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.