PODCAST · history
Hometown History
by Shane Waters
Every hometown has a story worth preserving—and most have been forgotten.Hometown History uncovers the overlooked events, mysteries, and tragedies from small-town America that never made it into the textbooks. Meticulous research meets respectful storytelling in 20-minute episodes perfect for your morning coffee.From deadly disasters to hidden triumphs, each week explores a different community's untold chapter. No sensationalism. No filler. Just the surprising, forgotten stories that shaped the America we know today.For curious minds who believe history is happening everywhere—not just in the big cities.
Episodes
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Frankfort, Kentucky: The Flood That Drowned the Capital | Hometown History
In January 1937, the Kentucky River swallowed its own capital city. Weeks of unrelenting rain pushed the river to 47.46 feet, more than thirteen feet above flood stage, sending brown water through downtown Frankfort and into the cellblocks of the Kentucky State Penitentiary. Inside those...
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Havre, Montana: The Secret Tunnel Empire Beneath the Streets
On January 14, 1904, Havre, Montana burned twice in one day. The first fire started in the back of Gross and Lebert's hardware store with a chinook wind still blowing. The second came around noon, when a clerk at the Stringfellow Drug Store opened the trap door to the cellar and got a face full…
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San Francisco, California: The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872 | Hometown History
In 1871, two Kentucky drifters named Philip Arnold and John Slack walked into a San Francisco mining broker's office carrying a buckskin pouch of rough stones: diamonds, rubies, and sapphires they claimed to have pulled out of American soil. What followed was one of the most audacious swindles in...
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Shawneetown, Illinois: The Town That Kept Building the Wall Higher
Shawneetown, Illinois was laid out in 1810, which makes it one of the oldest towns in the state. Before Illinois was a state, this was already a place. Two things put it on the map: salt from the works nearby, back when no household or smokehouse could run without it, and the Ohio River, which in...
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Pascagoula, Mississippi: The Phantom Barber's Midnight Crime Spree
In the summer of 1942, Pascagoula, Mississippi, was a quiet Gulf Coast town that the Ingalls Shipbuilding yard had turned into a wartime boomtown almost overnight. That summer someone began cutting through window screens at night, slipping into bedrooms, and snipping locks of hair from sleeping...
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Peshtigo, Wisconsin: America's Deadliest Fire You've Never Heard Of
On October 8, 1871, a wall of flame moving faster than a galloping horse descended on Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a lumber town built entirely of wood. Wooden sidewalks, wooden bridges, sawdust-packed roads, and heaps of bark and mill waste surrounded a population of two thousand people, nearly all of...
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Escalante, Utah: The Mysterious Disappearance of Everett Ruess
In mid-November 1934, a twenty-year-old artist named Everett Ruess led two burros into the canyon country south of Escalante, Utah. He carried journals, watercolors, and enough provisions for two months. He had spent four years wandering the desert Southwest alone, painting, writing letters that...
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Thaxton, Virginia: The Forgotten Train Disaster of 1889
On the evening of July 1, 1889, Passenger Train Number Two pulled out of Roanoke, Virginia, bound east through the Blue Ridge. It was a through train, New Orleans to New York, already running late, with Engine Number Thirty at the head and 74 people aboard, 56 passengers and a crew of 18. Among...
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Bath, Michigan: The School Treasurer Who Spent Eight Months Planting Dynamite
In May 1927, the small farming community of Bath Township, Michigan, suffered the deadliest school attack in American history, and nearly a century later most Americans have never heard of it. Andrew Kehoe, a 55-year-old trained electrician and school board treasurer, spent eight months secretly...
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Tucker, Arkansas: Secrets of Tucker Prison Farm - The Torture Machine
In the 1960s, Tucker State Prison Farm in Arkansas sat on 4,500 acres of Delta bottomland in Jefferson County. Three hundred inmates worked the cotton and soybean fields under the supervision of armed fellow prisoners, a practice the state called the trusty system. Only eight free-world employees...
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Little Rock, Arkansas: The Asylum That Buried Thousands in Unmarked Graves
In 1975, a construction crew breaking ground for a government complex on West Markham Street in Little Rock, Arkansas, unearthed an estimated three thousand to four thousand bodies buried in shallow, unmarked graves. They were patients of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum — committed not only for…
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Jackson, Kentucky: The Lawyer Who Carried His Baby as a Bulletproof Shield
In the spring of 1903, attorney James Buchanan Marcum faced a terrible daily calculation in Jackson, Kentucky. For seventy-two days, the most prominent lawyer in Breathitt County refused to leave his own home without his infant son pressed against his chest. The reasoning was as simple as it was...
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The Gainesville Tornado: 203 Dead in 3 Minutes
On April 6, 1936, two tornadoes merged over Gainesville, Georgia, and in just three minutes, killed 203 people, the deadliest tornado in a single building in American history. This is the haunting story of the Cooper Pants Factory disaster and how one catastrophic afternoon changed building codes...
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Jacksonville, Florida: The 1888 Yellow Fever Epidemic That Built Public Health
In the sweltering summer of 1888, a Tampa saloon keeper named R.D. McCormick stepped off a train in Jacksonville, Florida, carrying something far deadlier than luggage. Within weeks, the disease known as Yellow Jack would transform America's booming winter playground into a quarantined city of…
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Bessemer City, North Carolina: The Ballad Singer the Mill Bosses Couldn't Silence
Bessemer City, North Carolina. September 14th, 1929. A flatbed truck kicks up Red Carolina dust on a back road outside Bessemer City. The boards rattle beneath 22 pairs of feet. No one in the truck bed carries a weapon. They are textile workers heading home from a roadblock that turned them…
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Forsyth County, Georgia: The Town Georgia Tried to Bury Twice
September, 1912, Forsyth County, Georgia, 30 miles northeast of Atlanta, farming country, red clay roads, pine forests thick enough to block out the afternoon sun. The air sits heavy. It smells like turned earth and wood smoke. More than a thousand black Americans live here. They own land. They…
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Carrollton, Mississippi: The 1886 Courthouse Massacre That History Forgot
January 1886, Carrollton, Mississippi, a Saturday afternoon. Two brothers are hauling jugs of molasses from a wagon into a saloon. Heavy earthenware vessels, maybe 20 pounds each, slick with condensation. Ed and Charlie Brown, part African American, part Native American, working men making a...
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Dover, Delaware: The Poisoned Chocolates That Changed American Law
August 1898, Dover, Delaware. The heat of the day has broken, and the air smells of cut grass and warm earth. On the porch of the Pennington family home, Mary Elizabeth Dunning opens a package from the afternoon mail, a box of chocolate bonbons, a Cambric handkerchief, and a note. With love to...
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Brattleboro, Vermont: The Asylum Tower Holding a Century of Secrets
In the woods above Brattleboro, Vermont, a 65-foot stone tower has stood since the 1890s. It was not built by architects or hired masons. It was built by the patients of an insane asylum, stone by stone, under the direction of their doctors who believed that breaking rocks could fix broken minds....
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Waterbury, Vermont: The Asylum That Turned a Towns Name Into a Warning
You're standing on Route 100 in Waterbury, Vermont, in November 1891. The air smells like wood smoke and coming snow. Behind you, the last maples hold on to their copper leaves. Ahead on a hill that commands the entire valley, workers are laying the final stones on a building that will change...
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Riceville, Maine: The Ghost Town Whose Plague Never Happened
Riceville, Maine. Somewhere in the forest of eastern Maine, there's a town that no longer exists. It's a summer morning, sometime in the early 1900s. A traveler makes his way down a rutted logging road through dense strands of hemlock and spruce. He's headed for Riceville, a company town built...
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Prudence Island: The Keeper Who Relit the Light After Losing Everything
In a lighthouse keeper's cottage on Prudence Island, Rhode Island, six people huddle on the floor. It's September 21st, 1938. Outside, a wall of gray-green water is racing across Narragansett Bay, 16 feet of churning ocean pushed by winds exceeding 100 miles per hour. George Gustavus, the...
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Watch Hill, Rhode Island: The Fort Road Massacre That Killed 15
Watch Hill, Rhode Island. It's one o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon in September 1938. Miss John McKisson Camp is hosting a luncheon on the rocks at Weakapog, just east of Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Her guests gather in their summer finest. Linen dresses, straw hats, the quiet elegance you'd…
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Deal Beach, New Jersey: 240 Immigrants Drowned 150 Yards From Shore
Deal Beach, New Jersey. It's 6.10 on the morning of November 13th, 1854, and the gale-force winds that rattled windows all night have driven the few families of Deal Beach from their beds. Through the fog and driving rain, they see her. A massive three-masted clipper ship, full sails still set,...
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Hazardville, Connecticut: When Gunpowder Made—and Destroyed—a Town
January 14, 1913. Hazardville, Connecticut. A winter morning at the old powder mills, now operating under the Hercules Powder name for exactly 30 days. Workers Charles Blunden and Jacob Stocker went about their routines, same as they had for years. The machinery hummed. The river flowed past…
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Ord, Nebraska: The Teenage Teacher Who Saved 13 Children in the 1888 Blizzard
Ord, Nebraska. January 12th, 1888. Morning. A one-room schoolhouse six miles south of Ord, Nebraska. 40 degrees in January. Unseasonably warm. The morning where farm kids arrive without their heavy coats because it feels like spring decided to show up three months early. Minnie Freeman, 19 years...
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Lewistown, Montana: When the Guide Became the Killer (1889)
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...
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Globe, Arizona: The Curse of Room 18—Two Miners, One Deadly Room
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,...
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Taos, New Mexico: The Headless Body in the Fortress Mansion
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...
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East Montpelier, Vermont: The 14-Hour Marriage That Ended in Murder
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...
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Turtle Lake, North Dakota: The Wolf Family Murders of 1920
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.…
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Boise City, Oklahoma: The Night America Bombed Its Own Town
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...
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Opelousas, Louisiana: The Boy Two Mothers Claimed—A 92-Year DNA Mystery
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...
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Opelousas, Louisiana: The Boy Two Mothers Claimed—A 92-Year DNA Mystery
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...
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Edgefield, South Carolina: The Devil's Bargain Murder Trial of 1850
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...
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Hagerstown, Indiana: The Blind Engineer Who Invented Cruise Control
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....
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Gay Head, Massachusetts: 103 Souls Lost Half a Mile from Shore
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....
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Gauley Bridge, West Virginia: America's Deadliest Industrial Cover-Up
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...
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Wheeling, West Virginia: When Steel Workers Became Radio Stars
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...
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Erie, Pennsylvania: The Wall of Water That Killed 36
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...
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Athens, Tennessee: The 1946 GI Rebellion and the Limits of Armed Reform
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.…
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Osage County, Oklahoma: The Oil Murders That Created the FBI
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...
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Kalaupapa, Hawai'i: The Saint of Exiles and Hansen's Disease Colony
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...
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Africatown, Alabama: The Last Slave Ship and the Town Built by Survivors
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...
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Exeter, Rhode Island: America's Last Vampire Exhumation
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.…
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Ottawa, Illinois: The Radium Girls' Fight for Justice
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...
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Wahpeton, North Dakota: When Lightning Struck the Circus in 1897
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...
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Hickory, North Carolina: The 54-Hour Polio Hospital Miracle of 1944
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...
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How Wabash, Indiana Saved Its Main Street
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...
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American Nursing: How a Profession Was Born from War and Reform
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…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Every hometown has a story worth preserving—and most have been forgotten.Hometown History uncovers the overlooked events, mysteries, and tragedies from small-town America that never made it into the textbooks. Meticulous research meets respectful storytelling in 20-minute episodes perfect for your morning coffee.From deadly disasters to hidden triumphs, each week explores a different community's untold chapter. No sensationalism. No filler. Just the surprising, forgotten stories that shaped the America we know today.For curious minds who believe history is happening everywhere—not just in the big cities.
HOSTED BY
Shane Waters
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Hometown History have?
Hometown History currently has 216 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Hometown History about?
Every hometown has a story worth preserving—and most have been forgotten.Hometown History uncovers the overlooked events, mysteries, and tragedies from small-town America that never made it into the textbooks. Meticulous research meets respectful storytelling in 20-minute episodes perfect for your...
How often does Hometown History release new episodes?
Hometown History publishes regularly with 216 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Hometown History?
You can listen to Hometown History on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Hometown History?
Hometown History is created and hosted by Shane Waters.
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