Hometown History

Gay Head, Massachusetts. At 3.45 in the morning, on January 18, 1884, the lookout aboard the passenger steamer City of Columbus screams a warning into the darkness. Devil's Bridge buoy is off the port bow. It should be starboard. Second mate Edward Harding yells, heart a port, but it's too late. The ship strikes jagged underwater rocks at full speed. The grinding crack tears through the ir...

Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. It's 1931. Dewey Flack is 17 years old when he steps off the train in Gawley Bridge, West Virginia. He came from North Carolina. One-way ticket in hand. A promise. Send home money. His parents and five younger siblings are counting on him. It's the worst year. Of the Great Depression. There are no jobs back home. The tunnel project in West Virginia. It's p...

Wheeling, West Virginia. It's a Sunday afternoon in late 1939. 3,000 people pack into Wheeling's Capitol Theater, West Virginia's largest venue between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. But they're not here for a movie. They're not here for vaudeville. They're here to watch their neighbors perform on a national radio broadcast. The orchestra tunes up on stage. 42 musicians, machin...

August 3rd, 1915, downtown Erie, Pennsylvania, 8.45 at night. For the past five hours, an artificial lake has been growing in the middle of the city. Four city blocks flooded, water 30 feet deep in places, held back by a clogged culvert at 26th and State Streets. Fire Chief John McMahon stands at the edge, watching the reservoir rise. All day, police and firefighters have tried to clear the debris...

Athens, Tennessee. It's around 2.30 in the morning on August 2, 1946. The McMinn County Jail in Athens, Tennessee is surrounded. Armed veterans, some estimates say as many as 500, crouch behind storefronts, police cruisers, and the brick walls of the First National Bank across White Street. They've been firing rifles at the jail for six hours. Inside, 50 deputies and county officials huddl...

Osage County, Oklahoma. It's around 3 in the morning on March 10, 1923. In Fairfax, Oklahoma, Rita Smith sleeps in her bedroom. Her husband, Bill, is in the adjacent room. Their teenage white servant, Nettie Brookshire, sleeps upstairs. Five gallons of nitroglycerin sits beneath the house. The explosion obliterates the structure. Neighbors three blocks away feel their windows rattle. The Smith...

Kalaupapa, Hawai'i. Imagine a place of breathtaking beauty that is also a prison. Picture what are among the tallest sea cliffs on earth, a sheer wall of green and black stone plunging nearly 4,000 feet into the churning Pacific. This fortress of rock seals off a flat, leaf-shaped peninsula from the world behind it. For centuries, this was a vibrant, sacred part of Hawaii. But in 1866, its pro...

In July 1860, under cover of darkness, 110 West Africans were smuggled into Mobile Bay aboard the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach American shores. Arriving fifty years after Congress banned the transatlantic slave trade and made it punishable by death, these captives were quickly hidden and distributed to local plantations before the ship was burned and sunk to destroy the evidence. B...

Exeter, Rhode Island. It's just before dawn, March 17th, 1892. In the graveyard beside Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, five men gather around a crypt, sealed since winter began. Their breath fogs the air. A lantern flickers in the cold. The coffin opens. Inside lies the body of Mercy Lena Brown. She died two months ago, yet her skin is strangely intact. Her nails have lengthened. And when a spad...

Ottawa, Illinois. A young woman, barely out of her teens, dips a fine-tipped brush into a bowl of glowing paint. It's 1922, inside the old Ottawa High School, and sunlight streams through the tall windows, illuminating motes of dust that dance in their golden shafts of light. But these are no ordinary dust motes. They glitter with a faint, otherworldly luminescence. Before her is a tray of sma...

Wahpeton, North Dakota. The Twelve-year-old Edward Williams grips a rope with all his might, feet slipping in the muck. A grizzled circus worker rushes over to help. Edward stumbles back, wide-eyed. Suddenly, a blinding flash of lightning engulfs the big top. The main tent pole shatters under the bolt. Men are thrown to the ground. For an instant, everything and everyone is stunned into silence. R...

Hickory, North Carolina. It's just before sunrise, on Saturday, June 24th, 1944. In the woods by Lake Hickory, North Carolina, floodlights cast long shadows over a bustling campfire turned construction zone. Dozens of volunteers, men too old for the war, women in handkerchiefs, even off-duty soldiers, work throughout the night. Hammers cling against nails. Hand saws whirr through pine boards....

Wabash, Indiana. It's the night of March 31st, 1880. A sleepy town in Indiana explodes into the future with the flick of a switch, becoming the first city in the world to light its street with electricity. People gasped in wonder. Some called it magic. Others, a miracle. But like all American towns, Wabash would face darkness too. Empty storefronts. Lost jobs. A Main Street on life support. TI...

Washington, DC. It's 4 a.m. on the Western Front. A freight car converted into a makeshift ward jolts to a halt. Inside, nurses in ankle-length khaki skirts move like clockwork, checking pulses, setting splints, whispering words of positivity to boys who haven't seen home in two years. What you're hearing is a profession reborn, modern nursing. , the podcast that traces the world's...

London, England. It's 2.30 in the morning, November 1854, in a makeshift army hospital perched above the Bosphorus Strait. Rats scurry between cots stacked like bunk beds. Every few minutes, another stretcher swings through the door. Another young man, shivering from cholera, or minus a limb, he marched in with yesterday. Footsteps. Then, light. A single oil lamp slices the darkness. Behind it...

London, England. The year is 1910. Florence Nightingale has just passed away, leaving behind a legacy that forever changed healthcare. It's hard to believe there was a time when nursing wasn't the noble and respectable profession it is today. In fact, there was a time when people didn't want to be associated with nursing at all. It was considered a low-status occupation that you could...

Fayetteville, West Virginia. It was Christmas Eve, 1945, in the small, quiet town of Fayetteville, West Virginia. The Sauter family home, nestled in the Appalachian Hills, was bustling with excitement. Ten children were eagerly anticipating Christmas morning, while their parents, George and Jenny, watched the holiday unfold. The tree was decorated, and the younger children hung stockings by the fi...

Como Bluff, Wyoming. There is nothing wrong with a bit of healthy competition. It encourages people to do better, and it can lead to innovation. Just like the one between Apple and Microsoft, that has resulted in countless technological advancements for us. Or the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which has led to major developments in space exploration. But competition ca...

Hollywood, California. explore one of the most fascinating chapters of American film history, the curse of rebel without a cause. Generally, you would believe a horror film set would leave actors feeling like they've been cursed. But a romantic drama? Well, hold on. In 1955, one of Hollywood's most iconic romance films, Rebel Without a Cause, was released. But it was more than a romance fi...

In 1929, a recovering alcoholic and twice-discharged military veteran named Frank Bruce Robinson made a $2,500 investment that would transform a small Idaho college town into an unlikely center of American religious innovation. From his home in Moscow, Idaho, Robinson launched Psychiana, a mail-order religion that promised followers they could "literally and actually speak to God" through...

New York City, New York. You have probably heard the phrase, to pull a crater, but do where it comes from? It basically means to disappear, and it originated from one of the most infamous disappearances in American history. explore the disappearance of Judge Crater, a case of how a man simply vanished from the face of the earth, leaving behind a mystery that has puzzled everyone for decades. TIMEL...

New York City, New York. There are times when global change can impact you in ways you did not expect. Think about how the internet completely revolutionized the way we communicate, shop, and even find love. Or how the smartphone put the world at our fingertips, changing our daily lives in ways we couldn't have imagined. Or recently, how the COVID-19 pandemic changed how we work. These are thi...

Portland, Indiana. It's one of the great literary mysteries in America. My view is that it will remain a tantalizing mystery. These were the words of Don Swain, author of The Assassination of Ambrose Beers, A Love Story. And it is the perfect way to start today's episode. Today, we will be exploring the case of Ambrose Beers, a renowned writer who just vanished without a trace. His last le...

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Here on Hometown History, we've covered our fair share of government projects and cover-ups. Governments are known for their secrets. From covert operations to hidden facilities, they usually keep their most important plans out of public sight. Think about Area 51, long rumored to be the site of UFO research, or the secretive Manhattan Project that develop...

San Francisco, California. When someone shares a secret, it rarely stays quiet. Just like a game of telephone, each person adds their own little extra detail, and the story grows bigger and more exciting with each new version. That is pretty much how rumors work, and it's exactly what happened in this case, too. Back in 1872, a whispered hint about diamonds, hidden somewhere in the American wi...