Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Six Impossible Episodes: U.S. Ghost Towns About this episode We've had a lot of listener requests related to ghost towns, so this Halloween season, we've got six places in the U. S. that could be labeled as such. But not not all are empty today.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:32 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:03 Tracy V. Wilson? You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare.
1:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:04 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:18 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:19 Tracy V. Wilson? A couple of Octobers ago, I put together an installment of six impossible episodes that was all about ghost stories. And it was specifically listener requests for ghost stories that were pretty well known in a local area, but just might not have a lot of name recognition in other places. And as I was going through the listener requests to pull all of that together, I also found a lot of requests that were about ghost towns. So I saved those for later, and that is today. For the sake of expectations, when I think of the word ghost town, I usually imagine a place that was a town, the
3:00 Tracy V. Wilson? town was abandoned, and the abandoned town and all of its buildings are still standing. That was true of some of the places that we're talking about today, but some of them, as of this moment, here in the year 2025, like, they don't really have a lot of structures. So the town itself is now gone, but it is a town that was completely abandoned in the past.
3:24 Holly Frey? And the first town we're talking about is Bodie, California, which was requested by listener Karina. Bodie is a couple hundred miles east southeast of Sacramento, or about 100 miles roughly south of Lake Tahoe. It's very close to the Nevada border. It's in the mountains at an elevation of more than 8,000 feet, and it's probably the best preserved ghost town in California. And today, it's known as Bodie State Historic Park.
3:51 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1859, a man named W. S. Bodie, or Bodie, found gold in the region and staked a claim. Bodie died in a blizzard the following winter, and afterward, the Bodie Mining District was named in his honor. At first, this district really only attracted a few prospectors. There were other lucrative mines in the Southwest that were already established. Some of them were not quite as remote as Bodie was. But in 1877, a collapse at Bunker Hill Mine in Bodie revealed a huge vein of gold. And today, this is known as one of California's biggest gold strikes. That gold strike brought a lot of new people to Bodie.
4:36 Holly Frey? This area is the ancestral home of multiple bands of northern Paiute. And when newcomers flooded the area after this gold strike, they forced the Paiute off their land. We talk a lot more about the northern Paiute during this period in our two-parter on Sarah Winamucca from November of 2024, although Winamucca and her band were from about 200 miles north of Bodie. The impact on the Paiute also went beyond the loss of land, with their access to food disrupted as forests were cut down for lumber and firewood, and cattle were introduced to graze on the area's grasslands.
5:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Bodie followed the arc of a typical boom town. It saw a lot of new people and a ton of new buildings, and many of them were very hastily built. It also developed a Wild West reputation for danger and lawlessness. And at its peak, there were more than 60 saloons and dance halls there for a population of about 8,500 people.
5:37 Holly Frey? Like many of the 19th century's gold rush towns, Bodie's shops and services were largely provided by Chinese immigrants who had come to the United States for some kind of work, many of them working on the Transcontinental Railroad before its completion in 1869. So Bodie also had its own Chinatown.
5:57 Tracy V. Wilson? But just four years after the gold rush started in Bodie, the gold started to run out. Mining companies and the businesses supporting them started going bankrupt and people started leaving. While there was still mining going on, everything was at a much smaller scale.
6:15 Holly Frey? A fire struck the town in 1892, and then another fire in 1932. By the time mining officially ended in 1942, only about 10% of the roughly 2,000 structures that had been built in the town were still standing, and its population was about a quarter of its peak. People continued to leave until it was basically empty.
6:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Twenty years after mining operations ended, Bodie was designated as a national historic site and a state historic park. In 1966, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. When an open pit gold mine was proposed to be built nearby in the 1980s, people lobbied for the Bodie Protection Act, which was passed in 1994.
7:05 Holly Frey? Today, the buildings in Bodie are preserved in the state they were in when they were abandoned. This includes products still on the shelves at stores, household goods and furnishings in the homes, and equipment still in some of the shops and mining facilities. A lot of the upholstery is moldering and wallpaper is peeling from the walls. One hotel is precariously leaning and has been propped up with a large beam wedged into its side. Slowly rusting car bodies and trailers are dotted around the town. Some of the buildings are essentially in ruins, and they'll stay that way. The park's website describes this all as being preserved in a state of, quote, "arrested decay."
7:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Unlike a lot of parks, including some other historic parks, there aren't modern buildings or facilities that have been added into the town to accommodate visitors, although there is a parking lot, a picnic area, and a restroom with flush toilets on the outskirts of the town. If you need to use the restroom while in the town itself, there are outhouses. The last three miles that a person needs to travel to get to the site are on a pretty rough dirt road. And while the park is open year round, getting there in the winter can be treacherous to impossible because of all the snow.
8:27 Holly Frey? Unsurprisingly, people have been taking objects from Bodie as souvenirs since before it officially became a park. But the entire park is essentially one big museum, so people really should not be taking things. Some years ago, a park ranger tried to deter these thefts by starting a rumor that a curse would strike anyone who took anything out of the town. Although staff seem to have stopped telling people that, the park still gets letters from visitors who took things, sometimes packaged with their pilfered items detailing all of the harm that befell them because of it. There's a display of these letters in the museum. And while that's kind of a fun story, according to a 2018 piece from KQED, since all these
9:11 Holly Frey? items are stolen, when the park gets them back, they have to report it.
9:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, they have to fill out theft paperwork for the, you know, random rocks and trinkets that people have taken and then believe caused them to be cursed and suffer various misfortunes. Next, we have Old Cahaba, Alabama, which is Old Cahaba Archaeological Park today. This was requested by listener Ryan. This is at the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama rivers. It's about eight miles southwest of Selma, Alabama, and it has been through multiple waves of settlement and change.
9:52 Holly Frey? From about the 9th to the 17th centuries, much of what is now the southeastern United States was home to Mississippian peoples. This was not one unified indigenous tribe. The term "Mississippian culture" is used to describe a whole array of indigenous societies that had some commonalities in their cultures and ways of life during this period. Today's descendants of the Mississippian peoples in what's now Alabama include the Muskogee Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations, among others.
10:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Sometime near the end of the Mississippian period, people settled in the area that later became Old Cahaba. They built a large earthen mound with a semicircular village that was surrounded by a palisade and a moat. Archaeological research at the site suggests that the people living in this village had connections with other Mississippian peoples all over the region, including as far south as the Gulf of Mexico, and that it was probably a center of culture and commerce. There is some speculation that this settlement may have been the town known as Mabila, which was destroyed by Hernando de Soto in 1540.
11:05 Tracy V. Wilson? While that is not completely certain, it does seem like the settlement was no longer inhabited by the end of the 17th century.
11:13 Holly Frey? Jumping ahead a little, the United States went to war with the Muskogee Nation and their allies in the early 19th century. And the US obtained most of what would become central Alabama under the Treaty of Fort Jackson that ended the war in 1814. Three years later, white surveyors arrived in the area and found the mound and the moat. Then, in 1819, Alabama's first governor, William Wyatt Bibb, created a plan for the construction of Alabama's first capital at the site. He wanted to build the Capitol building directly on top of the mound, but after his death in 1820, it wound up being built on an adjacent parcel.
11:55 Holly Frey? The rest of the capital city was planned out in a grid that was inspired by the city of Philadelphia.
12:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Cohaba only served as the capital of Alabama for a few years. There had been controversy over this choice of location and its initial approval expired in 1825. Its position on the rivers had meant that it had grown and thrived thanks to easy access by steamboat, but the town had also experienced seasonal flooding and disease outbreaks, including malaria outbreaks. The late Governor Bibb had also been one of the biggest advocates of locating the capital in Cohaba, and nobody really took up that fight after he died. On February 1st of 1826, the legislature passed a bill moving the capital from Cohaba
12:43 Tracy V. Wilson? to Tuscaloosa, and then eventually the capital moved again to today's location of Montgomery.
12:49 Holly Frey? Cuhaba wasn't abandoned right away, though. It continued to serve as the county seat of Dallas County. The region was also still home to fertile agricultural land and rivers for shipping and transportation. And Dallas County became one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, with that wealth being built through the use of enslaved laborers and including the value of the enslaved people themselves.
13:15 Tracy V. Wilson? But then during the US Civil War, the Confederate government seized the railroad that had recently been completed to Cuhaba, and they pulled up the rails and used them to extend a different railroad line. Railroads were replacing steamboats by this point, so the loss of the railroad was a huge blow. Most of Cuhaba's white population started moving away.
13:39 Holly Frey? After the Civil War, the population of Cuhaba was predominantly black, and it became a center for advocacy and organizing work by black activists. Residents of nearby Selma, which had become the county seat after a flood in 1865, started calling Cuhaba the, quote, "mecca of the radical Republican Party." That was a nickname that was intended to be insulting.
14:03 Tracy V. Wilson? This community was a lot smaller and a lot more rural than Cuhaba had been prior to the Civil War, and it was also very resourceful. The old courthouse became a meeting place for black activists and other leaders in the fight for equal rights during Reconstruction. Old mansions were torn down, so their building materials could be repurposed or sold for scrap. Bricks were reused to construct new family homes. Vacant lots that were left after buildings burned down or were otherwise destroyed were turned into farms.
14:35 Holly Frey? Eventually, a Confederate veteran named Samuel Kirkpatrick bought out much of the town and converted it into a large farm. But that was abandoned in the 1930s. The Cuhaba Historical Commission was established in 1943, and the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The Alabama Historical Commission took control of the site two years later.
15:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Today, the visitor center at the park is in a restored Greek revival cottage from the town's earlier days. Visitors can also see an Artesian well called the Pirene Well, which was used to air condition a mansion and was the deepest Artesian well in the world when it was built. There's a two-story slave quarters still standing and St. Luke's Episcopal Church, which was relocated into the park from nearby in the early 2000s. There are also collapsed cellars, ruined buildings, and the foundations of Cohaba Federal Prison. There are still some chimneys and columns standing from the site's former mansions as well. And there are some abandoned trailers
15:45 Tracy V. Wilson? that were used by fishers and hunters in the area in the 1980s.
15:50 Holly Frey? There are also cemeteries, and the one called the New Cemetery is described as the park's most haunted location. Visitors report hearing children laughing and playing and have even looked for park staff near closing time to say that they were worried some kids were going to be locked in when the park gates closed for the night. The park is generally only open during daylight hours, but they do nighttime haunted history events in October, and those sell out every year.
16:19 Tracy V. Wilson? We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then have two more ghost towns.
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16:56 Speaker 05 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
16:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
17:19 Speaker 05 It was could rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
17:27 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
17:33 Speaker 00 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
17:39 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
17:42 Speaker 00 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
17:47 Speaker 05 With the fans' experience, it's incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
17:50 Tracy V. Wilson? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
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18:38 Tracy V. Wilson? but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
19:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
19:48 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
20:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Listener Erica requested an episode on Yosemite, Utah. Yosemite is what's in now Tooele County. This area has connections to multiple indigenous nations, and it's the ancestral homeland of the Goshutes, who are a branch of the Western Shoshone.
20:25 Holly Frey? The Goshutes had sometimes violent encounters with Europeans as the Spanish started colonizing areas to the south of what's now Utah. But the first non-indigenous people to really try to establish permanent settlements in the area that we're talking about were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This was after founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram were killed in Illinois in 1844, and the Saints began moving west.
20:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Conflicts between the Goshutes and the church and its members were ongoing throughout the period that we're talking about, as the newcomers encroached on Goshute land. The Saints also displaced the nearby Ute tribe, causing the Ute to try to resettle in Goshute territory, and that added another layer to this conflict. Ultimately, the federal government established reservations for the Goshute in 1912 and 1914, which was toward the end of the period we're talking about. While this reservation land was part of the Gosheets' ancestral homeland, it was also much smaller than the territory they had been living on and using. And of course, being on a reservation meant they were subject to the federal efforts
21:37 Tracy V. Wilson? to control their way of life and assimilate them into white society, which is something we have discussed in a lot of other episodes.
21:45 Holly Frey? When church leaders first decided to settle in Utah, it was still part of Mexico. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, this region was part of the Mexican cession to the United States. Congress established Utah Territory as part of the compromise of 1850, and President Millard Fillmore appointed church leader Brigham Young as territorial governor.
22:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Of course, there is a whole history of the relationships between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the government, including the government of Utah Territory and eventually the state of Utah and the federal government. But the establishment of Yosepa was more about the church's own membership. The church had been sending missionaries to the Pacific Islands, including an eight-month mission to Hawaii, conducted by founder Joseph Smith in 1864. Initially, the Hawaiians who joined the church remained in Hawaii because the Hawaiian monarchy had restrictions on its citizens permanently immigrating.
22:51 Tracy V. Wilson? When those restrictions were loosened, Hawaiians started moving to Utah to join the community the saints had established there. Other Pacific Islanders who had joined the church moved to Utah as well.
23:03 Holly Frey? But the Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders who made this journey faced racial prejudice and bigotry after arriving, and fears that they would spread leprosy or Hansen's disease in the community. There is no record of this disease in Hawaii prior to around the 1830s, but its population also had no resistance to it. So, once it was introduced to Hawaii, it spread very quickly. We talked about this more in our episode on the Koala Rebellion, which ran as a Saturday classic on November 30th of 2024. There were also language barriers between the Pacific Islanders and the rest of the church and its leadership, who were predominantly English-speaking.
23:45 Holly Frey? So, in 1889, the church set up a committee made up of three former missionaries to Hawaii and three Pacific Islanders to find a place to establish a separate community.
23:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Yosemite was established in Skull Valley as a joint-stock company to get around laws that limited how much property the church could directly own. And it was incorporated as Yosemite Agriculture and Stock Company. Its name came from the Hawaiian pronunciation of the name Joseph, in honor of Joseph Smith. This was a planned settlement with a grid of streets, a central public square, and a meeting house for church worship. While the design and the layout of the community followed the patterns that the church had established for its communities elsewhere, the names of the streets and other features were taken from the Hawaiian language.
24:37 Holly Frey? This community adapted to the valley's desert climate relatively well in the hotter months, building irrigation systems and drawing inspiration from what life had been like on the windier, drier sides of the Pacific Islands. They also planted lots of fruit and shade trees around their homes, and they found local alternatives to foods that they were used to, like growing algae to use in place of seaweed. The winters, though, were a much bigger issue, with snow and frigid temperatures that people were completely unaccustomed to.
25:09 Tracy V. Wilson? The town of Yosemite was small. It had a population of about 230 people, including some Anglo shareholders and supervisors for some of the settlement's farms. And this settlement did struggle. It took a long time for the town to start to sustain itself economically, and the church often had to reinvest money into it to keep it afloat. Some of the men also had to find work in nearby mines after various crop failures. Three residents did develop leprosy in 1896, which caused renewed fears of the disease.
25:45 Holly Frey? Then in 1917, the church decided to abandon Yosepa. The idea of gathering is part of church doctrine. People had come from Hawaii and other Pacific Islands because they were gathering with the saints in Utah. But by this point, Hawaii had been annexed by the United States and the church had decided to build a temple on the island of Oahu. Saints would be gathering there as well. The population of Yosepa was encouraged to return to Hawaii to help build that temple and the church paid their expenses.
26:19 Tracy V. Wilson? While Yosepa is often described as a ghost town because of this total abandonment in 1917, most of the town itself is not still standing today. It was sold to a ranching company, which demolished most of the buildings to turn it into grazing land. Most of what is still there is the graveyard, which includes monuments and memorials to the town and its residents, and a pavilion that's used by descendants of the people who lived in the town and other church members who visit the area for things like commemorative events. Yosepa was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
26:58 Holly Frey? Our next ghost town was requested by Larissa and it has the charming name of Pit Hole City, Pennsylvania. That was an oil boom town. In 1859, Edwin L. Drake successfully drilled an oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania. And this marked the start of the petroleum industry in Pennsylvania, although it didn't really start to grow right away because of the Civil War. Five years later, IG Frasier leased a farm on Pit Hole Creek, roughly eight miles southeast of Drake Well, and he drilled a well of his own, successfully striking oil in January of 1865.
27:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Word spread of Frasier's oil strike and as the weather warmed up in the spring, people started building a town around it. And this happened so fast. That May, AP Duncan and George C. Prater bought a big farm and they divided it up into plots. People started building on their lots within a day or two of signing a lease. Pit Hole's first hotel was called Aster House and it was built over the course of only a day. By that summer, the town had 50 of them. At the city's peak, its post office was the third busiest in all of Pennsylvania, with only Philadelphia and Pittsburgh moving more mail every day.
28:17 Holly Frey? Pit Hole City quickly went from not existing at all to having about 15,000 residents. Some of the people who rushed to the area were former Union soldiers looking for work or a place to invest any money they had earned from their service in the war. There were all kinds of opportunities and all kinds of jobs, including thousands of teamsters, those being people who handled teams of animals hauling thousands of barrels of oil each day.
28:45 Tracy V. Wilson? In the summer of 1865, Pit Hole City produced roughly a third of the petroleum in the United States. But while these wells were extremely productive at first, the oil deposits they were tapping into were fairly small, and soon they started drying up. On top of that, the economy and the logistics of the oil industry started to change. The price of oil plummeted by almost 75%. When a pipeline was completed in the fall of 1866, it made moving oil out of Pit Hole way easier and more efficient, but it also put all those thousands of teamsters out of work, or at least most of them.
29:30 Tracy V. Wilson? The oil industry also started moving toward consolidation, which put smaller drilling and refining operations out of business. We talked about this consolidation process more in our episode on Ida Tarbell versus John D. Rockefeller, which ran over two parts in November of 2021.
29:49 Holly Frey? This industry was also dangerous, and there were multiple serious oil well explosions and fires. Some of these burned not just the wells and the people who happened to be nearby, but also businesses and homes. These fires spread easily since most of the buildings were made entirely of wood and because oil storage tanks were intermingled with other buildings. As the city declined and its population dropped, there was little to no effort to clean up after these fires.
30:20 Tracy V. Wilson? By the end of 1866, there were only about 2,000 people left in Pit Hole City. Within another five years, there were less than 50 households left. The Pit Hole City Charter was revoked in February of 1877, and the land that the city had been on was sold.
30:39 Holly Frey? In 1963, part of the former city was given to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission opened a visitor center at the site in 1975. Today, there is a visitor center with a miniature model of the town, and you can still see the foundations of a Methodist church. Beyond that, what was once a bustling town is now just a field, with some of the town's former streets mown into the grass. There are interpretive panels around the fields describing what used to be there and the history of the town. Archaeological sites can also be added to the National Register of Historic Places, and Pit Hole City was added to that register in 1973.
31:24 Tracy V. Wilson? We haven't really touched on the indigenous history of this part of Pennsylvania, in part because there's some overlap with history we will be talking about later, and in part because the nation most associated with this area was no longer there by the time Pit Hole City was founded. But this area was home to the Iroquois-speaking Erie people, who Lake Erie is named for. The Erie lived on the southern shore of the lake and to the south and southeast of there. In the 1600s, the Erie were at war with the Haudenosaunee, and many of them were driven out of the region during this war. Survivors of the conflict became part of a lot of other indigenous nations, including some of the nations of the Haudenosaunee.
32:07 Tracy V. Wilson? And we will be coming back to the Haudenosaunee later on in this episode. For now, though, we will take a quick sponsor break.
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32:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesse have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
33:33 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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35:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Listener Erin asked for an episode on Jerome, Arizona, roughly 100 miles north of Phoenix and Arizona's Black Hills. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, this area was home to people of the Ho'okum culture. Like the Mississippian peoples we mentioned earlier, this is a term that encompasses a number of different indigenous tribes and peoples that have some commonalities, including their development of complex irrigation canals and the cultivation of maize. It appears that the Ho'okum peoples left this region sometime between 1350 and 1450 due to widespread drought. People who returned to the area later are likely descendants of Ho'okum peoples
36:44 Tracy V. Wilson? and include multiple Odam nations.
36:47 Holly Frey? The Spanish weren't really focused on this area when they started colonizing southwestern North America. There were surface-level deposits of ores and pigments that indigenous people had been using for centuries, but Spain's focus was really on gold and silver, not on the copper and other metals found around what's now Jerome. The area became part of Mexico after it gained independence from Spain and then part of the United States after the Mexican-American War in 1848.
37:17 Tracy V. Wilson? The first Anglo copper mining claims were staked around Jerome in the 1870s. United Verde Copper Company established a mining camp that was later named after one of its financiers, Eugene Jerome. A blast furnace was hauled into the area and that furnace successfully produced copper for a few years in the 1880s, but it went through a closure and then a change of ownership before actually becoming a profitable business. And that was toward the end of the decade.
37:49 Holly Frey? The town was incorporated in 1899 after a series of major fires and a lack of water to fight them. Incorporating as a town meant that they could establish a town council to make decisions about things like building codes and fire districts and water resources. Like Bodie and Pit Hole, most of Jerome's buildings were made of wood and they were built very quickly. And the newly adopted building code was designed to reduce the risk of major fires.
38:17 Tracy V. Wilson? After its incorporation, Jerome grew rapidly. Over the first decades of the 20th century, its population reached about 15,000 people. Many of these people were immigrants to the United States. It's estimated that there were people of about 30 different nationalities living in Jerome. Jerome also had a reputation for danger and crime and lawlessness, and it was nicknamed "the wickedest town in the West."
38:46 Holly Frey? There were also labor disputes. Multiple unions tried to organize the mines, including the AFL's Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, the Liga Protectora Latina, and the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. The Industrial Workers of the World were generally more radical than a lot of other labor unions and faced a lot of suspicion and distrust. And in 1917, mine supervisors and local businessmen teamed up to drive the Wobblies out of Jerome. We talked about this more in our episode on the similar Bisbee deportation that ran as a Saturday classic in February of 2022.
39:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Other issues affected Jerome and the landscape around it. Smelting ore produces a lot of pollution and that pollution killed off most of the vegetation in the surrounding area. That vegetation was what had been anchoring the soil to the hillsides. When the area's mines started running out of ore, mining companies moved to open pit mining and blasting, and that blasting further destabilized the soil. Runoff, erosion, and landslides all became serious problems.
39:59 Holly Frey? By the mid 20th century, many of the mines had closed down after exhausting all the available ore. Major mining activity ended by 1953. Soon, the town's population had dropped to only about 100 people, some of whom formed a historical society to try to preserve the town. Jerome State Historic Park was established in 1957.
40:23 Tracy V. Wilson? But even with those preservation efforts, the town continued to decline. Buildings that burned, collapsed, or fell into disrepair were mostly just abandoned, while a lot of the ones that were still standing were demolished to make other use of their materials. There was also a major snowfall in 1967 that just flattened some of the buildings that had started to deteriorate. Like, they were so unsound, they couldn't support the weight of the snow on them.
40:52 Holly Frey? But today, Jerome looks a lot different from Bodie or Pit Hole. It's not just a historic park, but a small town dotted with art galleries, wineries, and shops. Shortly after major mining operations ended, artist Roger Holt and his wife Shan moved to Jerome. And together, they established a group called the Verde Valley Artists, which became the Verde Valley Artists Association in the 1970s. The historical society and the artist society worked together to support the town and to bring art and artists to Jerome. The town revived itself as an art colony, and today it has a population of about 450 people, about a quarter of whom are artists.
41:36 Holly Frey? It's also a national historic landmark, and it's on the National Register of Historic Places.
41:41 Tracy V. Wilson? And it has some ghost stories. The Jerome Grand Hotel was originally a hospital, and it's rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of patients who died there. Visitors have also reported the sounds of squeaky gurneys and sightings of a ghost cat, although according to the hotel's website, the current owner of the hotel isn't into hauntings or ghost stories. Lawrence Memorial Hall was built on the site of shacks that were used by sex workers during Jerome's mining camp days, and it is purportedly haunted by their ghosts and has been given the nickname Spook Hall. People have also reported seeing
42:22 Tracy V. Wilson? strange orbs of light around Jerome's old cemetery. These are just examples, and since Jerome has become a tourist destination, there are of course, companies who offer ghost tours that you can take if you visit.
42:37 Holly Frey? And our last ghost town has been requested by so many listeners over the years. That is Centralia, Pennsylvania. This is in the eastern part of the Commonwealth, roughly 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia. This is in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Coal Region, which spans six counties and is the only Anthracite Coal Reserve in the United States.
43:00 Tracy V. Wilson? This area is the ancestral home of the Algonquin-speaking Lenape and the Iroquois-speaking Susquehannock. The Susquehannock faced violence, war, and introduced diseases after the arrival of European colonists in the area in the 17th century, and most of the surviving Susquehannock joined one of the Six Nations of the Hidhishawnee, who were eventually forced onto reservations that are mostly, but not entirely, located in New York. The Lenape faced a lot of those same things, and they were forced to move west. And today, the largest population of Lenape in the United States is in Oklahoma.
43:38 Holly Frey? These removals were ongoing when Centralia was established. Centralia was originally a settlement called Bull's Head. It was incorporated as Centralia Borough in 1866, at which point it had a population of about 1,300 people.
43:55 Tracy V. Wilson? When Centralia was incorporated, cities and towns around the region were growing rapidly, thanks to an increasing demand for coal. Although this was true for Centralia as well, it did not have quite the same dramatic boom and bust as the other industrial towns we have talked about today. By the 1890s, its population had grown from about 1,300 to about 2,800. It did reportedly have 27 saloons at that point, and one saloon for every 100 residents does seem like a lot.
44:31 Holly Frey? Not to me.
44:35 Tracy V. Wilson? It wasn't, though, like going from not really existing to having 15,000 residents seemingly overnight.
44:43 Holly Frey? Centralia's decline in the face of a faltering coal industry and other economic pressures also was not quite as dramatic. By 1950, there were still almost 2,000 people living there, and by 1960, that had dropped to about 1,500. Centralia became a ghost town for a different reason, because of a fire which was first detected in a surface mine pit near the Independent Order of Oddfellow Cemetery.
45:11 Tracy V. Wilson? There is some debate about the exact cause of the fire and who was responsible, but the thing that comes up the most often was a decision to burn the trash in the city's landfill ahead of Memorial Day in 1962. This landfill had been started in an old coal pit, and there was not a fireproof barrier between the bottom of the pit and the flammable coal in the ground underneath it. So the fire spread from the landfill to these underground coal seams, either starting the underground fire or fueling a fire that had already started from some other source.
45:52 Holly Frey? Once the fire was detected, people tried to put it out by dousing it with water and by smothering it with clay. There were also efforts to dig trenches and fill old mine shafts and pits with non-combustible materials. None of this successfully extinguished the fire. The obvious challenges of trying to fight a fire underground were made even more challenging by the fact that mining operations had been going on in Centralia for decades. And that included illicit digging that was not documented anywhere. So there were all kinds of unmapped shafts and tunnels and breaks that could continue to provide this fire with oxygen and exposed coal seams that could provide it with fuel.
46:36 Holly Frey? Over the first two decades after the fire started, more than $7 million was spent on firefighting and on relocating some of the people whose homes were in the most danger.
46:48 Tracy V. Wilson? As this fire spread underground, parts of the town were blanketed with carbon monoxide and various other gases and smoke. People could also feel the heat from the fire above the ground and things that were stored underground, including things like the fuel tanks at gas stations, started heating up as well. Sinkholes formed as the fire hollowed out the coal deposits. Homes and other buildings started to shift and tilt and sink. Parts of two cemeteries are believed to have dropped down into the earth.
47:25 Holly Frey? Surprisingly to me, a lot of people in Centralia just lived with all of this for almost a decade. But some people started developing health problems and the situation became obviously increasingly dangerous. On Valentine's Day of 1981, a 12-year-old boy fell into a sinkhole and had to be rescued. People quickly realized that the sinkhole was spewing carbon monoxide and that if it had taken them much longer to get the boy out, he would have died. The ongoing fire and its dangers were also getting increasing media attention. So not long after this, authorities decided to just clear out the town.
48:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Formal relocation efforts started in 1983. Congress appropriated $42 million for the relocation effort a year later.
48:16 Tracy V. Wilson? That carried on and then in 1992, the remaining buildings still standing in the town were condemned. A year after that, Route 61 through the town was closed and rerouted. In 2002, the United States Postal Service revoked the town's zip code.
48:34 Holly Frey? Meanwhile, a few holdouts refused to leave and some actually filed suit to be able to keep their homes. A court ultimately allowed them to remain in Centralia for the rest of their lives and they cannot sell their property or leave it to someone else in their estate. As of 2020, there were five people remaining there.
48:55 Tracy V. Wilson? The Centralia Mine Fire is still burning today and it is one of more than 20 active mine fires in Pennsylvania. It's believed that if it is not somehow extinguished, it will continue burning underground for centuries. The assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church still stands in Centralia and it's still in use so far, apparently unaffected by the fire. But otherwise, the town's buildings are mostly gone. What is left is mostly cemeteries, streets that are slowly cracking apart, building foundations and concrete stairs that lead to nothing.
49:34 Holly Frey? Route 61 had become covered in so much graffiti that it was nicknamed Graffiti Highway. During the stay-at-home order phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were still going there, including holding a large bonfire gathering in late March of 2020. A company called Pagnati Enterprises owns a lot of the adjacent land and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation had turned over the highway right-of-way to them in 2018. Pagnati Enterprises buried the remains of the highway in dirt to discourage visitors.
50:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Unsurprisingly, burying the Graffiti Highway, not a popular decision by people who were fans of the Graffiti Highway and sort of Centralia lore. Today, Centralia is also associated with the supernatural horror franchise Silent Hill, although that connection mostly follows the 2006 Silent Hill movie rather than the earlier video game franchise that the film is based on.
50:36 Tracy V. Wilson? And those are our six ghost towns for today.
50:40 Holly Frey? Ghost towns. Do you have one listener mail?
50:43 Tracy V. Wilson? I do. It's absolutely unrelated to this.
50:47 Tracy V. Wilson? This is from Wendy. Wendy is one of a number of people who sent similar queries. Wendy wrote to say, hello, Tracy and Holly. Several times I've heard Tracy, I think I still don't have your voices associated to your names. Sorry. Mention drum corps in passing. My daughter did one season of drum corps color guard and is working on her auditions and fundraising for one more season before she ages out. Your references to drum corps have us so intrigued. First, have you ever done an episode on drum corps? If not, we'd love to hear one. If drum corps isn't a big enough topic on its own, you could always add in WGI indoor percussion and winter guard. Second, to the extent that you're willing to share, where did you march? What instrument did you play? And what are your thoughts about your drum corps experience?
51:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Thankfully, my daughter had an amazing first season last year, saying it was the hardest and most rewarding thing she'd ever done. We're hoping she gets an opportunity to perform at Indy again next summer. For pet tax, here is our 10 year old rescue kitty Mist, who always manages to find something of ours to sit on, the mail, a sweatshirt, the book you're reading, or in this case, a blanket I'm trying to crochet. And equally as adorable, my drum corps daughter in costume. She is the shortest one in the front. I hope you have a fantastic week, Wendy. Thanks, Wendy. Like I said, we got some variation on this question, an email and on social media comments, so I thought I would answer it. Yeah, I was in the color guard.
52:13 Tracy V. Wilson? I was also in my marching band's color guard. I marched with Carolina Crown in 1992. I started the 1993 season. I made it through all of the wintertime rehearsal phase.
52:29 Tracy V. Wilson? And got not very far into like the everyday summer rehearsals ahead of touring. Because in my first year of drum corps, I got mono. And recovering fully from mono took me a long time. I seemed to do okay with the weekend rehearsals that were just like Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday. But once it was every day in the summer, and also if I recall correctly, we were being housed in dorms that weren't air conditioned. Like I just, my body wasn't capable of it. It was not, it was not working. And then also I was a teenager and had teenager drama.
53:13 Tracy V. Wilson? That also probably was an effect on my decision to drop out. But I think had I not dropped out when I did, I would have eventually wound up in the hospital possibly. Like I was, I was really physically struggling. I have a variety of feelings about my time in drum corps. Carolina Crown was a much, much smaller corps at the time. It had only been in existence for a couple or three years. A lot of the people that I marched with were founding members. And it was a much, like I said, a much smaller corps than it is today. I credit doing drum corps with having a pretty easy transition from high school to being in college
53:56 Tracy V. Wilson? and being responsible for myself and having to look after myself. Um, I think doing drum corps in a lot of ways helped me with some self-confidence and some autonomy that I had not really had the opportunity to develop in other contexts simultaneously. At least when I was there, and this was 30 something years ago, I cannot tell you if it is still like this. There was a real culture of pushing through injuries and not seeking help if you got sick. And in addition to getting mono during drum corps and taking well over a year to fully recover from it. I also did soft tissue damage to both of my ankles that took a really long time to recover from. And also.
54:42 Tracy V. Wilson? In my opinion, the adults who were responsible for, you know, instructing us young people did not do a good job of modeling the behavior of leading people without abusing them. I just don't think that grown adult men should be screaming obscenities at children over what's effectively a halftime performance. Like, maybe that's me being prissy and old fashioned, but like, I just, I don't think there is cause for that and is not the way that, that we should operate as a society. So it was something that I really got a lot of out of, and I still look back on and kind of go, huh, I
55:27 Tracy V. Wilson? don't love the fact that a bunch of teenagers were continuing to march on injuries and injuring themselves worse for the sake of a competitive marching experience. And yeah, in, in a lot of ways, it was a fun experience. In other ways, as an adult, looking back on it, things about it trouble me. Again, that is my experience from 30 plus years ago. It is not a commentary on what the Corps is like now. I have no idea. And yeah, we have an adorable picture of an adorable cat lying on a partially completed crochet blanket and an incredibly
56:04 Tracy V. Wilson? fun photo of in costume color guard members. I'm not going to get into the exact details because I don't want to, you know, involve somebody else's privacy, but that, that's a very fun picture of this, this color guard. So that was my Drum Corps experience. Thank you for the question, Wendy, and other folks who have asked about it. If you'd like to send us a note, we're at [email protected] . And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
56:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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