1

Seaside, Florida: The Truman Show

Seaside, Florida captured the hyper-idyllic essence of the fictional "Seahaven Island" in 1998’s satirical classic, The Truman Show .

Director Peter Weir and his location scouts found the exact picture-perfect community they needed in this town , with its pristine streets, pastel homes, and carefully planned design. That’s why, instead of building a massive Hollywood soundstage, the production team filmed in this 80-acre master-planned coastal community along Northwest Florida's Scenic Highway 30A. The real town became the fictional place where Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) unknowingly lives inside a television show. The movie helped turn this quiet Florida Panhandle community into a destination for movie fans.

2

Estes Park, Colorado: The Shining

Estes Park, Colorado, became famous on the literary and cinematic map because its historic Stanley Hotel inspired Stephen King to write his legendary 1977 horror novel The Shinin g.

King and his wife stayed at the hotel in 1974 when it was nearly empty as the season was ending, which inevitably fueled the author's imagination. Their stay, including a night in Room 217, helped inspire the fictional Overlook Hotel. While Stanley Kubrick filmed the exterior of his 1980 movie elsewhere, the Stanley Hotel became a filming location for the 1997 television miniseries adaptation.

3

Marfa, Texas: Giant

Marfa, Texas became a legendary screen destination when it hosted the 1955 production of the classic Hollywood epic Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor (Leslie Benedict), Rock Hudson (Bick Benedict), and James Dean (Jett Rink) in his final completed film role.

Director George Stevens used the stark West Texas desert outside Marfa to portray the sprawling "Reata" ranch. The cast and crew stayed at the historic Hotel Paisano during production, which became the center of the shoot’s off-screen life and still displays Giant memorabilia today, including giant roadside cutouts of Taylor, Dean, and Rock Hudson .

4

Monroeville, Alabama: To Kill a Mockingbird

Monroeville, Alabama, inspired the fictional town of Maycomb in Harper Lee’s novel and the 1962 film adaptation To Kill a Mockingbird . However, the movie was largely filmed on Universal Studios’ backlot in California, rather than in Alabama itself.

Universal’s designers recreated the Southern setting on the studio lot after visiting the location and taking photographs and measurements of the town and courthouse. The courtroom was carefully modeled on the interior of Monroeville’s courthouse, helping make the fictional Maycomb feel remarkably authentic. Today, you can visit the "A Celebration of Reading" sculpture in the same square . Created by Branko Medencica, the bronze sculpture features unidentified characters from the novel, although many reasonably assume they represent Scout, Jem, and Dill.

5

Savannah, Georgia: Forrest Gump

Savannah, Georgia provided the setting for some of the most recognizable scenes in 1994’s Forrest Gump .

While the fictional town of Greenbow, Alabama, and many rural landscapes were actually brought to life in other parts of Georgia and South Carolina, this town was the backdrop for the movie’s famous bus-stop scenes, where Forrest (Tom Hanks) sits with his box of chocolates and recounts his life story to strangers. The movie’s opening feather sequence also passes through the city’s historic squares. The bench itself was a movie prop and was removed after filming, although a prop bench is now displayed at the Savannah History Museum.

6

Madison, Indiana: Some Came Running

Madison, Indiana became a temporary Hollywood set in 1958 when it served as the primary filming location for the star-studded drama Some Came Running. The movie starred Frank Sinatra as Dave Hirsh , Shirley MacLaine as Ginny Moorehead, and Dean Martin as Bama Dillert.

Directed by Vincente Minnelli, the MGM film was based on James Jones’s novel and used Madison to portray the fictional town of Parkman, Indiana. Much of the movie was filmed in and around Madison, including its streets, homes, and businesses.

7

Rome, Georgia: Remember the Titans

Rome, Georgia, stepped into the cinematic spotlight by serving as a backdrop for the 2000 inspirational sports film Remember the Titans .

Specifically, Berry College in Rome provided the setting for the football team’s training camp. The college’s Ford Buildings, Old Mill, Oak Hill, and surrounding forest all appeared in the film. Fans can still recognize parts of the picturesque campus on screen, which was also used for other productions, including Sweet Home Alabama and Stranger Things .

8

Berlin, Maryland: Runaway Bride

Berlin, Maryland, stood in for the fictional town of Hale in the 1999 romantic comedy Runaway Bride , starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Three weeks of filming in 1998 were estimated to have brought as much as $1 million into the local economy, while the movie’s publicity helped drive a major increase in tourism.

Downtown shops along Main Street—including a local store turned into a bridal boutique and the historic Atlantic Hotel—served as key backdrops. The hotel also became especially associated with Richard Gere, with Room 20 now known as the "Richard Gere Room."

9

Franklin, Tennessee: Hannah Montana: The Movie

Franklin, Tennessee, became famous on screen as a key filming location for the 2009 Disney hit Hannah Montana: The Movi e, starring Miley Cyrus as Miley Stewart/Hannah Montana in the role she originated on Disney’s wildly popular TV show.

Among the on-screen highlights in this town, Franklin High School stood in for the fictional Seaview High School, where Miley and Lily (Emily Osment) attend classes. CoolSprings Galleria’s Belk Department Store was also used for a memorable shoe-store scene featuring Hannah and Tyra Banks. The historic downtown area also appears in several scenes, giving the movie a distinctly Tennesseean backdrop.

10

Libby, Montana: The Revenant

Although the movie was filmed in several locations (including the remote wilderness of Canada and south of Argentina), Libby, Montana became a crucial backdrop for the 2015 Oscar-winning epic The Revenant , capturing one of the film’s most gripping and intense sequences.

The specific location used near Libby is Kootenai Falls, one of the largest free-flowing, undammed waterfalls in the Pacific Northwest. In the film, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) desperately escapes an ambush by a party of pursuing Arikara warriors. He throws himself into the churning rapids and is violently swept downstream before plunging straight over the edge of a massive waterfall. The sequence took 10 full days to film on location.

1

Arizona skips Daylight Saving Time

Image: Christoph von Gellhorn

This is partly true because most of the state doesn’t bother with Daylight Saving Time . They stopped changing the clocks back in 1967. The exception is the Navajo Nation, which stretches into Utah and New Mexico and keeps DST so all its communities stay on the same schedule. Now, as for the smaller Hopi reservation, inside the Navajo Nation, it sticks with Arizona time… Yes, quite confusing if you’re not a local.

2

Georgia isn’t really the Peach State

Image: Jessica Furtney

Georgia loves its peaches, sure, but the state’s top fruit money-maker is actually blueberries . In recent years, blueberries have brought in several times more cash for farmers than peaches. Meanwhile, California grows far more peaches than Georgia ever has. The nickname stuck from the old days when Georgia peaches were famous for their flavor, not their volume. So while the pride is real, the peaches aren’t quite the powerhouse people may think.

3

Nevada didn’t record the hottest US temperature

Image: tommao wang

You probably think of Nevada’s desert heat as unmatched, but the all-time record belongs to California’s Death Valley . In July 1913, it hit a mind-melting 134 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest temperature not only in America but the hottest ever recorded on Earth!

4

Minnesota doesn’t have the most lakes

Image: Tom Conway

Minnesota proudly calls itself the "Land of 10,000 Lakes," but that’s selling itself short… The real number is closer to 12,000. However, Alaska wins this battle . The state has more than 3 million lakes over five acres in size. In fact, Alaska contains over 40 percent of the nation’s surface water. If you love fishing, kayaking, or just staring at a quiet stretch of water, the true lake capital of America is far up north.

5

Pineapples aren’t native to Hawaii

Image: Christian Joudrey

Pineapples are everywhere in Hawaiian imagery, but the plant actually comes from South America , mainly Paraguay and southern Brazil. Spanish explorers likely brought them to Hawaii in the 1500s after spreading them across the Pacific to places like the Philippines and Guam. Hawaii’s climate turned out to be perfect for growing them and by the 1900s, the islands were producing so many pineapples that the fruit became a symbol of Hawaii itself.

6

Maine isn’t the country’s easternmost point

Image: Chris Henry

If you’re a Geography geek, you’ll love this one. You might picture Maine’s rocky coast as the eastern tip of America, but the actual easternmost point is thousands of miles away, on Alaska’s Semisopochnoi Island in the Aleutians. How is that possible? Well, that’s because it crosses the 180th meridian, putting it in the Eastern Hemisphere. That means part of Alaska technically sits farther east than anywhere in Maine.

7

The biggest US earthquake didn’t happen in California

Image: Lala Miklós

California has suffered some big earthquakes in its history, but the most powerful earthquake in America struck Alaska in 1964 . It hit Prince William Sound with a magnitude of 9.2. It was so strong it shook the ground for four and a half minutes and triggered massive tsunamis. In today’s dollars, the damage would total more than $2 billion. Alaska sits on a collision zone of tectonic plates, making it one of the world’s most seismically active regions.

8

The Everglades isn’t America’s biggest swamp

Image: Joshua J. Cotten

A lot of people picture the Florida Everglades when they think of swamps, but technically, the Everglades isn’t a swamp at all. The real title of the largest swamp in the United States goes to Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin , which spans about 1.4 million acres. This swamp has a vast mix of cypress forests, bayous, and marshes, and it’s more than twice as productive as the Everglades when it comes to wildlife and plant life.

9

Big cities aren’t always capitals

Image: Mackenzie Cruz

It surprises people how often the biggest city isn’t the state capital . New York City? Not the capital… Albany is. Chicago? Nope, that honor goes to Springfield. Pennsylvania’s capital isn’t Philly or Pittsburgh, it’s Harrisburg. Even California’s capital isn’t L.A. or San Francisco, it’s actually Sacramento. Out of fifty states, only seventeen have their most populous city as the capital.

10

Alaska isn’t divided into counties

Image: Rod Long

Alaska likes to do things its own way. Instead of counties, it’s split into boroughs , and a massive area known as the Unorganized Borough has no local government at all. People out there don’t pay property taxes, but that freedom comes with challenges, limited services, fewer job options, and tough living conditions.

1

A renovation project saved thousands of lives on 9/11

On September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing 189 people. Few people know this part: the death toll could have been much higher. But there was a renovation project underway at the time of the attacks.

The Pentagon’s five-sided structure is divided into five "wedges," and workers had been renovating them one at a time. Flight 77 struck the wedge that had just been completed. Of the 4,500 people who normally worked in that section, only about 800 had moved back in. Without the reinforced construction and the incomplete occupancy, experts believe the casualties would have been catastrophically higher.

2

The Cold War and the hot dog stand

In the middle of the Pentagon’s five-acre center courtyard once stood a modest hot dog stand. According to a Cold War legend (one still retold by official Pentagon tour guides on every public tour), between the 60s and the 80s, Soviet satellite images tracked large groups of high-ranking military officials converging on that small building at the same time every day.

Soviet intelligence reportedly concluded the structure must be the entrance to some underground bunker in America. In reality, all it did was sell lunch. In 2006, the original stand was torn down, and a sandwich shop was built in its place.

3

Its construction began on September 11th, exactly 60 years before the attack

Builders broke ground on the Pentagon on September 11, 1941. That was exactly 60 years to the day before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that would strike the same building.

Construction had been ordered by Army Brigadier General Brehon Somervell, who wanted a permanent headquarters for the Defense Department to replace its then-17 scattered offices across Washington, D.C.

The project was extraordinarily ambitious: plans called for the world’s largest office building to be completed in just 16 months. In the end, the conception, design, and construction of the entire Pentagon building took a total of 15 months.

4

The same person oversaw its construction and the Manhattan Project

Colonel Leslie Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers took charge of Pentagon construction in August 1941. He worked six days a week and drove his team relentlessly, at one point employing more than 15,000 workers around the clock.

When the Pentagon was finished in January 1943, Groves was assigned to lead the Manhattan Project, America’s secret program to build the atomic bomb . His deputy, Captain Robert Furman, followed him into the Manhattan Project as chief of foreign intelligence. Together, the men who built the world’s largest office building went on to produce the weapon that ended World War II.

5

Why is it shaped like that?

The Pentagon’s iconic five-sided shape was the consequence of a geographic accident. The original site selected for the building, near Arlington Cemetery, **happened to be bordered on five sides by roads. **Architects designed the structure to fit those boundaries, producing a pentagonal floor plan. Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt intervened: worried the massive building would obstruct the view of Washington, D.C. from Arlington, he ordered the site moved to its current location along the Potomac River. But the five-sided design had already been drawn up, and nobody changed it.

6

It was the first desegregated building in Virginia

When the Pentagon was designed in 1941, segregation was the law in Virginia. Original plans called for doubled bathroom facilities: separate ones for Black and white employees, as required by Virginia statute. But President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, prohibiting racial discrimination in federal employment and government contracting.

As a federal building, the Pentagon was exempt from Virginia law. It became the only building in the state where segregation was not enforced. A fully desegregated federal workplace that opened in 1943. The doubled bathrooms were built anyway, as the plans were too far along to revise, but were never used as separately designated spaces.

7

Its construction was surprisingly frugal and incredibly fast

Ground broke on September 11, 1941, and construction finished on January 15, 1943, just 16 months later. More than 15,000 workers were on site around the clock. Wartime office shortages were so severe that employees moved into completed wings before the rest of the building was finished. Steel was too scarce to use extensively, so builders relied almost entirely on reinforced concrete. The 689,000 tons of sand and gravel required came directly from the nearby Potomac River, cutting transportation costs. The project was budgeted at $35 million, but the final bill was $63 million, which would translate to over $900 million in today’s dollars.

8

You can walk between its farthest points in only 7 minutes

The Pentagon is the world’s largest low-rise office building: 6.5 million square feet of space, which is three times the total floor area of the Empire State Building. Each of its five outer walls is 921 feet long. It has 7,754 windows and 17.5 miles of corridors. Approximately 26,000 military and civilian employees report for work there every day.

Despite that scale, the building’s concentric ring design is so efficient that it takes only about seven minutes to walk between its two farthest points.

9

The man who secretly lived inside its walls

During construction, Colonel Groves drove his deputy, Captain Robert Furman, so relentlessly that Furman rarely left the building. To cope, Furman had contractors build him a small, windowless apartment hidden inside the walls of the Army’s Ordnance Division. In this private room, he could sleep and shower without leaving the premises.

When construction ended and personnel dispersed, knowledge of the hidden room was never passed on to building management. Months later, when Furman returned to Washington on Manhattan Project intelligence business, he found the apartment undiscovered and exactly as he’d left it.

For over a year, he would slip back to the Pentagon, pop open a wall panel, spend the night, and emerge in the morning with his suitcase. He was finally caught in 1943 and forced to surrender the keys. It was never disclosed whether the secret apartment was maintained or eventually absorbed back into the official floor plans.

10

It houses over 30 restaurants, including everyone's favorite chains

The Pentagon feeds roughly 26,000 people a day, and its dining options read less like a military headquarters and more like a mall food court. The main Concourse Food Court, which opened in September 2009 and seats 875 people, is the largest of several dining areas.

Confirmed chains currently inside the building include McDonald’s, Five Guys, Subway, Popeyes, Starbucks (multiple locations), Dunkin’ (two locations), Panera Bread, Taco Bell, Panda Express, Baskin-Robbins, Potbelly, Jamba Juice, and Moe’s Southwest Grill, among others. The building also houses a CVS pharmacy, a florist, a jeweler, and a dry cleaner. In the summer of 2024, Potbelly became the first restaurant to open in the center courtyard. Yes, the very spot where the legendary Cold War hot dog stand once stood.