Yellow brick road
The actual road is believed to be one in Peekskill, New York, where L. Frank Baum attended Peekskill Military Academy. According to a local legend, the Yellow Brick Road was derived from a road paved with yellow bricks near Holland, Michigan, where Baum spent summers. Ithaca, New York, also makes a claim for being Frank Baum's inspiration. He opened a road tour of his musical, The Maid of Arran, in Ithaca, and he met his future wife Maud Gage Baum while she was attending Cornell University. At the time, yellow bricks paved local roads. Yellow brick roads can also be found in Aberdeen, South Dakota; Albany, New York; Rossville (Baltimore County), Maryland; Montclair, New Jersey (Parkhurst Place and Afterglow Way); Bronxville, New York (on Prescott and Valley roads); Chicago, Illinois; Liberal, Kansas; Sedan, Kansas and Chittenango, New York, as well as a school in Abington, Pennsylvania, and abroad in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Olive Hill, Kentucky
The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway served Olive Hill and many other places on the railroad's Lexington Subdivision (running from Ashland to Lexington). The C&O merged into the Chessie System, which CSX Transportation later bought out, and after that CSX pulled up the railroad in the mid 1980s. Olive Hill retained and restored a passenger depot as well as a caboose ("John Hop Brown" Memorial Park).
Olive Hill's racial history is not one that makes for pleasant reading. According to George C. Wright in his A History of Blacks in Kentucky, volume 2, "In the small community of Olive Hill in 1917, several hundred white laborers at the brick-making General Refractories Company threatened to strike unless recently employed blacks were dismissed. After first refusing to meet with the leaders of the disgruntled workers, the company managers acceded to their demand and fired all the black workers(p.14)." Perhaps this is one of the reasons the 2010 census shows only .17% percentage of African Americans residing in the city.
Olive Hill is located in western Carter County at (38.301007, -83.174091), primarily on the north side of Tygarts Creek, a tributary of the Ohio River. U.S. Route 60 passes through the city, leading east to Grayson, the Carter County seat, and west to Morehead. Interstate 64 passes north of Olive Hill, leading east to Huntington, West Virginia, and west to Lexington.