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NC 172's long-ago partner in crime

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One of the interesting things about North Carolina is, almost to a T, any intersection at a very small angle (10 degrees or so) almost always indicates an old alignment of a roadway. I've noticed that NC 133 has one of these intersections just south of a bridge and a sharp curve about halfway between Leland and Southport, and assumed that the roadway used to continue straight ahead. So I decided to trace a route along this roadway, now called Plantation Road after the Orton Plantation located nearby, and lo and behold...

First, here is the intersection of 133 and Plantation. Notice how it's almost straight on with the northern stretch of 133 from the intersection, even though Plantation itself curves to the left to meet 133.

Follow Plantation south, and eventually you cross into land occupied by Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal. Keep going south, and switch over to the Satellite view after the mapped road ends, and you'll come to this point where the road seems to be closed but there's obviously an old roadbed in place, and while there's no bridge over the small creek it's obvious that one existed at some point. After the second waterway (which is an intake canal for the nuclear plant that would have been built well after this road was abandoned), another road picks up, and this one eventually becomes NC 211 near the Southport ferry dock, running straight into downtown Southport.

So at some point, the road from Leland to Southport ran through what's now Sunny Point, and was probably relocated in the late '40s when Sunny Point was being built. It was never NC 133 because that numbering didn't come along until the late '50s, but it could have been the original routing of NC 130 before it was renumbered to NC 40 -- right around 1950, that stretch was given a number for the first time, and it existed unnumbered before then.

With all the military bases in eastern North Carolina, I'm sure this road isn't the only one that was necessarily rerouted to avoid a base. (NC 172, obviously, wasn't rerouted per se, but it was closed as a through route through Camp Lejeune.) Are there any other roads that were rerouted around a base?
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Comments

Unknown said…
NC-111 was rerouted when Seymour Johnson AFB was built. If you look at it on Google maps it's pretty clear that "Old NC-111" used to connect to Slocumb Street, which intersects with Ash Street (which at the time would have been US-70 and today is US-70 Business).
9:41 PM
Mapmikey said…
The 1930 Brunswick County Map supports the pre-NC 133 routing through Sunny Point

NC 111 has been rerouted twice for the AFB. See the map shown at http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Goldsboro,+NC&ie=UTF8&ll=35.341035,-77.944393&spn=0.04936,0.084715&z=14&om=1
which shows two different older NC 111 routings...one onto Slocumb St, and another using Piedmont Airlane Rd to meet 70 business...
11:39 AM
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