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 1810 was the

interstate. If you were moving people or freight through the middle of the country you moved them on that

water, and Shawneetown was a place you had to stop. In 1816 the first bank in the Illinois Territory was

chartered there, run by a man named John Marshall out of his own log cabin and then the brick house he

built, which is still standing.

Then the river started coming for it. From eighteen eighty-four through nineteen thirty-seven, the town

kept building its wall higher. In eighteen eighty-four, the river passed through a gap in an unfinished

levee. In 1898 a finished one let go on a Sunday afternoon and drowned twenty-five people. In 1913 the

town put another hundred and thirty thousand dollars into making it taller. By the mid-1930s the wall was

built to hold back a sixty-foot river. Sixty feet of river, held off by packed earth, by people who had

three floods in living memory and nothing bigger than that to imagine.

Timeline of Events

1810: Shawneetown is laid out on the Ohio River, one of the oldest towns in Illinois.

1812: It becomes the seat of Gallatin County, loses the seat to Equality in 1826, and takes a quarter

century to get it back.

1816: The first bank in the Illinois Territory is chartered at Shawneetown.

1839 to 1841: The town breaks ground on a Greek Revival bank building reported to cost eighty thousand

dollars.

February 1884: The Ohio comes up and goes straight through the gap in an unfinished levee.

April 1898: A ten-foot section of the finished levee gives way onto Market Street on a Sunday afternoon,

and the break opens to nearly half a mile. Twenty-five people drown, including Sheriff Charles Galloway's

wife Sylvester and his daughters Dora and Mary, nineteen and twelve. About 143 houses are wrecked or float

off and more than a thousand people end up in state tents.

1913: Another flood, another round of damage, and another $130,000 into the levee.

January 24, 1937: A steamboat comes up from Memphis and takes more than five hundred people off, with the

river inches under the top of the wall.

January 1937: The Ohio crests at Shawneetown at 65.6 feet, about five and a half feet over the top of the

wall.

Historical Significance

There is a thing a river wall does that nobody puts in the county history. When it gets tall enough you

cannot see the river anymore. It is right there, a couple hundred yards off, and gone from your day. Kids

grow up on the Ohio and have to climb something to look at it. The wall stops being a defense, starts being

scenery, and then stops being anything at all. In 1937 the water came over the top and kept coming, and the

town, which sits low behind that wall, went under about fifteen feet. The bank stayed up; water climbed

two stories on it and left a mark on those columns you can still find today. Shawneetown had roughly four

hundred homes. When the water pulled back weeks later, twenty of them were fit to live in. The streets

were still there and the lots were still there. Nineteen houses out of every twenty standing on them were

beyond living in.

Sources

WPA Guide to Illinois

Hanneman Archive accounts of the 1898 levee break

Gallatin County historical records

National Register of Historic Places documentation, Shawneetown Bank

U.S. Geological Survey Ohio River gauge records

If you liked this: Episode 170, Ottawa, Illinois. Another Illinois town where the industry that built it

decided what its people were worth.

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

Episode 211 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 residents. Local

newspapers called him the Phantom Barber. He first struck on June 5, 1942, taking hair from two girls at

the Our Lady of Victories convent, eleven-year-old Mary Evelyn Briggs and twelve-year-old Edna Marie Hydel.

The attacks kept coming. Six-year-old Carol Peattie lost her blonde curls, and investigators found a sandy

footprint on the empty bed by her window. Mrs. R.E. Taylor woke to a sickening smell in the room, and

investigators suspected chloroform, while her family slept around her. Then the crimes turned violent, and

Terrell Heidelberg and his wife were beaten with an iron bar. Police arrested a 57-year-old chemist with

a German background named William A. Dolan, convicted him of attempted murder, and sentenced him to ten

years. He was never charged with a single hair-cutting incident. Dolan received a limited suspension of

his sentence after the polygraph, later made indefinite, with some accounts reporting a later pardon, and

the identity of the Phantom Barber was never established.

Timeline of Events

1938: Ingalls Shipbuilding is established along the Pascagoula River.

December 1941: Pearl Harbor brings a flood of federal wartime contracts to Ingalls.

Summer 1942: Pascagoula's population swells from roughly 4,900 to roughly 14,000.

June 5, 1942: The first attack. Mary Evelyn Briggs and Edna Marie Hydel have their hair cut at the convent.

June 8, 1942: The second attack. Carol Peattie's hair is taken and a sandy footprint is found on the empty

bed by the window.

June 13, 1942: Terrell Heidelberg and his wife are beaten with an iron bar.

Late June 1942: Mrs. R.E. Taylor wakes to a sickening smell in the room; investigators suspect chloroform.

August 14, 1942: Newspapers report William A. Dolan's arrest as the Phantom Barber.

1942: Dolan is convicted and sentenced to ten years.

About 1948: Governor Fielding Wright arranges a polygraph and Dolan is released.

About 1951: Wright's suspension is made indefinite; some accounts report Dolan was later pardoned by Governor

Hugh White.

Historical Significance

The Phantom Barber case sits where wartime paranoia, rapid social upheaval, and criminal justice failure

meet. Pascagoula's overnight transformation into a boomtown two or three times its size built the perfect

conditions for fear. Neighbors no longer recognized each other, night-shift workers left their families

alone in unfamiliar houses, and wartime anxiety was already running high. The panic reached ship production

itself, because workers refused to leave home for night shifts at Ingalls. Dolan's eventual pardon suggests

Mississippi came to acknowledge the conviction was wrong. No hair-cutting incident was ever reported again

after Dolan's imprisonment, and the case remains one of the strangest unsolved mysteries in American crime.

Sources

Mississippi Encyclopedia

Newspapers.com archives of 1942 Pascagoula and Jackson County coverage

National Park Service records on Gulf Coast wartime industry

Contemporary Ingalls Shipbuilding employment records

If you liked this: Episode 198, Carrollton, Mississippi. Another Mississippi story the official record

tried to file away quietly.

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

Episode 210 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 them employed by William

Butler Ogden's woodenware factory, the largest in the country. That night a firestorm driven by gale-force

winds consumed the town in about an hour. Superheated gases ignited buildings before the flames arrived.

Sand fused into glass. People's clothing caught fire as they ran.

The river offered the best chance of survival, though people died there too, and a few survived elsewhere.

Father Peter Pernin, a French-born Catholic priest, pushed a wagon carrying the church's sacred vessels

into the river and stood chest-deep in the water for hours while the town burned around him. His 1874

account, The Finger of God Is There, remains the most detailed firsthand narrative of the disaster.

Timeline of Events

Summer 1871: A severe drought grips the upper Midwest and small brush fires burn unchecked for weeks across

northeastern Wisconsin.

October 8, 1871, morning: The wind shifts to the southwest and accelerates. Scattered fires begin merging

across the region.

October 8, 1871, 10:00 PM: The firestorm strikes Peshtigo and destroys the entire town within minutes.

October 9, 1871, dawn: Peshtigo has ceased to exist. Every building is gone. Surrounding settlements

including Sugar Bush are devastated as well.

1874: Father Peter Pernin publishes his eyewitness account, preserving the most complete record of the

fire.

Historical Significance

The Peshtigo fire killed between 1,200 and 2,500 people in a single night, making it the deadliest fire

in American history. The exact toll will never be known, because entire families were erased with nobody

left to report them missing. A mass grave in the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery holds 350 unidentified men, women,

and children. The disaster still received almost no national attention. The telegraph lines through the

region had burned, and by the time word reached the outside world the Great Chicago Fire, which started

the same night and killed roughly 300 people, had taken the country's headlines and national attention.

Frances Fairchild of Wisconsin had already traveled to Chicago with aid and had to redirect some of it

north once the scale of the Peshtigo catastrophe became clear. In Peshtigo itself, the fire is remembered

as the disaster the rest of the country forgot., though real fire prevention policy took decades to arrive.

Today the Peshtigo Fire Museum preserves artifacts from that night, and the memory has been kept alive less

by national recognition than by the families who rebuilt on burned ground and refused to let their dead be

forgotten.

Sources

Father Peter Pernin, The Finger of God Is There, 1874

Peshtigo Fire Museum and Peshtigo Fire Cemetery records

Wisconsin Historical Society accounts of the October 1871 firestorm

If you liked this: Episode 202, Gainesville, Georgia. Another town erased in minutes by something nobody

saw coming.

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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 read like poetry, and meeting artists like Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange along the way. He shared a last camp with two sheepherders, who offered him mutton; he said he had plenty. He never came back.

In March 1935, a search party found his two burros penned behind a brush fence, healthy in Davis Gulch, a side canyon off the Escalante River. His camp was strangely incomplete: bedroll, cookware, paintings, and journals all missing. Carved into the rock wall above it was a single word and a year: NEMO 1934. Nemo is Latin for nobody. No body was ever found, and no conclusive evidence of what happened has ever surfaced. The desert simply closed behind him. In the ninety years since, Everett Ruess has become the patron saint of wanderers, of people who felt the pull of wild country so strongly they followed it past the point of return. His fate remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the American West.

Timeline of Events

March 28, 1914: Everett Ruess is born in Oakland, California, to Christopher and Stella Ruess.

Summer 1930: At sixteen he takes his first solo wilderness trip in the Sierra Nevada and comes home changed.

1931 to 1934: He makes four extended solo journeys through the desert Southwest and meets Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Maynard Dixon.

Mid-November 1934: He writes his last letter to his brother Waldo from Escalante, Utah, telling him he has not tired of the wilderness.

Mid-November 1934: A sheepherder is the last person to see him, heading into canyon country east of Escalante.

March 1935: A search party finds the burros, the camping gear, and NEMO 1934 carved in Davis Gulch. Everett is declared lost and presumed dead.

2009: DNA testing of remains found at Comb Ridge proves they are not Everett Ruess.

Historical Significance

Everett Ruess occupies a singular place in the literature and mythology of the American West. His letters and journals, published after his disappearance in On Desert Trails in 1940, influenced a generation of wilderness writers including Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Jon Krakauer. The NEMO inscription in Davis Gulch became an icon of the vanishing impulse, the idea that a person could walk into wild country and become part of it. The 2009 DNA investigation, which proved the bones found at Comb Ridge were not his, brought national attention back to the case and confirmed the mystery is still open. Davis Gulch itself was flooded by Lake Powell after Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963. The ground where Everett was last seen no longer exists above water.

Sources

Ruess family letters, published in On Desert Trails, 1940

David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess, 2011

Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory findings, 2009

If you liked this: Episode 185, Taos, New Mexico. Another Southwest mystery where the desert kept the answer.

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

Episode 208 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 them were three young men from Cleveland, Tennessee, in the first-class coach: William Steed, a thirty-year-old druggist, William Marshall, the twenty-two-year-old city recorder, and John Hardwick, thirty-three, whose father founded the Cleveland Woolen Mills. They were bound for New York to board a ship for Paris and the 1889 World's Fair. Their whole town had turned out on the platform to see them off.

That night a storm turned Wolf Creek into a churning brown river. At Blue Ridge station Conductor R. P. Johnson took a message off the wire: the track is flooded to Liberty, run with great care, there is great danger. The crew talked it over at Buford and went on east, because there was no easy way to turn a through train around. At about 1:25 in the morning on July 2, Train Number Two reached Newman's Fill, where the line crossed Wolf Creek on packed dirt over a culvert. One survivor called the dark Egyptian blackness. Engineer Patrick Donovan could not have seen the gap where solid ground had been a few hours earlier.

Timeline of Events

July 1, 1889, evening: Train Number Two leaves Roanoke running late, bound east through the mountains.

July 2, 1889, about 12:30 AM: Past Ironville, water is running over the rails. The train stops at Buford, then continues east, twenty-seven minutes behind schedule.

July 2, 1889, about 1:25 AM: Engine Number Thirty hits the washout at Newman's Fill. The locomotive drops into the creek bed and the wooden cars fold in behind it.

July 2, 1889, minutes later: Coal from the firebox and oil from the lamps set the split-open wooden coaches burning. Donovan, scalded by escaping steam, dies in the cab. He never left his post.

July 2, 1889, dawn: Nearly five hours pass before relief reaches the site. The telegraph lines are down and nobody is coming.

Afterward: Commissioner James C. Hill puts the cause on the track, not the crew. The culvert could not carry what the creek was pushing, and Donovan is cleared.

Historical Significance

At least eighteen people died and twenty-one more were hurt. The burning was so complete that most of the dead could never be named; recovery crews counted spinal columns out of the ash, and at least one passenger was never accounted for at all. Section master Tandy Jones, who knew every tie and culvert on his stretch, said afterward that he had been greatly surprised to hear an accident had happened at that culvert, because he regarded it as one of the safest on the line. That is the one the creek took. Major Henry N. Martin, a Civil War veteran who got out alive, said he had stood on the battlefield and watched his comrades fall like leaves in autumn and had never seen anything that curdled his blood the way that night did. W. J. Barksdale escaped and then stayed, working to free trapped passengers, telling the women who begged him to go that he would not leave until they were all safe. Steed, Marshall, and Hardwick never got past the Blue Ridge.

Sources

Lost at Thaxton survivor statements and recovery records

Commissioner James C. Hill's investigation report, 1889

Norfolk and Western Railway records

George C. Davis photograph of the wreck, Virginia Room digital collection

If you liked this: Episode 191, Deal Beach, New Jersey. Another mass-casualty disaster that vanished from public memory almost as fast as it happened.

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

Episode 207 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 wiring Bath Consolidated School with more than a thousand pounds of dynamite and military-surplus pyrotol. On May 18, 1927, he detonated the north wing at 8:45 AM, killing 38 children and 6 adults. The south wing charges never went off because of a faulty alarm clock mechanism, which spared 106 students sitting directly above 500 pounds of live explosives.

Kehoe also murdered his wife Nellie, destroyed his own farm with incendiary devices, and set off a truck bomb near the rescuers, killing Superintendent Emory Huyck, postmaster Cleo Clayton, and resident Glenn Smith. The community of Bath chose to rebuild the school on the same site. Among the families who returned was that of eight-year-old survivor Bernice Sterling, who had lost three siblings that morning.

Timeline of Events

July 1926: Andrew Kehoe is elected school board treasurer.

January 1927: Kehoe begins secretly wiring the school basement with explosives.

January to April 1927: He buys more than 1,000 pounds of dynamite and pyrotol from stores across three counties.

May 17, 1927: Kehoe sets all of the timing devices for the following morning.

May 18, 1927, 8:00 AM: Kehoe kills his wife Nellie.

May 18, 1927, 8:45 AM: The north wing of Bath Consolidated School detonates. The south wing charges fail.

May 18, 1927, 9:00 AM: The Kehoe farm is destroyed by incendiary devices.

May 18, 1927, 9:30 AM: Kehoe detonates a truck bomb near the rescuers, killing himself and three others.

May 19, 1927: More than 500 pounds of unexploded dynamite is found in the south wing.

September 1928: The new Bath School opens with enhanced safety protocols.

Historical Significance

The Bath School disaster remains the deadliest school attack in American history, worse than every incident that has followed it. Michigan wrote the first school building safety codes in direct response, covering basement security, access restrictions, and background checks for staff with building access. In 1994, at age 75, survivor Bernice Sterling testified before Congress about school safety. The Bath School Memorial Museum, established in 1975, preserves evidence including the original clock stopped at 8:45 AM. The community's cup and saucer tree, built with dishes salvaged from victims' homes, still stands as a place people travel to see. The last survivor died in 2018 at age 99.

Sources

Michigan State Police investigation records Bath school board minutes, 1926 to 1927 Store purchase receipts from Lansing, St. Johns, and Owosso Survivor testimony of Bernice Sterling, Congressional record, 1994 Bath School Memorial Museum archives

If you liked this: Episode 189, Ord, Nebraska. Another story of a schoolhouse at the center of a catastrophe, and the person who had to decide what to do next.

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

Episode 206 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 ran the entire facility. Behind the walls of the so-called hospital building, a prison physician named A.E. Rollins had rigged a hand-crank telephone to deliver electrical shocks to inmates strapped to an examination table. The prisoners called a short burst "a phone call." A sustained crank was "a long-distance call."

The device became known as the Tucker Telephone, and it operated for years without any outside investigation. Men died of unexplained cardiac arrest. Others carried nerve damage for life. It took an idealist superintendent named Tom Murton, a federal lawsuit called Holt v. Sarver, and a conservative judge willing to use the word "evil" to finally bring the system down, in a ruling that declared an entire state prison system unconstitutional for the first time in American history.

Timeline of Events

1916: Arkansas purchases Tucker Prison Farm, 4,500 acres of Delta bottomland intended for agricultural production using inmate labor.

1960s: The Tucker Telephone is in routine use under prison physician A.E. Rollins. At least nine inmates die of cardiac failure between 1964 and 1967.

January 1968: Governor Winthrop Rockefeller appoints reformer Tom Murton as prison superintendent. Murton discovers unmarked graves at Cummins Prison Farm and unearths skeletal remains showing evidence of violence.

October 1968: Inmates file Holt v. Sarver in federal court.

February 18, 1970: Judge J. Smith Henley rules the entire Arkansas prison system unconstitutional, a first in U.S. legal history.

Historical Significance

Holt v. Sarver transformed American corrections law. Before that ruling, federal courts largely treated prison conditions as a state matter and kept their hands off. Judge Henley's decision established that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment applied not just to individual acts but to entire systems of incarceration. The case set the legal foundation for decades of prison reform litigation across the country. The Tucker Telephone itself became a symbol of what happens when an institution operates without oversight, and it is still referenced in law school textbooks, criminal justice scholarship, and the 1980 film "Brubaker," starring Robert Redford, which drew directly from Tom Murton's experience.

Sources

Holt v. Sarver, 309 F. Supp. 362 (E.D. Ark. 1970), court transcripts Tom Murton, Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal (Grove Press, 1969) Arkansas State Archives photographic collection

If you liked this: Episode 204, Little Rock, Arkansas. Another Arkansas institution that hid what it did to the people in its custody.

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

Episode 205 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 mental illness but for alcoholism, epilepsy, poverty, old age, and conditions as vague as "emotional difficulty due to menopause." Most had no family to claim them. Most had no headstone. Most had no name left in any record the state still kept.

Shane Waters traces the full arc of this institution, from its hopeful founding in 1883 under the progressive Kirkbride Plan — which demanded sunlight, fresh air, and a maximum of 250 patients — to its collapse into a warehouse for the forgotten, where the patient census swelled past 5,000 in buildings designed for 1,750. Along the way, the asylum survived a devastating tornado in 1894, cycled through name changes meant to mask its failures, and forced patients into unpaid labor on a segregated farm. The story of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum is a story about what happens when a society decides some people are not worth treating — and eventually decides they are not worth remembering.

Timeline of Events

The history of institutional mental health care in Arkansas stretches across more than a century of ambition, neglect, and rediscovery.

1873: Arkansas legislators H.M. McVeigh and D.P. Baldwin introduce Act 66, appropriating $50,000 for a state asylum. Governor Elisha Baxter signs it into law on April 19.

1883: The Arkansas Lunatic Asylum opens on March 1 under Superintendent Dr. Chastaine Caldwell Forbes, with the first patient admitted days earlier by legislative order.

1894: A tornado destroys multiple wards of the South Wing on October 2, killing asylum physician J.T. Ingate and causing over $1 million in damage.

1934-1935: Patient census reaches 4,996 to 5,046 — nearly three patients for every bed in a facility designed for 1,750.

1963: The original Kirkbride asylum buildings are demolished. All traces of the structure vanish.

1975: Construction crews discover an estimated 3,000-4,000 bodies in unmarked graves. Roughly half are relocated to the Benton Services Center cemetery; an estimated 1,500-2,000 remain beneath government buildings and parking lots.

Historical Significance

The Arkansas Lunatic Asylum represents one of the most stark examples of institutional failure in American mental health history. What began as a progressive experiment in architectural healing — rooted in the Moral Management movement of Philippe Pinel and William Tuke — devolved into systematic overcrowding, forced labor, and mass anonymous burial. The 1975 discovery of thousands of unmarked graves beneath state-owned land forced a reckoning with how Arkansas treated its most vulnerable citizens for nearly a century. Today, researchers through the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum WordPress project and the Privett Family Photo Album are working to recover the names and stories of forgotten patients. The site along West Markham Street remains in use as state government offices, with a modest memorial standing over the one-acre plot where an estimated 1,500-2,000 souls still rest beneath the soil.

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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 horrifying: the men who wanted him dead would not risk shooting a man holding a baby. Marcum had made enemies of the most powerful political machine in eastern Kentucky, Judge James Hargis and Sheriff Ed Callahan, by challenging their stolen elections in open court. In a county where at least thirty political murders had already gone unpunished, Marcum was the last reformer standing.

Timeline of Events

The violence in Breathitt County, known as "Bloody Breathitt," stretched across decades of political warfare rooted in post-Civil War factionalism. Key dates in the Hargis-Marcum conflict include:

1901: legal challenge Hargis wins county judge and Callahan wins sheriff in a disputed election; Marcum takes the Fusionist

April 13, 1902: Hargis property Dr. B.D. Cox, an anti-Hargis physician, is killed by more than twenty buckshot wounds near the

July 1902: Town Marshal James Cockrell is shot from a courthouse window; Curtis Jett suspected

May 4, 1903: behind by Curtis Jett J.B. Marcum is assassinated in the Breathitt County Courthouse doorway, two shots from

August 1903: Frankfort Jett and accomplice Tom White convicted; life sentences at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in

February 6, 1908: Department Store Judge Hargis is shot and killed by his own son, Beach Hargis, inside the Hargis Brothers

May 4, 1912: to the day after Marcum's murder Ed Callahan is shot from ambush through the window of his store at Crockettsville, nine years

Historical Significance

The assassination of J.B. Marcum became a turning point for Breathitt County and for Kentucky's approach to political violence. The case drew national press coverage and forced Governor J.C.W. Beckham to deploy state militia troops, the third such deployment in the county's history. The subsequent trials, moved far from Jackson due to the impossibility of seating an impartial local jury, demonstrated both the depth of the region's corruption and the limits of legal reform in Appalachian Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth century. The Ballad of J.B. Marcum, recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1937 and preserved at the Library of Congress, transformed a courthouse murder into enduring folk memory. Today, the Breathitt County Museum at 329 Broadway Street in Jackson preserves the county's violent history alongside its Appalachian heritage, and the county that once could not insure a single building is known for its Honey Festival and for filling its entire World War I service quota with volunteers, no man drafted.

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

Episode 203 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 forever.

Gainesville, nestled in the Blue Ridge foothills, was thriving during the Great Depression. Known as the "Queen City of North Georgia's Mountains, " this manufacturing hub of nine thousand residents had managed to weather the economic crisis better than most American towns. Cotton mills, poultry plants, and garment factories provided steady work for families desperate for income. At the corner of West Broad and Maple Streets stood the Cooper Pants Factory, a brick structure built in 1893 where approximately 125 workers, mostly young women and girls, stitched trousers for meager wages that nonetheless kept families fed.

But the building had a fatal flaw: one staircase. One entrance. One exit. For 125 people.

The morning of Monday, April 6th began like any other. Sewing machines hummed to life. Thread was loaded. Workers settled into their shifts with no knowledge that a meteorological catastrophe was forming in the mountains to the west. Just the day before, an F5 tornado had devastated Tupelo, Mississippi, killing over 216 people, the fourth deadliest tornado in American history. The same storm system that spawned that destruction was now pushing eastward, producing a dozen tornadoes across the Southeast in less than twenty-four hours.

Gainesville had no warning system. No sirens. No weather radar. Two separate storm cells were forming in the hills west of town, moving inexorably toward each other on a collision course with fate.

Among those who would experience the disaster firsthand was C.F. "Stubby" Fiammett, a tobacco salesman attempting to drive to town when the unthinkable happened. As the two tornadoes merged directly over the city, the Cooper Pants Factory, that building with one staircase for 125 people, became a death trap. The structure collapsed in on itself, trapping workers under tons of brick and twisted steel. Fiammett found himself pinned under the wreckage, conscious and listening as the screams of trapped factory workers echoed through the ruins around him. For nearly three hours, he lay there, trapped, as the sounds of human suffering grew fainter. Not because rescue was arriving, but because the women were dying.

This episode explores the meteorological perfect storm, the architectural failures that amplified the tragedy, and the survivors' harrowing accounts of those three minutes of hell. We'll examine how this single disaster forced America to completely rethink building safety codes, fire exits, and structural standards. The Gainesville tornado became a watershed moment in American disaster history, proof that sometimes it takes unimaginable tragedy to force systemic change.

Join us as we walk the streets of this Georgia town and uncover the human stories buried in the rubble of industrial America. This is Hometown History: where local stories changed the world.

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

Episode 202 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 the dead, sending refugees fleeing north only to be met with armed guards, locked gates, and threats of gunfire. Of the roughly fourteen thousand people who stayed, one in three would contract yellow fever. Four hundred and twenty-seven would never recover.

Jacksonville in 1888 was no ordinary Southern city. A progressive coalition of working-class whites and African Americans had swept the previous year's election, seating five Black council members, a Black municipal judge, and twenty-three Black police officers. The epidemic shattered that experiment in biracial governance. As elected officials fled, civilian leaders stepped forward. Colonel J.J. Daniel organized the Jacksonville Auxiliary Sanitary Association, hiring hundreds of doctors and nurses before the fever claimed his own life. Dr. Alexander Darnes, Jacksonville's first African American physician, stayed to treat patients from both communities. A woman known as Mrs. A.B. Anthony went house to house delivering milk to the sick at her own expense.

Timeline of Key Events

The 1888 Jacksonville yellow fever epidemic unfolded with terrifying speed across five months, from a single diagnosisto a city-wide catastrophe.

July 28, 1888: R.D. McCormick diagnosed as first confirmed yellow fever case

August 10, 1888: Board of Health officially declares epidemic; Jacksonville Auxiliary Sanitary Association formed

September 3, 1888: Acting Mayor J.W. Archibald evacuates the city

Late September 1888: Peak week, 944 new cases and 70 deaths in seven days

November 25, 1888: First hard frost kills mosquitoes and effectively ends the epidemic

December 15, 1888: National and state quarantines officially lifted

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

Episode 201 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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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 around. They did what they were told. They turned back, and the cars behind them kept coming. In that truck bed, gripping the wooden side rails, a 29-year-old woman feels the September heat press against her skin.

TIMELINE
1927: By 1927, the Loray mill had introduced the stretch-out system, slashing its workforce from $3,500 to $2,200 while demanding the same output.
1929: On March 25, 1929, five workers at the Loray mill were fired for attending a union meeting.
1979: On September 14, 1979, the 50th anniversary of her death, a group of North Carolina women placed a permanent AFL-CIO marker on Ella May Wiggins' grave.
1986: In 1986, North Carolina proposed a historical marker near the Loray Mill.
2013: In 2013, after 27 years of resistance, a revised historical marker was approved.
2017: Wiley Cash, in his 2017 Southern Book Prize winning novel, The Last Ballad, brought Ella Mae's story to a generation that had never heard it.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The story of Bessemer City is a reminder that the events that shaped America didn't always happen in the biggest cities. What unfolded here left marks on the community that are still visible today. The full story is more complicated, and more human, than the version most people know.

Episode 200 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

If you liked this: Episode 168 (Hickory, North Carolina)

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 go to church. William and Ida Bagley own 60 acres. Grant Smith preaches on Sunday. Children walk to school along dirt paths worn smooth by generations of feet.

TIMELINE
1912: 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.
1913: In February 1913, a grand jury drops all charges against Tony Howell.
1920: The 1920 census recorded 30 black residents, where there had been more than a thousand.
1956: In 1956, the sluice gates close.
1987: By 1987, Forsyth County's population reached 40,000.
1994: In 1994, the invisible empire of the KKK is forced to dissolve.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The story of Forsyth County is a reminder that the events that shaped America didn't always happen in the biggest cities. What unfolded here left marks on the community that are still visible today. The full story is more complicated, and more human, than the version most people know.

Episode 199 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 delivery. The doorways narrow, someone's coming out as they're going in. Bodies shift, a jug tilts, and thick brown molasses drips down a white man's sleeve. The brothers stop, apologize.

TIMELINE
1834: Founded in 1834 and named for Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland.
1860: By 1860, just before the Civil War, the county's population was about 22,000 people.
1865: Between 1865 and 1950, historians suggest there were dozens of mass racial terror events in the American South.
1880: By 1880, Carroll County was still roughly 56% black.
2019: In 2019, Mississippi Freedom Trail installed a historical marker on the courthouse square.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The story of Carrollton is a reminder that the events that shaped America didn't always happen in the biggest cities. What unfolded here left marks on the community that are still visible today. The full story is more complicated, and more human, than the version most people know.

Episode 198 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 yourself and baby, Miss C. She passes the candy around. Her sister Ida takes one. Her daughter takes one. Friends gathered on the porch reach in. The evening is warm. The chocolate is sweet.

TIMELINE
1887: From 1887 to 1891, and a former attorney general of Delaware, Pennington was one of the most respected men in Kent County.
1895: Around 1895, Dunning met Cordelia near Golden Gate Park.
1896: In 1896, Mary, devastated by the infidelity and financial ruin, packed up and returned to Dover with their young daughter to live with her father.
1898: Early 1898, the Spanish-American War was coming, and the Associated Press needed war correspondence.
1906: After the 1906 earthquake destroyed the county jail, Cordelia was transferred to San Quentin.
1907: John Preston Dunning, his career destroyed by the trial revelations, died in 1907 in Philadelphia, penniless, and at 43.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The story of Dover is a reminder that the events that shaped America didn't always happen in the biggest cities. What unfolded here left marks on the community that are still visible today. The full story is more complicated, and more human, than the version most people know.

Episode 197 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. But some patients found another use for the tower they had built with their own hands. They climbed it one last time. In 1938, officials sealed the door shut. At the base of that tower sits a cemetery holding more than 650 burials, many marked only with numbers.

This is the story of Anna Hunt Marsh, the daughter of Vermont's Lieutenant Governor, who watched her husband's patient die from ice water submersion and forced opium comas in 1806. She spent twenty-eight years turning that grief into action. When she died in 1834, her will contained a single sentence that would change Brattleboro forever: ten thousand dollars left for the purpose of building a hospital for the insane in Windham County. She became the first woman in American history to found a mental health institution.

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 everything. The Vermont State Asylum for the Insane. Four stories of red brick, 200 windows catching the afternoon light, italianate towers that look, from certain angles, almost welcoming.

TIMELINE
1891: The phrase sounds enlightened for 1891.
1925: From 1925 to 1936, the hospital participated in Vermont's eugenics program, sterilizing patients deemed unfit to reproduce.
1975: In 1975, the patient population drops below 600 for the first time in 50 years.
2013: In 2013, the University of Vermont's Eugenics Survey Project publishes new research on the Vermont State Hospital.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The story of Waterbury is a reminder that the events that shaped America didn't always happen in the biggest cities. What unfolded here left marks on the community that are still visible today. The full story is more complicated, and more human, than the version most people know.

Episode 195 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

If you liked this: Episode 184 (East Montpelier, Vermont)

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 around a tannery on Buffalo Stream. He knows the place. Maybe a hundred people live there. Workers, families, children who attend the schoolhouse at the north end of town. But when he arrives, something is wrong.

TIMELINE
1879: In 1879, a company called F. Shaw & Brothers established what they called a Bark Extract Works.
1880: By 1880, census records show just 10 people living there.
1883: In 1883 money, that's an almost incomprehensible sum.
1890: By 1890, Riceville had exploded to 136 residents.
1898: Two years later, in 1898, James Rice and his brothers Francis X and John took full control, forming the Hancock Leather Company.
1900: By 1900, census records painted a detailed picture.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The story of Riceville is a reminder that the events that shaped America didn't always happen in the biggest cities. What unfolded here left marks on the community that are still visible today. The full story is more complicated, and more human, than the version most people know.

Episode 194 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 lighthouse keeper, stands with his wife Mabel, his 12-year-old son Edward, and three neighbors who came seeking shelter. They'd climbed upstairs when the water started rising.

TIMELINE
1869: New England had experienced no major hurricanes since 1869, 69 years earlier.
1905: Among them is Martin Thompson, the former keeper, a 70-year-old Norwegian immigrant who'd served at this ferry station from 1905 to 1933.
1961: The lighthouse was automated in 1961.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The story of Prudence Island is a reminder that the events that shaped America didn't always happen in the biggest cities. What unfolded here left marks on the community that are still visible today. The full story is more complicated, and more human, than the version most people know.

Episode 193 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

If you liked this: Episode 192 (Watch Hill, Rhode Island)

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 expect from old money families who've summered here for generations. Someone mentions that the sea looks restless today. Another guest points to a strange yellow light hanging over the water.

TIMELINE
1938: By 1938, this exclusive summer retreat had catered to wealthy New York families for nearly half a century.
1945: In 1945, seven years after the hurricane, the Watch Hill Fire District purchased Napotree Point for $10,000.
1966: In 1966, Providence completed the Fox Point hurricane barrier.

WHY THIS MATTERS
The story of Watch Hill is a reminder that the events that shaped America didn't always happen in the biggest cities. What unfolded here left marks on the community that are still visible today. The full story is more complicated, and more human, than the version most people know.

Episode 192 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

If you liked this: Episode 171 (Exeter, Rhode Island)

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: https://redcircle.com/privacy