The Lake Drummond Hotel (also called the Halfway House) is on the state line between Virginia and North Carolina, along the Dismal Canal. The Halfway House presented an excellent option for illegal dueling, gambling, or a lover’s tryst. A criminal needed only to cross the building’s central state line to be in the other state.

Edenton Harbor in North Carolina is the first harbor stop in my middle-grade book, where two enslaved children escape with their free Black father on the Maritime Underground Railroad in 1834.

After the Union captured the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1861, Lucy McKim Garrison (1842-1877) and her father traveled to them. About 10,000 enslaved people were now free. Lucy became enthralled by the emotions expressed in African American songs and their great diversity of styles. She began writing their words and setting them in musical notation.

Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was an English chemist who used special X-ray images of tiny structures, known as X-ray crystallography. She examined molecules to understand their shape and structure. Her work helped reveal the molecular structures of DNA and RNA, as well as those of viruses, coal, and graphite. She is most famous for capturing "Photo 51" which showed DNA's helical structure