Drive-Thru Towns

Klamath: The River That Reclaimed Itself People have been living at the mouth of the Klamath River for ten thousand years. To put that in perspective: the Roman Empire takes you back two thousand years. The Egyptian pyramids, four thousand. Long before there was a United States, before any European explorer stepped onto these shores, and before anyone paved a highway through the Pacific Northwest...

Angels Camp: The Gold Rush Outpost That Made America Laugh The world record for a frog jump is twenty-one feet, five and three-quarter inches, measured across three consecutive leaps. Set in 1986 by a bullfrog named Rosie the Ribeter, that record has stood uncontested for forty years. Every May, competitors descend on a small California town to break it. They train their frogs, obsess over takeoff...

Bombay Beach: The Salton Sea's Post-Apocalyptic Art Riviera I want you to picture curtains moving. Not blowing—moving. The deliberate kind. The kind that means someone just let go of the fabric a half-second before you looked up. That is Bombay Beach, California—a grid of silent, dust-caked streets sitting 223 feet below sea level on the edge of the Salton Sea, right where the San Andreas Faul...

Locke: The Chinese Empire Built on a Nine-Acre Handshake Imagine a town built entirely by Chinese immigrants, for Chinese immigrants, on land those very same immigrants were legally forbidden to own. Under the California Alien Land Law of 1913, these families couldn’t buy the dirt beneath their feet. Instead, they built a thriving community—fifty buildings, a school, a theater, and five bustling g...

Old Shasta: The Gold Rush Queen Erased by a Railroad Spelling Bee The town that killed Old Shasta isn't even named after the right guy. In 1880, a railroad company won a lawsuit that officially named its new hub "Redding"—not after Pierson B. Reading, the pioneer who actually founded the region, but after Benjamin B. Redding, a Sacramento politician and land agent who never lived the...

Fiddletown: The Gold Country Boomtown That Refused to Become a Dead Man’s Punchline In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox pulls off Highway 49 into Amador County to explore Fiddletown, California. To the thousands of drivers cutting through Gold Country wine tasting rooms every week, Fiddletown is experienced as a brief road-trip joke—a green highway sign to laugh at and forget...

Trona: The Alien Planet of the Mojave Built on Toxic Salt and Stolen Lakes Wyatt Earp showed up to a California desert town in 1910—not as a legendary lawman, but as a sixty-two-year-old hired gun. He was leading a band of armed men to help claim-jump a lake. They weren't fighting over water; they were fighting over a dry basin made of pure money, and men were entirely willing to die over who...

Bishop: Stolen Water, Dynamite, and the Blueprint for Chinatown In 1924, forty men loaded half a ton of dynamite into two touring cars, drove out under a moonless sky, and blew a massive crater into a concrete pipeline owned by the City of Los Angeles. They weren't career criminals—they were tired local farmers. When California’s most powerful engineer, William Mulholland, was told his preciou...

Rough and Ready: The 87-Day Republic That Seceded for Gold and Came Back for Beer What is the shortest a country has ever existed before deciding it wasn't worth the trouble? Not a short-lived monarchy or a brief military coup—an entire sovereign nation. With a president, a constitution, a flag, and the burning conviction that they had finally had enough. The answer is eighty-seven days. And t...

Mendocino: A California Logging Town Wearing New England Drag A man is running. In the dead of night in 1854 San Francisco, Henry Meiggs climbs onto a ship with a satchel full of forged city bonds and stolen warrants. He is fleeing a massive financial ruin later known as "the Meiggs scandal," bound for South America where he will build Andean railroads, die a millionaire, and be buried u...

California City: The Ghost Grid of the High Mojave Nat Mendelsohn—a Columbia-educated sociology professor and Czech immigrant—stood on a barren hill in the Mojave Desert in 1958 wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, white gloves, and a Homburg hat. Looking out over 82,000 acres of creosote bush and sun-hammered clay, he envisioned a metropolis that would out-develop Los Angeles. He designed a master-pla...

Lone Pine: The Velvet Trap of the American Backlot The most famous outdoor set in the history of American filmmaking is forty-five minutes from a jail cell that once held Charles Manson, and twenty minutes from a guard tower that once held eleven thousand American citizens who had committed no crime at all. Same highway. Same orange rock. Same sky. Nobody made a movie about that part. That is Lone...

You've driven past them a hundred times. The gas station that used to be a bank. The dirt lot that used to be ten thousand people. The water that used to be a river. Outside the five or six California cities everybody already knows, the whole rest of the state is one long drive-thru — and we decided to actually stop. This trailer kicks off the season with a family road trip down the entire Pac...

Madrid: The Town That Walked Off the Civic Map They came looking for gold and left with a town that eventually quit being a town. That is Madrid, Maine—not the Madrid with majestic museums, heavy traffic, and capital-city swagger, but a quiet notch tucked into Franklin County along Route 4. Here, the Sandy River keeps its own counsel and the pines stand around like they’ve heard every rumor twice....

Eastport: The City Where the Tide Does the Hiring Eastport is the town where the tide does the hiring. At the absolute edge of the Gulf of Maine, the water doesn’t just rise and fall—it swings like a pendulum loaded with money. Sitting on Moose Island, Eastport locks in the highest tidal range in the continental United States, with the water level shifting by more than 20 feet in a single day. Tha...

Durham: The Holy City on a Barren Sand Hill They built a holy city on a sand hill, then watched it collapse under the weight of one man’s certainty. That is the story of Shiloh—a sprawling, four-story religious empire that once dominated the skyline of Durham, Maine. At its absolute peak, this was not a mere camp meeting; it was a closed, self-contained city of up to 1,000 people governed by doctr...

Freeman Township: The Town Born from Ash and Broken by Scale Freeman Township was born from fire. That is not a poetic metaphor slapped on later for atmosphere—the town was literally born from the smoke of Portland burning during the Revolutionary War. When British warships reduced Maine's greatest port city to ash, a wave of destitute, displaced refugees needed somewhere else to go. Freeman b...

Kittery: Bargains and Warships at the Gateway to Maine Kittery is the oldest town in Maine, and somehow it still looks like it’s in a hurry. That is the joke hiding in plain sight at the state line. On one side of Route 1, you have the polite chaos of outlet traffic, sprawling parking lots, and vacationers hunting for discounted sweaters. On the other side—shielded behind high-security gates and l...

Monson: The Town That Exported Darkness Monson’s black slate ended up in the Eternal Flame at Arlington National Cemetery. That’s not a metaphor—that is real quarry stone from a little town in the Maine woods, cut, polished, and sent off to hold national grief in place. For a generation, this hill-town material became a presidential memorial and a staple of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, making Monson r...

Swan Island: The Island Full of Furniture Where the Town Disappeared The island is full of furniture, but the town is entirely gone. That is the unsettling reality of Perkins Township—better known today as Swan Island —a green smudge of land stranded in the middle of Maine's Kennebec River. Once a bustling, self-contained community of shipbuilders, ice harvesters, and farmers, it is now an uni...

Wiscasset: The Nuclear Piggy Bank at the Prettiest Village in Maine Wiscasset’s nuclear power plant didn’t explode. It just stopped paying the town. From 1972 to 1996, the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant on Bailey Peninsula generated roughly 119 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity—and in the process, it funded some of the lowest property taxes in the United States. Thanks to this reactor-fueled...

Flagstaff: The Town They Burned Before They Drowned It They set the town on fire—house by house, beam by beam—so that when the water finally came, there would be nothing left to float. No doors bobbing like driftwood. No roofs breaking loose like memory refusing to sink. Fire first. Then water. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox pulls over in western Maine, where the windshie...

Bucksport: The Paper Town with a Cursed Exoskeleton When Bucksport lost its massive paper mill, the town did what communities do when the giant in the room dies: it started telling better stories. For more than 80 years, the Verso mill was the entire point of Bucksport—it was the boilers, the skyline, and the steady union payroll that anchored generations of families on the Penobscot River. Then,...

Durham: The Holy City on a Barren Sand Hill They built a holy city on a sand hill, then watched it collapse under the weight of one man’s certainty. That is the story of Shiloh—a sprawling, four-story religious empire that once dominated the skyline of Durham, Maine. At its absolute peak, this was not a mere camp meeting; it was a closed, self-contained city of up to 1,000 people governed by doctr...

York: The Town That Rented Itself by the Week York, Maine, is a town that has been destroyed, invented, abandoned, and sold back to the summer in three different centuries. Today, it looks like coastal New England pulled straight from a glossy brochure—complete with lobster shacks, sandy beaches, historic inns, and a traffic pattern that turns summer into a full-body civic condition. In this episo...