Hometown History

Bristol, Tennessee. Last month I was driving through a small downtown in northeastern Tennessee and realized that my two left tires were directly on top of the state line. On my right side was still Tennessee, but on my left side was the state of Virginia. The yellow line was the borderline. It occurred to me that these shop owners on opposite side of the street were not only in two different stat...

Brown County, Indiana. The turning point in history of most hometowns is economic. A factory moves in, or an industry moves in, and then thousands or millions of people follow. This episode is the story of a county in southern Indiana that was changed not through industry, but through art. It's the story of one well-known painter named T.C. Steele and his wife Selma, and how they almost single...

Leavenworth, Washington. but as you guys get out i start to hear gunfire like of a shotgun yeah and i was just like guys do you guys hear that but by that point in time you guys had already been in this gold fever and you guys are so determined you're like yeah i'm sure it's fine i think it was some people up on the hill target shooting they were shooting handguns or something like tha...

Bean Blossom, Indiana. I'll never forget the morning you left me, a big mistake you called on. If you come back, sunshine will fall, if you stay away, you'll get my phone. Sweet heart of mine, can't you hear me call? A million times above you been mistreated you, Lord, and I'm sorry. Come back to me is my request. Standing in the center of a music museum in southern Indiana, I'...

Abraham Lincoln spent fourteen formative years in Spencer County, Indiana, from age seven to twenty-one, in a period that would profoundly shape the character of America's sixteenth president. Between 1816 and 1830, Lincoln transformed from a frontier boy into a self-educated young man on the banks of Little Pigeon Creek, learning the values of hard work, compassion, and justice that would def...

In December 1816, seven-year-old Abraham Lincoln stood at the edge of the Indiana wilderness, watching his father Thomas swing an axe into frozen timber. The family had left Kentucky behind, fleeing land disputes and the shadow of slavery, to carve out a new life along Little Pigeon Creek in what would become Spencer County, Indiana. For the next fourteen years, this remote frontier homestead woul...

West Columbia, South Carolina. I'm back with Benny Sultan, Reverend Charles Jackson, and Keller Kisham to discuss the legacy of the 1963 South Carolina State Championship football team. In the last episode, we looked at the amazing on-field success of this team, which outscored its opponents 526-27 over the course of the season. This episode, we're going to focus more on the legacy of that...

West Columbia, South Carolina. It looked like sand. It looked like dirt. Absolutely. , they referred to it as the dust bowl, even when they played football back then. At the other end, you saw some rusted, dilapidated fencing. I look at it like this. It was a big part of the community, but it was a yard that was in disrepair, and it needed people coming together. And I'm putting their hearts t...

New Harmony, Indiana. Have you ever wanted to join a commune? Better yet, have you ever wanted to start a commune? Have you ever wondered how communes work, or how they feel, which they seem to inevitably do? If your answer is yes to any of those questions, this episode is for you. The founder of the Communal Studies Association, Dr. Donald Pitzer, is with me today. Dr. Pitzer also founded the Cen...

In January 1825, Welsh industrialist Robert Owen arrived in the small Indiana town that would become the epicenter of American utopian experimentation. Having purchased the entire community from George Rapp's Harmonie Society for $150,000, Owen envisioned transforming New Harmony into a model society based on cooperation, education, and equality. This ambitious social experiment attracted some...

New Harmony, Indiana. We're talking with Jennifer Green today, history professor at the University of Southern Indiana, and one of my all-time favorite guests. Jennifer also serves as the school's reference and archives librarian. I met Jennifer following a trip to a small town called New Harmony on the Indiana-Illinois border. New Harmony is without a doubt one of the strangest places I&#...

Wabash, Indiana. Long time listeners will know that I've been all over the country finding stories. From Florida to Washington State, from Texas to Minneapolis. All this time, there's been one at the end of my street. Literally, at the end of my street that I haven't covered. Two blocks from my office, a small circle of about a dozen log cabins marks the spot of an 1826 treaty between...

San Francisco, California. last episode we sat down with Brandon at the Beat Museum in San Francisco to learn more about the Beat Movement and the way it forever changed the way Americans have thought about not only literature but life itself. we're going to be looking specifically at the relationship between this movement and the city of San Francisco which has been home to so many interestin...

San Francisco, California. In high school, I read Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, like everybody else. Living in a small town outside Muncie, Indiana, Kerouac's sense of freedom and adventure appealed to me, as it has so many since its publication in 1957. So when we were in San Francisco this past spring, we stopped at the Beat Museum downtown to learn more about the movement Kerouac h...

Reno, Nevada. After our episode on The Conqueror's Curse, I invited Richard Marino back to the studio to talk more about the history of the city of Reno. In that earlier episode, we discussed the ill-fated Howard Hughes film, The Conqueror, that resulted in the eventual deaths of more than 30% of its cast and crew. Before visiting Reno this spring, my only exposure to this city had been the TV...

St. George, Utah. Some would say the 1956 movie, The Conqueror, was cursed from the beginning. It had a terrible script, an unhappy crew, and a producer in Howard Hughes, who would soon lose his mind to an obsessive-compulsive disorder and any number of other unknown mental challenges. Within two years, he quit wearing clothes or cutting his nails and would eat only three different foods, chicken,...

Virginia City, Nevada. This episode will be a little different in that I'll be taking you on a mine tour deep underground in Virginia City. This is the city where Mark Twain worked at a local paper in his younger years and became the writer we know and love today. It's also the location of one of the biggest silver strikes in history. TIMELINE 1797: it was not Washington, D. 1906: in the c...

Crescent City, California. I love the atmosphere here. It reminds me of backroom storage rooms for investigation libraries. Oh, -huh. Yeah. That's what this is. This is our research room. We're sitting in the back room of the Del Norte County Historical Museum in Crescent City, California. Across from me at the table is Karen Beteljewski, and she's walking me through the ins and outs o...

San Juan Islands, Washington. When things go as well as they did during the Pig War, it can be easy to forget just how wrong they could have gone. I asked former Chief of Interpretation and historian for the San Juan Island National Historic Park, Mike Voorhees, how the Pig War might have ended otherwise. Any an incident, any a hot-headed incident, an American soldier shooting a British naval offi...

San Juan Islands, Washington. Have you ever had a fight with a family member over something stupid? Better yet, have you ever had that fight only to realize it wasn't so stupid after all? That behind that excuse for a fight was a real fight just waiting to be had? That's basically the story of the Pig War. Yes, the Pig War, which happened between the Pork and Beans War and the Fenian War,...

Desolation Peak, Washington. Great image of God with four finger pointed straight at me. Through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in his right hand would say it. Come on, boy, go thou across the ground. Go moan for man. Go moan. Go groan. Go groan alone. Go roll your bones alone. Go thou and be little beneath my sight. Go thou and be my new to seed...

In the volcanic highlands of southern Oregon lies Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States and one of the most pristine bodies of water on Earth. Formed approximately 7,700 years ago by the catastrophic eruption and collapse of Mount Mazama, Crater Lake's impossibly blue waters descend 1,949 feet into the caldera of an ancient volcano. For the Klamath people, who witnessed the mounta...

Washington, DC. I know you could be anywhere else right now, so I'm glad you're here. Let's get started. The unsung heroes of America's park systems are the men of the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the height of the Great Depression. In 1932, American unemployment hit a record high of nearly 25 percent. That same year, FDR made th...

Lake Mead, Nevada. Off in the background of every National Park success story is another story of catastrophic failure. One giant, towering, cascading, cautionary tale. Our government was so willing to protect areas like Death Valley because we had already blown our one chance to protect the first great natural attraction America ever had, Niagara Falls. TIMELINE 1920: strike, Union Pacific strike...

…1 campfire… …1 dark forest… …31 bone-chilling stories… …Will YOU survive the night? This Halloween season, enter the woods for a unique and truly epic podcast experience! Around the campfire Shane Waters will introduce 31 crime podcast hosts. Each host brings a new, nerve-wracking true story to the circle. It’s an extra special, two part, five-hour, Halloween event, but before hitting play you mi...