About this site

How We Check What Is on This Site

This is an independent guide, written by people who go to these places. It is not run by Delaware State Parks, the New Jersey State Park Service, or the Delaware River and Bay Authority. Here is how the facts on it are arrived at, and what happens when one of them turns out to be wrong.

Where the history comes from

The wartime material — Fort Miles, the towers, the minefield, the indicator loops, the surrender of U-858 — is checked against primary and specialist sources rather than against other travel sites. In practice that means the National Register of Historic Places nomination for Fire Control Tower No. 23, the Naval History and Heritage Command, uboat.net's boat histories, the Coast Defense Study Group, the Delaware Public Archives historical markers, and contemporary newspapers through the Library of Congress.

Where sources disagree, we say so on the page rather than picking the tidier number. Three examples that are live on this site: the fire control towers are counted as fifteen or as twenty depending on whether the five steel towers are included, so we give both; accounts of how long U-858 lay at the Fort Miles wharf range from five days to several months, so we give the documented transfer date instead; and the National Register nomination and the Fort Miles Historical Association disagree about which batteries Fire Control Tower 23 was assigned to, so that page says so rather than choosing.

Where the measurements come from

Depths, distances and shorelines are measured, not repeated. The bathymetry on this site is sampled from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information coastal relief model. The park map is drawn from OpenStreetMap survey data. Where a figure on this site differs from one you have read elsewhere, it is usually because we went and measured it.

What we will not publish

A number we cannot source, a photograph we cannot licence, or a claim that rests on a single uncorroborated retelling. If something interesting is missing from a page, that is often why.

Photographs and maps

Every photograph on this site is either our own or reused under a licence that permits it, and the credit line under each one names the photographer and the licence. Maps drawn for this site from OpenStreetMap data carry the Open Database Licence attribution required by that licence. The illustrated artwork in the ferry game is original, and is labelled as painting rather than photograph wherever it appears.

Corrections

Pages carry the date they were last checked. When we find an error we fix it and, where it changes the substance, we say what changed rather than quietly editing it out. If you find something wrong — particularly if you know one of these places or worked at one — tell us at hello@obxmaps.com.