Sources
550,000+ locations narrated.
Whistlestop's narration is built from data curated out of publicly available archives, including Wikipedia and state historical records, plus a growing set of stops we research and write ourselves. Every stop links back to where it came from.
Curating it is the work, and it's ongoing: sourcing new datasets, rating what deserves to interrupt you, and writing the places no archive covers well. This page names the people whose records make that possible, and it will get longer.
Where do stops come from?
Three streams feed the same tour, and the app treats what comes out of them identically. You never have to know which one a story came from.
01
Public encyclopedias
Wikipedia, queried live by location as you drive. Anything with an article and coordinates can come up, which is what makes the coverage national rather than a list of the famous places.
02
Public records
Bulk databases we import and host ourselves, starting with state historical markers. These are the plaques and registers that already exist in public archives, made findable at sixty miles an hour.
03
Curated by Whistlestop
Our own stops, researched and written one at a time, for the places the archives miss or describe badly. We rate each one for how much it deserves to interrupt you, and they ride along in the app with no signal needed.
Whatever the source, the spoken story is written fresh for the moment you'll hear it rather than read out verbatim, and every stop keeps a link back to where it came from. More on that, and on how wrong it can be, in the FAQ.
Special thanks to
The bodies whose work the app leans on hardest right now. Two today, more as the map grows.
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia · worldwide
Nearly every place the app finds starts as a Wikipedia article with coordinates attached. Its geosearch tells us what's near the road; the article gives the story its facts.
Written and checked by volunteers, for free, for twenty-five years. There is no version of this app without them, and the license that lets a small project build on that work is as much the gift as the writing is.
Visit Wikipedia ↗
Texas Historical Commission
State agency · Texas
The state's official historical markers, the roadside plaques you pass at speed and can never stop to read. Imported from public records and served by location as you drive.
Thousands of markers, each one researched, argued over by a county committee, cast in aluminum, and planted by the road decades before anyone thought to put them in a database. We're reading their homework out loud.
Visit Texas Historical Commission ↗Logos are shown to credit the sources we draw on. These organizations are not affiliated with Whistlestop, have no involvement in it, and don't endorse it. Wikipedia content is used under its CC BY-SA license; historical marker records are public records of the state that issued them.
What we're still adding
The goal isn't the biggest database. It's the most interesting one: enough coverage that any road has something worth hearing, curated hard enough that what's said is worth the interruption. Working outward from there:
- Historical markers across the rest of the country, state by state
- Natural features and geological landmarks
- Roadside attractions, the odder the better
- Public art and murals
- Local favorites that never made it into any database
Work somewhere with a dataset that belongs in here, or know a place nobody has written down? Get in touch. The best stops usually start as somebody's tip.