Drive-Thru Towns

Fiddletown: The Gold Country Boomtown That Refused to Become a Dead Man’s Punchline In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns , host Andrew Wilcox pulls off Highway 49 into Amador County to explore Fiddletown, California. To...

Trona: The Alien Planet of the Mojave Built on Toxic Salt and Stolen Lakes Wyatt Earp showed up to a California desert town in 1910—not as a legendary lawman, but as a sixty-two-year-old hired gun. He was leading a band...

Bishop: Stolen Water, Dynamite, and the Blueprint for Chinatown In 1924, forty men loaded half a ton of dynamite into two touring cars, drove out under a moonless sky, and blew a massive crater into a concrete pipeline...

Rough and Ready: The 87-Day Republic That Seceded for Gold and Came Back for Beer What is the shortest a country has ever existed before deciding it wasn't worth the trouble? Not a short-lived monarchy or a brief...

Mendocino: A California Logging Town Wearing New England Drag A man is running. In the dead of night in 1854 San Francisco, Henry Meiggs climbs onto a ship with a satchel full of forged city bonds and stolen warrants...

California City: The Ghost Grid of the High Mojave Nat Mendelsohn—a Columbia-educated sociology professor and Czech immigrant—stood on a barren hill in the Mojave Desert in 1958 wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, white...

Lone Pine: The Velvet Trap of the American Backlot The most famous outdoor set in the history of American filmmaking is forty-five minutes from a jail cell that once held Charles Manson, and twenty minutes from a guard...

You've driven past them a hundred times. The gas station that used to be a bank. The dirt lot that used to be ten thousand people. The water that used to be a river. Outside the five or six California cities everybody...

Madrid: The Town That Walked Off the Civic Map They came looking for gold and left with a town that eventually quit being a town. That is Madrid, Maine—not the Madrid with majestic museums, heavy traffic, and...

Eastport: The City Where the Tide Does the Hiring Eastport is the town where the tide does the hiring. At the absolute edge of the Gulf of Maine, the water doesn’t just rise and fall—it swings like a pendulum loaded...

Durham: The Holy City on a Barren Sand Hill They built a holy city on a sand hill, then watched it collapse under the weight of one man’s certainty. That is the story of Shiloh—a sprawling, four-story religious empire...

Freeman Township: The Town Born from Ash and Broken by Scale Freeman Township was born from fire. That is not a poetic metaphor slapped on later for atmosphere—the town was literally born from the smoke of Portland...

Kittery: Bargains and Warships at the Gateway to Maine Kittery is the oldest town in Maine, and somehow it still looks like it’s in a hurry. That is the joke hiding in plain sight at the state line. On one side of Route...

Monson: The Town That Exported Darkness Monson’s black slate ended up in the Eternal Flame at Arlington National Cemetery. That’s not a metaphor—that is real quarry stone from a little town in the Maine woods, cut...

Swan Island: The Island Full of Furniture Where the Town Disappeared The island is full of furniture, but the town is entirely gone. That is the unsettling reality of Perkins Township—better known today as Swan Island...