February 2, 2023 • 10 mins
Sometimes a thing is important because of how it's built, while other items are important because of the "why". Both options, though, deserve a place in the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
(00:27):
of Curiosities. Oftentimes, when people die, we erect a lasting
tribute to their memory. It could be a headstone in
a graveyard, or a small shrine in our home, or
even a statue in a park. Every person, famous or not,
(00:48):
affects the world around them, for better or for worse,
and those who have left their mark deserve to be remembered.
But sometimes we don't get it right the first time,
and the way we honor someone we lost needs to
do over. It started with a mob, but not an
angry mob, and inspired one. The people of Boonsboro, Maryland,
had all congregated on July four, eight seven, in the
(01:09):
town square with one job to build a monument. Two
years earlier, the Maryland General Assembly had voted to fund
the project with money earned through the state's lottery program.
Many initiatives were given budgets that way, with players buying
tickets printed with numbers on them, just as they do today.
The structure was to be made of stone and rise
to the sky like a finger pointing towards the heavens.
(01:31):
The people chose a perfect spot for their creation in
the nearby woods and got to work all day. They
gathered stones and stacked them, creating a base measuring fifty
four feet in circumference. On top of that sat a
tower fifteen feet tall. Halfway through the day, a local
reverend delivered an impassioned speech to keep the builders motivated.
(01:52):
They must have worked too, because they had finished fifty
percent of the tower by four pm. With the day's
work complete, someone stood up and read the Declaration of
Independence to the crowd. Three veterans of the Revolutionary War
then fired their rifles in salute. It was a day
of celebration, but the rest of the tower would have
to wait until a few months later, as most of
(02:13):
the workmen were going to be busy until then. Everyone
returned in September and construction was finally completed. By the
time it was done, the Boonsboro Tower measured thirty feet high,
a testament not just to the man they were honoring,
but to their patriotism and work ethic as well. According
to William Bell, a journalist with the town's Torchlight newspaper,
(02:33):
Boonsboro citizens were filled with a spirit of zeal and
ardor so much so that it didn't matter that the
tower wasn't precise and its measurements or particularly good looking.
It was sturdy and made with the best of intentions.
Bell went on to write, we do not calculate that,
when finished, it will give this town immortal glory, but
(02:54):
we do sincerely hope that it will be the means
of stirring up the fading gratitude of the people. Unfortunately,
that gratitude didn't last long. The tower had been built
with dry laid stone, meaning it lacked mortar to bind
the masonry together. The monument was mostly destroyed by the
time the Civil War had begun. Union soldiers used the
(03:14):
small portion remaining as a signal station. After Confederate troops
severed their telegraph lines. Someone would stand on top of
the tower's ruins and wave flags in different formations to
convey secret messages to their allies. It wouldn't be restored
until eighteen eighty two, when a local organization raised the
funds necessary to fix it up, but they did more
(03:35):
than repair it, and they upgraded it. The structure now
boasted whitewashed walls and a lookout tower on top that
was made of steel. Sadly, it wasn't enough to keep
the monument from falling into disrepair yet again. A little
over twenty years later, the tower suffered from a lightning
strike so severe that half of it turned to rubble.
(03:56):
A rumor began to circulate around town that a father
had used dynamite to blow up the monument because his
daughters kept meeting boys there behind his back. A second
restoration commenced in the nineteen thirties, just over one years
after the structure was first built. The land was then
bought by a local historical society and turned into a
state park in nineteen thirty four. As for the monument itself,
(04:18):
it was rebuilt with cement and mortar, designed to look
like it did after it was first completed in nineteen
just a whole lot stronger. But why was so much
money and effort spent on preserving this one stone structure?
Why was it so important? Because it was built in
nineteen seven to honor the United States first President George Washington,
(04:41):
which means that the Boonsboro Tower was the first ever
Washington monument, built five decades earlier than the gleaming white
Obelisque in Washington, d c. That everyone knows today. The
(05:07):
sun glared overhead as the two gun slingers stepped into
the road poised to fire at each other. It was hot,
with barely a breeze as crowds watched with bated breath
for the battle to begin. It was noon in Palisade, Nevada,
and the locals were about to do what they did
best perform. If you visit Palisade today, there isn't much there.
(05:28):
The town was in Eureka County in northeastern Nevada, like
so many towns in the Western front Here, though, it
was formulated, plotted, and raised by the railroad companies that
controlled large portions of westward expansion Central Pacific Railroad to
be specific. The possibility of a railroad that connected the
East and the West coasts was proposed in the eighteen forties.
(05:49):
Not one to let those pisky things like treaties and
territorial rights stand in their way, railroad executives began petitioning
Congress that's August body refused to sanction the plan for
several years until the Railroad Act of eighteen sixty to
finally put full government support behind the Transcontinental Railroad. The
Central Pacific Railroad Company of California would meet the newly
(06:11):
created Union Pacific Railroad in the middle of the country.
Construction began in eighteen sixty three, using poor labor practices
and underpaid labor, largely immigrants from China and Ireland. The
government and railroad companies sat down and, in conjunction with
the Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two, plotted out where
railroad stations would be and the towns that would surround them.
(06:33):
So many towns were raised on the frontier, and all
of them were a gamble. It was a question of
risk and reward. Would this little community succeed or die
in the face of all that hostile environment, the tough land,
and crippling economic conditions that would be thrown at them.
The cycle of boom and bust was kick started by
gold fever in the eighteen forties. Towns seemed to rise
(06:55):
and fall overnight as news of gold spread across the
largely unexplored western ontier. Settlers looking for a better life
quickly established new towns, and then railroads moved in, which
brings us back to Palisade. It was founded in eighteen
sixty eight to be a stop on the Central Pacific Railroad,
which would help bring people to and from Nevada and
transport the wealth from the nearby silver mines. As the
(07:18):
town grew and as more people began traveling to San
Francisco or Chicago, Palisade became a convenient rest stop, and
then a funny thing started to happen. Slowly, but surely,
Stories started to trickle back east from letters sent by
loved ones, columns and newspapers, and telegrams of the bizarre
experiences the wild West had to offer. As the West
(07:38):
grew thick with settlers and railroads became more common, so
did stories of bank robberies, train thefts, and outlaws who
seemed to be roaming the territories by the dozen. These
stories took on a whole new life with the creation
of the dime Store novel in the eighteen sixties. These
novels were, in a word, lured. They over exaggerated stories
of cowboys, explorers, and bandits, and with the increase in
(08:01):
literacy after the Civil War, the books flew off the shelves.
Soon it wasn't just settlers and their families heading west.
There were tourists going to visit friends and family members
out there, hoping to see some of the excitement they've
been promised. Cowboys and gunfights and wolves and lawlessness. But
they weren't getting any of that, and it turned out
the wild West wasn't nearly as wild as visitors had
(08:23):
been led to believe. The people of Palisade noticed the
grumbles of discontent by those stepping off the trains at
their station and complaining at lunch in their restaurants. As
you might imagine, no one wanted to lose the revenue
that was brought in by the travelers, and while they
were pretty sure that people weren't going to stop coming,
no one wanted to test that theory. So the locals
came up with a plan to give them exactly what
(08:45):
they wanted. In the early eighteen seventies, when visitors rolled
into Palisade, they could expect to see lawmen and outlaws
having shootouts, watching bodies hit the floor, seeing daring escapes
from bank robberies, and anything else that could say their
morbid curiosity. It was a pretty impressive operation, made even
more so because the whole town was in on it.
(09:07):
They used blanks during gun battles, animal blood from the
slaughterhouse for their grizzly death scenes, and even worked with
the local native peoples to perform raids. All of this
law and order hoop Law and Palisade didn't even have
their own sheriff. Over the course of these re enactments,
there were more people killed in Palisade than actually lived there,
and none of the travelers noticed that they were never
(09:28):
targeted by these ruthless outlaws. These performances went on for
three years and entertained thousands with the drama that tourists
expected to see. Slowly, fewer and fewer people passed through Palisade,
and like so many other boom towns on the Western frontier,
it became a ghost town not long after the railroad
closed in the nineteen thirties. After that, the buildings disappeared,
(09:49):
and all that was left was the land. No more
was ever heard from Palisade and their outlaws, well, except
for a local legend about an attempt to assassinate President
Hoover with dynamites in ninety two. But friends, I think
that's a curious story for another time. I hope you've
(10:11):
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
(10:33):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Ye
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
(00:27):
of Curiosities. Oftentimes, when people die, we erect a lasting
tribute to their memory. It could be a headstone in
a graveyard, or a small shrine in our home, or
even a statue in a park. Every person, famous or not,
(00:48):
affects the world around them, for better or for worse,
and those who have left their mark deserve to be remembered.
But sometimes we don't get it right the first time,
and the way we honor someone we lost needs to
do over. It started with a mob, but not an
angry mob, and inspired one. The people of Boonsboro, Maryland,
had all congregated on July four, eight seven, in the
(01:09):
town square with one job to build a monument. Two
years earlier, the Maryland General Assembly had voted to fund
the project with money earned through the state's lottery program.
Many initiatives were given budgets that way, with players buying
tickets printed with numbers on them, just as they do today.
The structure was to be made of stone and rise
to the sky like a finger pointing towards the heavens.
(01:31):
The people chose a perfect spot for their creation in
the nearby woods and got to work all day. They
gathered stones and stacked them, creating a base measuring fifty
four feet in circumference. On top of that sat a
tower fifteen feet tall. Halfway through the day, a local
reverend delivered an impassioned speech to keep the builders motivated.
(01:52):
They must have worked too, because they had finished fifty
percent of the tower by four pm. With the day's
work complete, someone stood up and read the Declaration of
Independence to the crowd. Three veterans of the Revolutionary War
then fired their rifles in salute. It was a day
of celebration, but the rest of the tower would have
to wait until a few months later, as most of
(02:13):
the workmen were going to be busy until then. Everyone
returned in September and construction was finally completed. By the
time it was done, the Boonsboro Tower measured thirty feet high,
a testament not just to the man they were honoring,
but to their patriotism and work ethic as well. According
to William Bell, a journalist with the town's Torchlight newspaper,
(02:33):
Boonsboro citizens were filled with a spirit of zeal and
ardor so much so that it didn't matter that the
tower wasn't precise and its measurements or particularly good looking.
It was sturdy and made with the best of intentions.
Bell went on to write, we do not calculate that,
when finished, it will give this town immortal glory, but
(02:54):
we do sincerely hope that it will be the means
of stirring up the fading gratitude of the people. Unfortunately,
that gratitude didn't last long. The tower had been built
with dry laid stone, meaning it lacked mortar to bind
the masonry together. The monument was mostly destroyed by the
time the Civil War had begun. Union soldiers used the
(03:14):
small portion remaining as a signal station. After Confederate troops
severed their telegraph lines. Someone would stand on top of
the tower's ruins and wave flags in different formations to
convey secret messages to their allies. It wouldn't be restored
until eighteen eighty two, when a local organization raised the
funds necessary to fix it up, but they did more
(03:35):
than repair it, and they upgraded it. The structure now
boasted whitewashed walls and a lookout tower on top that
was made of steel. Sadly, it wasn't enough to keep
the monument from falling into disrepair yet again. A little
over twenty years later, the tower suffered from a lightning
strike so severe that half of it turned to rubble.
(03:56):
A rumor began to circulate around town that a father
had used dynamite to blow up the monument because his
daughters kept meeting boys there behind his back. A second
restoration commenced in the nineteen thirties, just over one years
after the structure was first built. The land was then
bought by a local historical society and turned into a
state park in nineteen thirty four. As for the monument itself,
(04:18):
it was rebuilt with cement and mortar, designed to look
like it did after it was first completed in nineteen
just a whole lot stronger. But why was so much
money and effort spent on preserving this one stone structure?
Why was it so important? Because it was built in
nineteen seven to honor the United States first President George Washington,
(04:41):
which means that the Boonsboro Tower was the first ever
Washington monument, built five decades earlier than the gleaming white
Obelisque in Washington, d c. That everyone knows today. The
(05:07):
sun glared overhead as the two gun slingers stepped into
the road poised to fire at each other. It was hot,
with barely a breeze as crowds watched with bated breath
for the battle to begin. It was noon in Palisade, Nevada,
and the locals were about to do what they did
best perform. If you visit Palisade today, there isn't much there.
(05:28):
The town was in Eureka County in northeastern Nevada, like
so many towns in the Western front Here, though, it
was formulated, plotted, and raised by the railroad companies that
controlled large portions of westward expansion Central Pacific Railroad to
be specific. The possibility of a railroad that connected the
East and the West coasts was proposed in the eighteen forties.
(05:49):
Not one to let those pisky things like treaties and
territorial rights stand in their way, railroad executives began petitioning
Congress that's August body refused to sanction the plan for
several years until the Railroad Act of eighteen sixty to
finally put full government support behind the Transcontinental Railroad. The
Central Pacific Railroad Company of California would meet the newly
(06:11):
created Union Pacific Railroad in the middle of the country.
Construction began in eighteen sixty three, using poor labor practices
and underpaid labor, largely immigrants from China and Ireland. The
government and railroad companies sat down and, in conjunction with
the Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two, plotted out where
railroad stations would be and the towns that would surround them.
(06:33):
So many towns were raised on the frontier, and all
of them were a gamble. It was a question of
risk and reward. Would this little community succeed or die
in the face of all that hostile environment, the tough land,
and crippling economic conditions that would be thrown at them.
The cycle of boom and bust was kick started by
gold fever in the eighteen forties. Towns seemed to rise
(06:55):
and fall overnight as news of gold spread across the
largely unexplored western ontier. Settlers looking for a better life
quickly established new towns, and then railroads moved in, which
brings us back to Palisade. It was founded in eighteen
sixty eight to be a stop on the Central Pacific Railroad,
which would help bring people to and from Nevada and
transport the wealth from the nearby silver mines. As the
(07:18):
town grew and as more people began traveling to San
Francisco or Chicago, Palisade became a convenient rest stop, and
then a funny thing started to happen. Slowly, but surely,
Stories started to trickle back east from letters sent by
loved ones, columns and newspapers, and telegrams of the bizarre
experiences the wild West had to offer. As the West
(07:38):
grew thick with settlers and railroads became more common, so
did stories of bank robberies, train thefts, and outlaws who
seemed to be roaming the territories by the dozen. These
stories took on a whole new life with the creation
of the dime Store novel in the eighteen sixties. These
novels were, in a word, lured. They over exaggerated stories
of cowboys, explorers, and bandits, and with the increase in
(08:01):
literacy after the Civil War, the books flew off the shelves.
Soon it wasn't just settlers and their families heading west.
There were tourists going to visit friends and family members
out there, hoping to see some of the excitement they've
been promised. Cowboys and gunfights and wolves and lawlessness. But
they weren't getting any of that, and it turned out
the wild West wasn't nearly as wild as visitors had
(08:23):
been led to believe. The people of Palisade noticed the
grumbles of discontent by those stepping off the trains at
their station and complaining at lunch in their restaurants. As
you might imagine, no one wanted to lose the revenue
that was brought in by the travelers, and while they
were pretty sure that people weren't going to stop coming,
no one wanted to test that theory. So the locals
came up with a plan to give them exactly what
(08:45):
they wanted. In the early eighteen seventies, when visitors rolled
into Palisade, they could expect to see lawmen and outlaws
having shootouts, watching bodies hit the floor, seeing daring escapes
from bank robberies, and anything else that could say their
morbid curiosity. It was a pretty impressive operation, made even
more so because the whole town was in on it.
(09:07):
They used blanks during gun battles, animal blood from the
slaughterhouse for their grizzly death scenes, and even worked with
the local native peoples to perform raids. All of this
law and order hoop Law and Palisade didn't even have
their own sheriff. Over the course of these re enactments,
there were more people killed in Palisade than actually lived there,
and none of the travelers noticed that they were never
(09:28):
targeted by these ruthless outlaws. These performances went on for
three years and entertained thousands with the drama that tourists
expected to see. Slowly, fewer and fewer people passed through Palisade,
and like so many other boom towns on the Western frontier,
it became a ghost town not long after the railroad
closed in the nineteen thirties. After that, the buildings disappeared,
(09:49):
and all that was left was the land. No more
was ever heard from Palisade and their outlaws, well, except
for a local legend about an attempt to assassinate President
Hoover with dynamites in ninety two. But friends, I think
that's a curious story for another time. I hope you've
(10:11):
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
(10:33):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Ye
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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