Hometown History

On April 22, 1920, someone entered a farmhouse three miles north of Turtle Lake, North Dakota, armed with a shotgun and a hatchet. By morning, eight people lay dead—seven members of the Wolf family and their teenage hired hand. Only eight-month-old Emma Wolf survived, left crying in her crib for two days while her family's bodies grew cold around her.

The Wolf family were German-Russian immigrants, part of a wave of settlers who...

On July 5, 1943, just hours after Fourth of July celebrations had ended, the residents of Boise City, Oklahoma woke to the sound of explosions. Bombs were falling from the sky, and in the chaos, terrified citizens assumed the worst—that America was under attack. What they didn't know was that the bombs raining down on their tiny Panhandle town weren't coming from Germany or Japan. They were coming from the United States Arm...

In February 1849, an enslaved sawmill worker named Appling approached his owner with an extraordinary proposal: he would murder Martin Posey's wife Matilda in exchange for a promise of freedom. What followed exposed the brutal mechanics of what historians call "criminal bargains"—informal contracts between enslavers and enslaved people that the legal system barely acknowledged.

Martin Posey, a man of modest origins who m...

In 1896, a five-year-old boy in Hagerstown, Indiana, lost his sight in a workshop accident. Doctors couldn't save his vision, and by age seven, Ralph Teetor would never see again. What happened next defied every expectation of that era—an age when blind children were typically institutionalized and trained only for basket-weaving.

Instead, Ralph's parents raised him as if nothing had changed. They let him explore the machine...

In the early hours of January 18, 1884, the passenger steamer City of Columbus struck the jagged underwater rocks of Devil's Bridge off Gay Head, Massachusetts—now called Aquinnah—sending 103 people to their deaths within sight of the shore they could see but never reach. This maritime catastrophe remains the deadliest shipwreck in New England history for the nineteenth century, a tragedy that exposed fatal gaps in passenger sa...

Episode Summary

In 1931, seventeen-year-old Dewey Flack stepped off a train in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, carrying a one-way ticket and a promise to send money home to his family. Two weeks later, he was dead—his lungs filled with crystalline silica dust so pure it turned them to stone. His death certificate said pneumonia. It was a lie.

Dewey was one of approximately 764 workers who died during construction of the Hawks ...

The Story

In the depths of the Great Depression, when unemployment in West Virginia topped 25% and families struggled to afford even basic necessities, something remarkable happened in Wheeling. Steel workers—machinists, crane operators, stenographers—became national radio celebrities. Their show, "It's Wheeling Steel," reached millions of Americans coast to coast and proved that working-class people weren't just aud...

On August 3, 1915, a wall of water tore through downtown Erie, Pennsylvania, at twenty-five miles per hour, destroying three hundred buildings and killing thirty-six to forty people in the city's deadliest disaster. The Mill Creek Flood wasn't an act of God—it was the predictable result of a choice made by a growing American city that buried a powerful creek beneath culverts and ignored repeated warnings.

For decades, Erie b...

On the night of August 1, 1946, hundreds of World War II veterans laid siege to the McMinn County jail in Athens, Tennessee. Armed with rifles, Thompson submachine guns, and dynamite, they surrounded the brick building where corrupt county officials had locked themselves inside with stolen ballot boxes. What followed was six hours of sustained gunfire, three dynamite explosions that flipped police cruisers and collapsed the jail...

The Wealthiest People Per Capita in the World Were Being Murdered for Their Money.

In the early 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma drove Pierce-Arrow automobiles, built terra-cotta mansions, and employed white chauffeurs. Oil discovered beneath their reservation made them spectacularly wealthy—each tribal member received quarterly royalty payments that reached $3,350 by 1925 (equivalent to over $60,000 today). National n...

Between 1866 and 1969, the Kingdom and later State of Hawai'i sent over eight thousand people diagnosed with Hansen's disease—then known as leprosy—to permanent exile on the Kalaupapa peninsula on the island of Moloka'i. This breathtaking but isolated landscape, surrounded by the tallest sea cliffs on Earth, became both a prison and, unexpectedly, a community. The vast majority of those exiled were Native Hawaiian, torn...

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 hidden and distributed to local plantations before the ship was burned and sunk to destroy the evidence. But this story doesn't end with e...

On a cold March morning in 1892, five men gathered at Chestnut Hill Baptist Church cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island, to open a family crypt. Inside lay the body of Mercy Lena Brown, who had died just two months earlier from consumption—tuberculosis. What happened next became one of the most documented cases of vampire folklore in American history. Mercy's body appeared strangely preserved in the frozen crypt, and when examined,...

In 1922, a dream factory opened in Ottawa, Illinois, offering young women exceptional wages to paint luminous watch dials with a miracle element called radium. The Radium Dial Company promised these "ghost girls" that the glowing paint coating their hands, faces, and clothes was not only safe but healthy—that it would give them a vibrant rosy complexion. They believed they were the luckiest women alive, working as artists w...

On June 10, 1897, the Ringling Brothers circus arrived in Wahpeton, North Dakota, transforming the small frontier town's ordinary morning into an extraordinary day of anticipation and wonder. As townspeople gathered to watch exotic animals unload from circus train cars, local children—including twelve-year-old Edward Williams—volunteered to help raise the massive circus tent in exchange for free show tickets. But beneath gather...

In the summer of 1944, as World War II raged overseas and medical resources stretched thin, a deadly polio outbreak swept through western North Carolina. When Charlotte's hospitals reached capacity and turned away desperate families, the small city of Hickory faced an impossible choice: watch children suffer without treatment, or attempt something unprecedented. What happened next would become known as the Miracle of Hickory—a ...

In 1880, Wabash, Indiana became the first city in the world to light its streets with electricity—earning gasps of wonder and cries of "miracle!" But by the 1970s, like downtowns across America, Wabash's Main Street was dying. Storefronts boarded up. Street lights flickering over empty sidewalks. Suburban malls had won.

Then something unexpected happened. Instead of accepting defeat, Wabash fought back. Through grassroot...