Drive-Thru Towns

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...

Presque Isle & Caribou: The Potato Empire with a Heartbeat In Presque Isle and Caribou, the soil isn’t just dirt—it is destiny with frost on it. For a generation, Aroostook County, Maine , was the potato capital of the world. These two northern strongholds sat at the dead center of that agrarian empire—railroad hubs, harvest havens, and military outposts where the rhythm of the school calendar...

Millinocket: The Paper Town That Burned Without Fire It was called "The Magic City"—a massive industrial marvel carved entirely out of the deep Maine woods in just 18 months. Millinocket and its sister town, East Millinocket, rose to become one of the most powerful paper-making centers on the planet, turning out the physical sheets that carried the nation's news, catalogs, and daily...

Drive Thru Towns — Season 3 Trailer Hosted by  Andrew Wilcox This season, we’re heading back into the places that made me, the roads that raised me, and the Maine that started as a few weeks old in the back seat and never really let go. From roadside rest stops and ham-and-cheese lunches with orange soda to Katahdin on the horizon, these towns are part of the map and part of the memory. We’ll expl...

The ALCAN: The Road That Connected a Country and Erased the People Who Built It One thousand, three hundred, and eighty-seven miles. Built in just eight months during the height of World War II, the Alaska Highway (ALCAN) is more than an engineering marvel—it is a landscape of compressed history, wartime urgency, and human endurance. In this special extended episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andr...

Utqiagvik: The Top of the World, Where America Ends and the Dark Begins There is no road to Utqiagvik. There never has been, and likely never will be. To reach the northernmost city in the United States, you must fly over hundreds of miles of roadless tundra or arrive by barge during the brief summer window when the Arctic Ocean isn't frozen solid. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host An...

Portlock: The Village Everyone Fled From Deep on the Gulf of Alaska coast, on the rugged southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, lies a ghost town that didn't die because the fish ran out or the economy collapsed. It died because of fear . In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox takes us to Portlock (also known as Port Chatham), a place so unsettling that an entire community aban...

Eagle: The Last American Town Before Everything Became Canada Situated on the banks of the Yukon River, just 12 miles from the Canadian border, sits a town that was once the "Gateway to the Interior." Today, it is a quiet sentinel of history at the end of the Taylor Highway. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox explores Eagle, Alaska —the first incorporated city in th...

Chicken: Too Remote to Spell Ptarmigan Deep in the Interior of Alaska, at the end of the Taylor Highway, sits a town that owes its name to a spelling bee that never happened. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox takes us to Chicken, Alaska —a community founded by gold miners a full decade before the Klondike became a household name. When it came time to name the post office in...

Seldovia: The Boardwalk Town the Highway Killed Before the Earthquake Could This is the only episode of Drive-Thru Towns where you actually cannot drive through the town. There is no road to Seldovia. To get here, you have to cross Kachemak Bay by boat or drop out of the sky by floatplane, arriving in a community that has been defined by its isolation since 1787. In this episode, host Andrew Wilco...

Hope: Named After a 17-Year-Old Boy, Forgotten Like One Too At Mile 56.3 of the Seward Highway, a 17-mile spur road dead-ends into a town that time—and the gold rush—nearly left behind. While the rest of the world remembers the Klondike, the real story of Alaska’s first major gold strike began here, on the shores of Turnagain Arm. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox takes us d...

Eklutna: The Oldest Living Place No One Drives To Twenty-six miles from the glass towers of Anchorage sits a village that has been continuously inhabited for over 800 years . While thousands of commuters blast past the Eklutna exit at 65 miles per hour every morning, they are passing a site that was already ancient when Marco Polo left Venice. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilc...

Ninilchik: Where Russia Never Really Left High on a bluff overlooking Cook Inlet, five gold onion domes catch the Alaskan sun, looking like a piece of the Old World that drifted across the Pacific and simply took root. This is Ninilchik , a town that the Russian Empire retired from—and then forgot to take with it. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox explores the "pensioner set...

Whittier: The Town That Was a Secret, Then a Bunker, Then Itself Most towns have a "welcome" sign. Whittier has a schedule . To enter this town, you must drive through a single-lane, two-and-a-half-mile mountain tunnel that only opens for cars once an hour. If you miss your window, the mountain simply says "no." In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox takes us...