Hometown History

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 dow...

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 reac...

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 ...

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 towe...

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 atten...

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 climb...

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. Anothe...

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, stuck hard on the outer sandbar, just 500 yards from shore. The ship's bell. That's what woke them. The incessant staccato clat...

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 stone walls built to contain disasters. Then four blasts ripped through the mill in rapid succession. The sound reached Hartford, over 20 mile...

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 old, is teaching her first real class. 13 students, ages 6 to 14. And there's Frankie Gibbon in the back row, not paying attention to ...

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 something caught against the rocks near samples crossing. At first, he thinks it's driftwood. Then, he gets closer. A body. A woman, face do...

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, gone. The officers tried to rouse him, asked where he lived. Veklund managed to open his eyes. In a voice so weak they could bare...

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 something was quite wrong. Flies. Hundreds of them. Blackening the screen door, their buzzing audible from 20 feet away. Martinez sc...

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 for the stove. Inside the farmhouse, the elderly woman Laura had hired as a chaperone was waiting with a warning. Sherman ...

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. In the kitchen, by all accounts, five bodies are piled in the root cellar beneath a trapdoor. The mother, the oldest daughter, three yo...