Hometown History

Lewistown, Montana, 1889. Mid-June, 1889. The Judith River runs cold through central Montana Territory. The water flows down from the Little Belt Mountains, snaking through grassland where cattle ranches have only just begun to replace the buffalo herds. A rancher riding his property spots something caught against the rocks near samples crossing. At first, he thinks it's driftwood. Then, he ge...

Globe, Arizona. Saturday night, November 16th, 1907. Approaching midnight in Globe, Arizona's red-light district, two Globe police officers found him lying in the dirt. A 25-year-old Finnish miner named Richard Veklund. He'd been drugged and robbed. His pockets were empty. Over a hundred dollars, gone. The officers tried to rouse him, asked where he lived. Veklund managed to open his eyes....

Taos, New Mexico. On the morning of July 3rd, 1929, U.S. Deputy Marshal Jim Martinez stood outside Arthur Rothford Manphy's fortress-like mansion in the heart of Taos, New Mexico. He'd come to serve legal papers to the 70-year-old Englishman, but the moment he approached the back door, he knew something was quite wrong. Flies. Hundreds of them. Blackening the screen door, their buzzing aud...

East Montpelier, Vermont. September 5th, 1889, 11 o'clock in the morning. Laura Cutler Gold walked up the path to her family's farm in East Montpelier, Vermont, wearing yesterday's wedding dress. She'd been married for 14 hours. Her new husband, George, stopped at the woodshed to gather kindling for the stove. Inside the farmhouse, the elderly woman Laura had hired as a chaperone w...

Turtle Lake, North Dakota. April 24th, 1920, a farmhouse three miles north of Turtle Lake, North Dakota. In a small bedroom, an eight-month-old baby girl has been crying for two days straight. She's soaked through her diaper, soiled, weakening from hunger and cold, but no one comes to feed her. In the kitchen, by all accounts, five bodies are piled in the root cellar beneath a trapdoor. The mo...

It's just past midnight on July 5th, 1943, in Boise City, Oklahoma, and Forrest Bork is sound asleep above his post office on the courthouse square when the explosion hits. The whole building shakes. Bork jolts awake, thinking one thing. Someone's cracking the safe downstairs. He creeps to his window in the dark, and there's already a group of men in the alley, staring at his garage ac...

Opelousas, Louisiana. Columbia, Mississippi, April 1913. Julia Anderson walked into the sheriff's office, holding a photograph of her son Bruce. She'd been told the boy they'd found matched his description. Five years old, light hair, distinctive scars. But when they brought the child out, he looked at Julia with blank eyes. No recognition. No mama. Just fear. The sheriff asked, is thi...

186: Opelousas, Louisiana: The Boy Two Mothers Claimed, A 92-Year DNA Mystery Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out:...

March 1849. Workers searching the woods between Edgefield and Abbeville County, South Carolina, stumbled across a shallow grave. Inside, the decomposing body of a man. The coroner arrived, examined the remains, recorded his findings in careful detail, the clinical precision that shows up in death records of the era. Cause of death, a leaden ball shot from a gun or pistol by the hands of some perso...

Hagerstown, Indiana. September 1908, Philadelphia train station. 18-year-old Ralph Teeter stands on the platform, one suitcase in hand. It contains a year's worth of clothes. He's traveled alone from Hagerstown, Indiana, a town of 2,000 people. Everyone knows him there. The streets are memorized. Every building corner echoes back his location through the click of his metal-tipped shoes. Ph...

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...