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**Hometown History**

Discover the untold stories hidden in your own backyard with Hometown History. We bring to life the forgotten events and local legends that never made it into the textbooks. Each episode uncovers the mysteries and pivotal moments that shaped small towns across the nation. Join us as we delve deep into the past to reveal the history you didn't know existed. Let's explore the hidden chapters of history, one hometown at a time.

Latest Episodes:

Havre, Montana: The Secret Tunnel Empire Beneath the Streets Oct 13, 2026

Show notes

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 of smoke. The rush of

air lit what had been smoldering below, and it went east through the block, taking the Hotel Havre and the

Metropolitan, then jumped the street. Great Falls put Engine 151 on the line with a tank car of water and

covered the distance fifty minutes faster than the scheduled passenger run. Nearly sixty buildings were

gone. Not one person died.

In February the city council ordered all new downtown construction to be brick or stone. The wooden frontier

town was finished. But the owners were not going to sit in a Montana winter waiting on brick walls, so they

dropped into their own basements. Steam tunnels already ran under the streets and Shorty Young had already

dug passages between his own buildings. They tied into all of it and connected the rest as they went, and

what came out was something nobody planned: an underground town.

Timeline of Events

1879: The Army begins building Fort Assinniboine, the largest military post ever built in Montana.

1891: The settlement takes the name Havre, after Le Havre in France. It incorporates in 1893.

January 14, 1904: Two fires burn nearly sixty buildings. Fort Assinniboine sends soldiers to stop the looting

and fifteen people are arrested. No cause is ever established.

February 1904: The city council requires brick or stone for all new downtown construction.

1910: Havre's population has more than tripled, to 3,624.

February 28, 1918: Long George Francis, six foot six and a future Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame inductee,

is convicted of stealing a bay mare. He skips sentencing and hides in the Bears Paw Mountains. He kept a

saddlery in the tunnels.

October 1918: A state raid on Shorty Young's Border Saloon, run with two improperly deputized men, recovers

one quart bottle holding about three drinks of whiskey. The Attorney General's own office calls the raid

illegal and the raiders are the ones arrested.

December 31, 1918: Montana's prohibition takes effect, a year ahead of the rest of the country. The

underground is ready before the ink dries.

Historical Significance

On a given afternoon down there you could get a shave at the Fountain Barbershop, buy sausage from the

Pioneer Meat Market, have Doctor Wright pull a tooth in an office with an x-ray machine, eat a tamale from

Tamale Jim, drink at the Sporting Eagle, and never come up for daylight. There was a bordello, a drugstore,

an ice cream shop, a funeral parlor. Wah Sing ran a laundry where cowboys left a change of clothes, bathed,

and picked up the clean set on the way out. Three opium dens ran in those corridors, mostly as pain relief

for railroad workers wrecked by the work; Montana had outlawed opium smoking in 1891, which did nothing

but push it further down. For the Chinese community, the underground was both a place to earn a living and

a place to be left alone. Shorty Young ran the gambling, the prostitution, and the bootlegging, with an

escape tunnel that started under his stage and ran several hundred yards west. He fought local, state, and

federal government, and he usually won.

Sources

Havre Beneath the Streets museum

Great Northern Railway division point records

Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, Long George Francis

Montana Attorney General's office records, 1918

If you liked this: Episode 188, Lewistown, Montana. Another Montana story where the respectable version of

events did not survive a closer look.

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 213 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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San Francisco, California: The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872 | Hometown History Oct 06, 2026

Show notes

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 American history.

By Asbury Harpending's account, the stones were pronounced genuine by Charles Lewis Tiffany himself, though

only a tenth of the sample was sent for appraisal. Civil War General George McClellan, Congressman Benjamin

Butler, and newspaper editor Horace Greeley joined as investors only after the appraisal came back. Mining

engineer Henry Janin, who had inspected more than 600 mines and never endorsed a failure, called the diamond

field wonderfully rich. Bank of California founder William Ralston and a syndicate of the wealthiest men

on the West Coast paid Arnold and Slack $660,000, roughly $17.7 million today. The scheme came apart only

when geologist Clarence King, leading a federal survey of the fortieth parallel, went to the site near the

Wyoming and Colorado border and found cut gems mixed in with the rough ones. The field had been salted with

stones bought in London and minerals gathered from Navajo country in the American Southwest.

Timeline of Events

1829: Philip Arnold is born in Hardin County, Kentucky.

Early 1871: Arnold and Slack deposit their stones at the Bank of California.

1871: Charles Tiffany examines a tenth of the sample and pronounces the stones genuine; the appraisal comes

back at $150,000.

Summer 1871: Arnold travels to London and buys rough gems from Leopold Keller.

June 1872: Henry Janin inspects the salted mesa near the Wyoming and Colorado border and declares it

wonderfully rich.

Summer 1872: Arnold and Slack are paid $660,000 for their claims.

October 1872: Clarence King investigates and finds cut gems and impossible gem ratios.

November 25, 1872: King's telegram exposes the fraud and the hoax collapses.

1873: Arnold returns $150,000, keeps the rest, and becomes a banker in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

1875: William Ralston drowns in San Francisco Bay during his customary swim; whether it was a stroke or

something he chose remains disputed.

February 8, 1879: Arnold dies of pneumonia after being shot the previous August.

1896: John Slack dies in White Oaks, New Mexico, working as a coffinmaker.

Historical Significance

The Great Diamond Hoax exposed a fatal weakness in Gilded Age investment culture. The same hunger for

the next big strike that had built San Francisco could be turned against its wealthiest citizens. Charles

Tiffany's humiliation led directly to his hiring of George Frederick Kunz, America's first true gemologist.

Clarence King became a national figure and was later appointed the first director of the United States

Geological Survey. The case proved that scientific evidence could beat speculation and greed, at least

once. The salted mesa is still called Diamond Peak, and hikers occasionally turn up remnants of Arnold's

planted garnets more than 150 years later.

Sources

Smithsonian Magazine

WyoHistory.org, Wyoming State Historical Society

Newspapers.com archives of 1872 San Francisco press coverage

Reports of the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel

If you liked this: Episode 174, Osage County, Oklahoma. Another story about what sudden mineral wealth does

to the people standing closest to it.

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 212 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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Shawneetown, Illinois: The Town That Kept Building the Wall Higher Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

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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Pascagoula, Mississippi: The Phantom Barber's Midnight Crime Spree Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

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

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Peshtigo, Wisconsin: America's Deadliest Fire You've Never Heard Of Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

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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Escalante, Utah: The Mysterious Disappearance of Everett Ruess Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

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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Thaxton, Virginia: The Forgotten Train Disaster of 1889 Sep 01, 2026

Show notes

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.

Episode 207 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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Bath, Michigan: The School Treasurer Who Spent Eight Months Planting Dynamite Aug 25, 2026

Show notes

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.

Episode 206 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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Tucker, Arkansas: Secrets of Tucker Prison Farm - The Torture Machine Aug 18, 2026

Show notes

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.

Episode 205 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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Little Rock, Arkansas: The Asylum That Buried Thousands in Unmarked Graves Aug 11, 2026

Show notes

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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