Scottsburg is an interesting little place: a Ghost Town, certainly, but with a few enthusiastic residents! It is situated off the Umpqua River about 20 miles upstream from the Pacific Ocean and 33 miles west from the the fabulously titled city of Drain, Oregon. The gravel road between Drain and Scottsbug was once the only public route from the interior valleys to the coast.  Scottsburg was named after a mercantile businessman named Levi Scott, and was a stopping point for ocean schooners carrying freight and passengers.
        Not much was left of Scottsburg, we found, but that was the charm of course. Torrential floods wiped away most of the town but a few structures, and we got to meet the*very* few yet *very* alive number of residents do still live there, including the nice lady at the cardboard box-like post office who drew me this map.  See, this was a notch on the checklist for me and my wonderful freind, who is similar enough to myself to think that hunting for ghost towns and remote historical places is a good idea and worthy of a whole road trip (see Alviso map).   We had found on this unparallelled source of information called the Internet, that there was an old cemetary somewhere around this town.  And there was - ooh Stephan King would've collapsed into tears at the site of it. Thats what the post-office-lady drew us a map to, just before sending us to go visit with her husband next door who was fixing up and old turn of the century house that was stockpiled with generations' worth of household items under generations' worth of dust..  Also to give a feel of the general environs I've included a marker to an abandoned motel on the main ocean route we found just before heading towards the inner valleys.  

Below: The coordinates for the various stops and clues; and below that is an except from the Crosswalk article that highlighted a bit more about this map.
1.The Lost Motel
2.The post-lady's husband's house
3.Scottsburg History marker
4. Bob's Market (1 stop)
5. The creepy wooden sign
6. Ghosts and epitaphs

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from Crosswalk:

- I’ve noticed that my map collection can be divided into two large subcategories to describe their function: Category One could be called “If you cross the tracks you’ve gone too far - maps that tell directions.” Category Two could be called “...and this is where I crashed my bike – maps that tell stories” The first kind sends the receiver on a journey towards a new story of some kind, the second teaches of stories that have already happened.   

There is a preconception that maps are a visual media that don’t have sounds, but I would argue that they do. Not one of my maps has been given to me in silence: all have been accompanied an entire series of words and gestures. Especially the first type of maps, the directional ones, contain most or all of a particular list of the following visual/verbal clues: Instructions, Procedure, Time/Duration, Anticipation, and Failure/Missteps. Within my explanation I’ll be referring to a fantastic example: a map of tiny Scottsburg, Oregon that I acquired while exploring mostly-forgotten towns along the Oregon coast. Towns like this are the intersections of the visible and invisible; whose prosperous histories either failed or dwindled; yet within them remain traces of a certain, quiet presence where the past lives on. A conversation with the lady at the Scottsburg Post Office led to the creation of this map to direct me to a hidden cemetery from the 1800’s that I’d read about on a web site about ghost towns. As I eventually discovered, its location was nestled off a side street of Scottsburg that wound its way up a mountain, a journey which would’ve made Stephen King or David Lynch lapse into frenzied fits of writing.

It begins with [1] Instructions. Every map is made because of a specific purpose. When I’m on a 2 hour break from working at a school in a tiny, unfamiliar town, my purpose would be, “hmm there must be SOMEthing interesting around. I’m here so I might as well find out.” A good map provides the information we need, which will lead to meeting that purpose. And lead me it has, to exploring forgotten sculpture parks, historic train stations, haunted houses and obscure museums. In the case of Scottsburg, my intent was to discover the hidden cemetery. Since this endeavor proved successful, the map has fulfilled its function and left a telling memory.

The next characteristic would be [2] Procedure: This is the part where arrows are drawn, streets and landmarks and other graphically compelling little shapes and lines, and the person might reinforce this by pointing and gesturing all over the place. Scottsburg shows a great example of procedure; one glance at the map and I remember the tiny hand-carved sign that stood exactly at the crux of the forked upper-left arrow.

[3] Time/Duration: the most conscientious map makers might include a marker of time, i.e.: “This will take you about 15 minutes.” In completely foreign places, this is an incredible help, as we all know that doomed feeling of thinking to oneself something along the lines of “Hmm I’ve been driving for an awfully long time...and he never mentioned anything about crossing into Michigan, or driving past that tacky waterpark either....” A variation of this is included on Scottsburg’s “2 miles,” which leads to:

[4] Anticipation, a less mathematical version of Time/Duration. It provides marked places to look for in order to reassure us that we are going the right way. Back to our Oregon town: on the way, we were to look out for a Bridge, Bob’s Market (where we stopped for munchies: bananas, beef jerky, and trail mix that had a slight, nail-polish-like aftertaste), and a Trailer.

And finally, [5] Failure/Missteps. Some people include this, some don’t; it all boils down to phrases like “If you cross the train tracks, you’ve gone too far!”