whole thing outright. What ultimately tipped the balance, in state after state, was a promise from the Constitution’s supporters: if you ratify this document, we will immediately add a series of amendments protecting individual liberty — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial, protection against unreasonable searches. In June of 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, which technically made the Constitution law. But the two largest, most influential states — Virginia and New York — still hadn’t voted, and without them, this new government would have been fatally weakened from the start. Virginia ratified just days later. New York followed in July. And true to that promise, the very first Congress under the new Constitution proposed a Bill of Rights — ten amendments, ratified by the end of 1791, that remain the bedrock of American civil liberty to this day. And then, in 1789, the country needed someone to actually run this thing. There was really only one candidate anyone seriously considered: George Washington, elected unanimously. Here’s what I find remarkable about Washington’s presidency, and it’s something that doesn’t come across in most textbooks. Nearly everything he did, he was doing for the very first time, with no example to follow. There was no rulebook for how an American president should behave, because there had never been one before. Should he be addressed as “Your Excellency,” the way European heads of state were? Washington said no — plain “Mr. President” would do, a small choice that quietly set the tone for everything that followed. Should a president serve until death, the way a king would? Washington chose to step down after two terms, establishing a tradition that held for a hundred and fifty years, until it was finally written into law as an actual constitutional amendment. He built the cabinet system essentially from scratch, appointing Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State and Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury — two brilliant men who, almost immediately, became fierce political rivals, disagreeing sharply over how much power the federal government should really have. That rivalry, in many ways, planted the seeds of the very first American political parties, something the founders hadn’t planned for and largely dreaded. Washington himself, in his Farewell Address in 1796, warned the country against exactly this — the dangers of political factionalism tearing at the fabric of the union. It’s a warning the country began ignoring almost as soon as it was spoken. Washington also faced his own version of Shays’ Rebellion, in 1794 — the Whiskey Rebellion, when farmers in western Pennsylvania rose up against a new federal tax on liquor. But this time, the outcome looked completely different, because this time, there was a real federal government behind it. Washington personally led federal troops to put down the uprising, which sounds dramatic, but it actually proved something enormously important: this new government could maintain order without collapsing into the kind of tyranny everyone had feared. That was, in its own way, exactly the kind of precedent this fragile young country desperately needed. By the time Washington left office in 1797, the United States had gone from a loose, nearly failed confederation of suspicious states to a functioning nation with an actual government, actual institutions, and an actual peaceful transfer of power to his successor, John Adams. That peaceful transfer — one leader stepping aside, an opponent stepping in, without a war, a coup, or a crown changing hands by force — was, at the time, almost unheard of anywhere in the world. Coming up in our final segment — where you can go, right here in the states, to stand in the actual rooms where all of this history happened. [SOUND: Music bridge] SEGMENT FOUR — approx. 10:00 Where You Can Walk This History Today ANNITA: Welcome back, final segment of the show. If everything we’ve talked about today has you curious, here’s the good news — you don’t have to just read about any of it. You can go stand in it, walk through it, and see the actual rooms where these decisions were made. Start in Philadelphia, at Independence Hall. This is the building where the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, and where, eleven years later, that same room hosted the Constitutional Convention — the actual chamber where Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and fifty-two other delegates argued through that brutal Philadelphia summer, windows shut tight for secrecy, hammering out the Great Compromise and everything that came with it. You can take a guided tour through the National Park Service and stand in that exact room. Right next door, the Liberty Bell sits on permanent display — and just a short walk away, the National Constitution Center offers interactive exhibits that walk you through the entire ratification fight, state by state, in a way that makes the whole complicated drama genuinely easy to follow. From there, head to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate along the Potomac River in Virginia. This isn’t just a historic house — it’s a genuinely moving way to understand the man behind all those precedents he set on the fly. You can walk his gardens, tour his home, and visit the museum and education center, which does an honest job of presenting the full picture of Washington’s life, including the enslaved people who lived and worked on that plantation — a part of this story that deserves to be told alongside everything else, not separately from it. If you find yourself in New York City, don’t miss Federal Hall on Wall Street — the site where Washington actually took his first oath of office in 1789, and where the very first Congress met and drafted the Bill of Rights. The current building is a reconstruction, but a striking bronze statue of Washington marks the exact spot where he stood to take that oath, and it’s a genuinely powerful place to pause for a moment, right in the middle of the city’s financial district. And if you’d rather trace this era through the life of a single founder, Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home outside Charlottesville, Virginia, offers an unusually honest and detailed look at both his intellectual legacy and the deeply uncomfortable truths of slavery at the heart of his household — including the increasingly well-documented story of Sally Hemings and her family. It’s not always a comfortable visit, but it’s an important one, and I’d argue that discomfort is exactly the point. Now, closer to home — because this era isn’t just a Philadelphia and Virginia story. Right here in Georgia, and across the coastal South, you can find the fingerprints of this exact period. Savannah’s historic district, with its grid of shaded squares, was largely laid out and built up in these very decades — the streets you can walk today were being paved, quite literally, while the ink on the Constitution was barely dry. If you head down toward the Georgia coast, many of the churches, cemeteries, and town squares in towns like Midway and Darien trace their roots straight back to this founding era, when Georgia itself was still finding its footing as one of these thirteen fragile new states, wondering, right along with everyone else, whether this whole experiment was actually going to work. This is really the heart of what I love sharing with you every single week. History isn’t just something you read about in a book, and it isn’t just something that happened once, a long time ago, in a room far away. It’s something you can walk through, touch with your own hands, and stand inside of, if you know where to look — and every one of those places I just mentioned is open to you, right now, whenever you’re ready to go find it. That’s our show for today. I’m Annita with Travel With Annita — join me Saturdays 1 to 2 on WDUN, always here, always local.  

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  Episode #55

  Episode 55: Togo The Alaskan Sled Dog

  Aug 25, 2026—

  Togo – The Alaskan Sled Dog “The Dog They Left Out of the Story”   The Story of Togo In January of 1925, in the dead of an Alaskan winter, a twelve-year-old dog ran across frozen sea ice in the dark, in a blizzard, to save a town full of children he would never meet. History gave the credit to someone else. This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. Today, we’re setting the record straight on Togo. Before there was Togo, there was Constance. She was a young Belgian woman who’d come to Nome in 1905, drawn north during Alaska’s gold rush years like so many others. She met Leonhard Seppala at the races — in fact, she was crowned queen of the 1915 All-Alaska Sweepstakes, the very race that would one day make her husband famous. They married in 1908, and settled into a life shaped by dog sleds, harsh winters, and the rhythms of the North. So when a sickly, undersized puppy was born in their kennel in 1913 — a puppy Seppala took one look at and wanted nothing to do with — it was Constance who stepped in. She nursed him through those fragile early weeks, when nobody expected him to survive at all. Later, when Seppala gave the troublesome young dog away as a house pet, it didn’t take. Togo escaped, jumped clean through a closed window, and ran several miles back to the only home he’d ever known. That was the last time anyone tried to give Togo away. Slowly, that stubbornness revealed itself as something else entirely — intelligence, instinct, an almost uncanny sense for danger on the trail. By age five, Togo wasn’t just part of the team. He was leading it. By 1925, Togo was twelve years old — elderly for a working sled dog — and had already spent seven years as Seppala’s lead dog, guiding him to three All-Alaska Sweepstakes championships. And there’s one more detail worth knowing: Leonhard and Constance had a daughter by then, Sigrid, eight years old — living right there in Nome, in the middle of a diphtheria outbreak that was killing children exactly her age. This wasn’t just a heroic mission for Seppala. It was personal, in the most immediate way a parent can understand. In the winter of 1925, diphtheria broke out in Nome, Alaska — a highly contagious bacterial infection, and one that kills quickly, choking its victims as infected tissue swells and blocks the airway. Nome’s only doctor had run out of antitoxin. A resupply order had gone unfulfilled before winter set in. With more than 10,000 people at risk, children especially, and the nearest available serum sitting 674 miles away in Nenana, officials faced an impossible problem. Flying it in was ruled out — 1925 aircraft simply couldn’t reliably survive Alaska’s winter conditions, and a blizzard was already closing in. There was only one option left: dog sled teams. A relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred dogs would carry the serum across the frozen wilderness in a race against time. Back in Nome, Constance Seppala waited. Her husband and Togo were somewhere out in that storm, and so was her eight-year-old daughter’s fate — Sigrid was exactly the age of the children diphtheria was killing fastest. There was no way to know, in the middle of a blizzard with the phone lines down, whether either of them would come home. Seppala and Togo were assigned what should have been a straightforward round trip — meet the incoming relay partway and bring the serum home. Instead, due to a miscommunication about timing, Seppala pushed his team over 170 miles east from Nome, expecting to travel much farther still, into some of the most dangerous terrain on the entire route: a stretch of coastline along Norton Sound that mushers had nicknamed, without exaggeration, “the ice factory.” He found the incoming relay almost by accident — a musher named Henry Ivanoff, waving frantically through the whiteout, shouting that he had the serum. Seppala took the package and immediately turned back the way he’d come. Now he faced the decision that would define the entire mission. Going around Norton Sound was the safe choice. It was also a full extra day slower — a day the children of Nome didn’t have. Seppala chose to cross it directly. Heading out onto the ice in the darkening afternoon, visibility dropped to nothing. The wind howled so loudly he couldn’t have heard the ice cracking even if it had been right beneath him. He couldn’t see the front of his own team. He simply trusted Togo to find the way. And Togo did something extraordinary. At one point, in the middle of that gale, Seppala gave a command to turn — and Togo, without being told to stop, abruptly halted and somersaulted backward into the rest of the team. Seppala, furious, went to scold him. Instead, he found an open channel of water, growing wider, less than six feet from where the team stood. It wasn’t visible from the sled. Togo had sensed it, or seen it, or simply known — and stopped them from driving straight into the freezing water. That wasn’t even the worst of it. On the return crossing, disaster nearly struck for real: the ice beneath Seppala’s sled broke free entirely, setting him, his team, and the serum adrift on a floating chunk of ice, cut off from solid ground by open water. With no other option, Seppala tied a line to Togo’s harness and threw him — a twelve-year-old dog — five feet across freezing water, hoping he could reach the far ice and pull the floe back toward shore. Togo tried. The line snapped under the strain. He tried again, and this time, it held long enough to draw the floe close enough for the team to leap across to solid ice. After finally reaching Golovin, having crossed some of the most treacherous ground in Alaska not once but twice, Seppala and Togo still had an eight-mile ridge left to climb before they could hand off the serum — completing 260 miles in four and a half days, with dogs so exhausted they could barely stand. A story worth sitting with: the final leg of the relay — the last 53 miles into Nome itself — was run by a different team, led by a dog named Balto. When the serum reached Nome, the country erupted in celebration. Newspapers ran the story everywhere. A statue was even erected in Balto’s honor in New York’s Central Park, unveiled less than a year later. There was just one problem. Balto’s leg — while real, and no small feat — was the shortest, safest, and last stretch of the run. Togo had carried the serum across the longest, most dangerous distance, through the night, across breaking sea ice, at twelve years old. Seppala never hid his frustration. In his own memoir, he wrote plainly that he resented the statue given to Balto — arguing that if any dog deserved special recognition, it was Togo. The public, and the press, had simply gotten the story wrong — and it took decades for that mistake to be corrected in the public imagination. Togo’s story didn’t end at the finish line in 1925. After the serum run, Seppala took Togo on an extended tour through the United States, showing the aging dog off to a public eager to meet him. But the long journey home to Alaska would have been hard on a dog already well past his prime. So in 1927, Seppala made a difficult choice. He left Togo in the care of Elizabeth Ricker, a Maine musher who’d struck up a partnership with him at the Poland Spring Resort, where the two had competed in sled dog races together. Seppala himself wrote about that parting: on a cold, gray March morning, Togo raised a small paw to his knee, as if asking why he wasn’t coming along. For the first time in twelve years, Seppala hit the trail without him. But Togo’s story was far from over. At Poland Spring, he became the foundation sire of an entirely new kennel line — fathering hundreds of puppies over the following years. It’s estimated that a large majority of Siberian Huskies in the United States today can trace their lineage back to Togo. Ricker even wrote a small book about him, “Togo’s Fireside Reflections,” and sold copies “autographed” with his inked paw print. By 1929, sixteen-year-old Togo was beginning to fail. Arthritis had settled into his joints. His eyesight was going. Age — the same relentless force that comes for every living thing — had finally caught up with the dog who once outran a blizzard. Elizabeth Ricker, who’d cared for him for two years by then, made a decision that reflected genuine devotion, even in its difficulty. Rather than let him decline further, unable to walk without help, she chose to have him painlessly put to rest while he was still, in the newspapers’ words, “proudly alert” — his ears sharp, his poise intact, exactly as the world should remember him. On December 5th, 1929, with both Ricker and Seppala present, Togo was euthanized. Seppala, who had run beside this dog for twelve years and trusted him with his own life more times than he could count, called Togo simply the best dog he ever had. His mounted body eventually found a permanent home at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters in Wasilla, Alaska, and his skeleton remains today in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. In 2022, Poland Spring unveiled a bronze statue in his honor — a fitting tribute to a dog who quietly became the ancestor of a breed, long after the world had already tried to forget his name. If you want to stand where Togo’s story is still honored, you can. Nome and the surrounding trail remain accessible to travelers, particularly around the annual Iditarod each March, when mushers still run portions of the very route Togo once led through the dark. The Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome holds photographs and artifacts from the original serum run, offering a direct link back to that winter in 1925. And in Wasilla, at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters, Togo himself — mounted, alert, unmistakably himself — still greets visitors today. [SOUND: Music swells softly under the narration — the same instrumental thread that opened the episode, now slower] There’s a version of this story where Togo never makes it past six months old. Small, sick, unwanted — the kind of puppy the world simply lets go of. That version almost happened. It didn’t, because one woman looked at him and decided he was worth the trouble. Everything after that was Togo proving her right. He ran into a blizzard so dark his own musher couldn’t see the front of his sled — and found the way anyway. He stopped a team of exhausted dogs a heartbeat before they would have vanished into open water, without anyone telling him to. When the ice broke apart beneath them, and there was nothing left to do but ask an old dog to do the impossible, he did it — twice — until the line finally held. He covered more miles, through more danger, than any dog on that trail. And when it was over, the world put a statue on a very different dog. Togo didn’t know that, and it wouldn’t have changed what he did. He went home to a fireplace in Maine, fathered the next generation of a breed that carries his blood to this day, and when age finally caught up with him, he went out exactly the way he’d lived — proud, alert, unmistakably himself. Some heroes get statues. Some get a devoted woman’s decision not to give up on them, a musher who never stopped correcting the record, and, nearly a century later, a podcast still telling the truth. We say his name, and we tell his story. Togo’s story deserved this much care, and it shows.

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  Quarter Miles Travel With Annita

  Following Togo’s Trail: A Travel Guide to the 1925 Serum Run

  Aug 25, 2026—

  Following Togo’s Trail: A Travel Guide to the 1925 Serum Run Nome, the Diphtheria Outbreak, the Iditarod, and Where to Find Togo Today Every hero has a version of the story the world remembers, and a version that’s actually true. For Togo, the twelve-year-old sled dog who led his team across the most dangerous 260 miles of the 1925 race to save the children of Nome, Alaska, those two versions couldn’t be further apart. On a recent episode of Quarter Miles Travel, “The Dog They Left Out of the Story,” we traced Togo’s journey from a sickly, unwanted puppy to the true hero of the Great Race of Mercy — and uncovered why history handed his statue, his fame, and his place in the public imagination to a different dog entirely. This guide picks up where that episode left off, mapping out the real places where Togo’s story still lives today — from the frozen coastline he once crossed in the dark, to the quiet corners of three states where his memory finally caught up with what he actually did. Why This Guide In January of 1925, a diphtheria outbreak threatened the town of Nome, Alaska, and a relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred sled dogs raced 674 miles across the frozen wilderness to deliver life-saving serum. Togo, the twelve-year-old lead dog of musher Leonhard Seppala, carried that serum across the longest and most dangerous stretch of the route — and for decades, watched a different dog receive most of the credit. This guide gathers the real places where that story still lives — from the town the serum was racing to save, to the museum where Togo himself still stands watch, to the world-famous race his journey inspired. Whether you’re planning a full Alaska trip or a detour through New York City, here’s where to go to trace this remarkable piece of history for yourself. Alaska: Where It Happened Nome, Alaska How to get there: Nome is not accessible by road from the rest of Alaska; visitors fly in, typically via Anchorage This is where the story begins and ends — the isolated coastal town that a diphtheria outbreak threatened to devastate in the winter of 1925, and the town Togo, Seppala, and the rest of the relay mushers raced to save. Nome today remains a small, remote community on the Bering Sea coast, rich with Gold Rush history layered on top of this later chapter. A drive east along the Bering Sea coast follows roughly 30 miles of the historic serum run trail itself, giving visitors a genuine sense of the terrain the mushers crossed. Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum — Nome, Alaska Located in Nome, this local museum holds photographs and artifacts from the original 1925 serum run, offering a direct and tangible link back to that winter. It’s the natural first stop for anyone wanting to understand the event from the perspective of the town it saved, rather than just the mushers who saved it. Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters & Museum — Wasilla, Alaska Location: Mile 2.2 Knik Road, Wasilla, AK (near the intersection with Knik-Goose Bay Road) Website: iditarod.com/plan-your-visit — https://iditarod.com/plan-your-visit/ Hours: Generally open year-round, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., with extended daily hours (roughly 8 a.m.–5 p.m.) during the summer season (mid-May through mid-September); confirm current hours before visiting, especially in winter Admission: Free museum entry; dog-cart rides available for a small fee (around $10/person) during summer months This is the single most important stop on the entire trip: Togo himself, mounted and preserved, stands on permanent display here in a glass case — the actual dog, not a replica. The headquarters also houses decades of Iditarod race memorabilia, trophies, and photographs, and offers dog-cart rides in summer so visitors can get a small taste of what it feels like to be pulled by a real sled dog team. Located about 45 minutes to an hour north of Anchorage, this is an easy and essential day trip for anyone visiting the area. Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Website: iditarod.com — https://iditarod.com The race itself is the living legacy of the 1925 serum run — a roughly 1,000-mile course from the Anchorage area to Nome, run every March by mushers and dog teams retracing much of the same historic ground Togo and Seppala once covered. The ceremonial start takes place in Anchorage, with the competitive restart currently held in Willow, about 70 miles up the Parks Highway. If your travel dates allow, visiting during the race (early March) offers a rare chance to see the modern-day version of exactly what this history was really about. New York City: Where Togo Is Remembered in Bronze Togo Statue — Seward Park, Manhattan Location: Seward Park, bounded by East Broadway, Essex Street, and Canal Street, New York, NY 10002 (Lower East Side) Tucked into a small Lower East Side park, this bronze statue of Togo has stood at the East Broadway entrance since 2001 — one of only a small handful of statues in the country dedicated to him specifically, rather than to the serum run in general. The park underwent a major renovation in recent years, and Disney partnered with NYC Parks to add an interpretive plaque alongside the statue honoring the 260 miles Togo covered to help deliver the serum. It’s a quiet, easy-to-miss corner of the city — worth deliberately seeking out rather than stumbling upon. Balto Statue — Central Park, Manhattan Location: Central Park, near East 67th Street, New York, NY (Doris C. Freedman Plaza area) Worth visiting for context, even though it tells only part of the story: this statue, unveiled in December 1925, honors Balto, who led the final and shortest leg of the serum relay into Nome. It became — and remains — far more famous than any tribute to Togo, despite Togo having run the longest and most dangerous portion of the journey. Seppala himself was famously unhappy about this imbalance, writing in his own memoir that he resented the statue given to Balto, believing Togo was the dog who truly deserved it. Visiting both statues in the same trip makes for a genuinely compelling contrast — and a good conversation starter about how history remembers its heroes. Maine: Togo’s Final Years Poland Spring Resort & the Togo Statue — Poland Spring, Maine After the serum run, Togo spent his retirement here, in the care of musher Elizabeth Ricker, fathering the next generation of a sled dog line before his death in 1929. In 2022, Poland Spring unveiled a bronze statue in Togo’s honor — the newest of his memorials, and a fitting tribute given that this is where he actually lived out his final, peaceful years by the fire. It’s a quieter, more personal stop than the New York statues, tied directly to the end of Togo’s story rather than its most famous chapter. A Suggested Way to Experience This Story If you’re able to combine stops, consider this rough arc: start in New York, comparing the Togo statue in Seward Park with the more famous Balto statue in Central Park, to understand how public memory shaped this story from the very beginning. Then travel to Alaska — Nome first, to see where the serum was actually headed and to visit the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, followed by Wasilla, to stand in front of Togo himself at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters. If your schedule allows a visit in early March, the modern Iditarod race offers a living, breathing continuation of the exact history you’ve just traced. And for those who want the quieter, final chapter, a stop in Poland Spring, Maine, completes the picture — from the dog who was almost forgotten, to the dog whose name is now remembered in three states. For more on the U.S. Mint State and Commemorative Coins visit their website USMint.Gov 2008 50 State Quarters Coin Alaska Uncirculated Reverse

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