Why is there a sign on NC I-40 near Wilmington pointing to Barstow, CA? Here’s the story

If you’ve driven to Wilmington and back in the past couple of months, you might have done a doubletake to check a new I-40 mileage sign against your GPS as you were rolling out of The Port City.

Benson 94

Raleigh 123

Barstow, Calf. 2,554

For that last one, you have to zoom out — way out — on the map. But when you do, Interstate 40 comes into focus as a more-or-less straight line stretching from the East Coast to the West Coast, a squiggle of blue Sharpie that passes through eight states on its way across one big country.

We may not unite around much else, but Americans are physically connected by the best interstate highway system in the world.

I-40 became one of the longest continuous highways in the U.S. when it was completed in North Carolina in 1990. The air still smelled like hot asphalt when some 3,000 people gathered to watch then-Gov. James G. Martin cut the ribbon on the section of the road between Raleigh and Wilmington that June. It would take a couple more years for new bypasses and re-designations to be done, and even now, it seems like I-40 is always under construction somewhere.

But it’s there, a pitch-and-gravel monument to determination, cooperation and, above all, mobilization: the notion that we’re capable of movement, from short distances to long hauls.

It wasn’t long after the road was completed that state highway departments at both ends of the country decided to install complementary memorials to this accomplishment for the commonwealth.

Subtle, understated and within the DOT’s industrial specialty, they were stamped out of metal, lettered like every other white-on-green interstate mileage sign and mounted near the origin of I-40 in each state. If a driver glanced over to adjust their radio volume at the wrong second, they might not even notice their sign, which was both a joke and a geography lesson.

Ours said, simply:

Barstow, Calif. 2554

Theirs said:

Wilmington NC

2,554 MI

That’s not bad for bureaucracies, and people did notice. The signs became targets for thefts at both ends of the country. According to the Wilmington Star-News, the North Carolina sign was stolen five times before the NCDOT gave up on replacing it.

But then last year, a nostalgic unnamed citizen contacted the N.C. secretary of transportation about the sign.

“I think they missed it, and they requested it to be put back,” said Lauren Haviland, NCDOT communications officer for the area that includes Wilmington.

Determined not to be Charlie Brown to thieves’ Lucy, the agency decided to make the California sign less-easy pickings.

The $1,300 sign that was installed in February is bigger, measuring 4 feet by 11 feet, harder to fit inside a car or the bed of a pickup truck. It’s several miles farther west, so it would be more of a drive for, say, a group of college students with not enough homework to do. And, Haviland said, the sign shop hopes the addition of the data on Benson and Raleigh will make it less of a trophy.

Because of its relocation, the exact mileage may no longer be quite accurate. But many drivers wouldn’t notice that either, since now, if you really want to drive from Wilmington to Barstow, GPS will direct you not to take I-40 at all, but to follow U.S. 74 through Charlotte, pick up I-26 and then get on I-40 near Asheville.

It’s 46 miles closer.

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