Hometown History

On January 14, 1904, Havre, Montana burned twice in one day. The first fire started in the back of Grossand Lebert's hardware store with a chinook wind still blowing. The second came around noon, when a clerkat the Stringfellow Drug Store opened the trap door to the cellar and got a face full of smoke. The rush ofair lit what had been smoldering below, and it went east through the block, taking the Hotel Havre and theMetropolitan, then jumped the street. Great Falls put Engine 151 on the line with a tank car of water andcovered the distance fifty minutes faster than the scheduled passenger run. Nearly sixty buildings weregone. Not one person died.In February the city council ordered all new downtown construction to be brick or stone. The wooden frontiertown was finished. But the owners were not going to sit in a Montana winter waiting on brick walls, so theydropped into their own basements. Steam tunnels already ran under the streets and Shorty Young had alreadydug passages between his own buildings. They tied into all of it and connected the rest as they went, andwhat came out was something nobody planned: an underground town.Timeline of Events1879: 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 lootingand 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 asaddlery in the tunnels.October 1918: A state raid on Shorty Young's Border Saloon, run with two improperly deputized men, recoversone quart bottle holding about three drinks of whiskey. The Attorney General's own office calls the raidillegal and the raiders are the ones arrested.December 31, 1918: Montana's prohibition takes effect, a year ahead of the rest of the country. Theunderground is ready before the ink dries.Historical SignificanceOn a given afternoon down there you could get a shave at the Fountain Barbershop, buy sausage from thePioneer Meat Market, have Doctor Wright pull a tooth in an office with an x-ray machine, eat a tamale fromTamale 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 relieffor railroad workers wrecked by the work; Montana had outlawed opium smoking in 1891, which did nothingbut push it further down. For the Chinese community, the underground was both a place to earn a living anda place to be left alone. Shorty Young ran the gambling, the prostitution, and the bootlegging, with anescape tunnel that started under his stage and ran several hundred yards west. He fought local, state, andfederal government, and he usually won.SourcesHavre Beneath the Streets museumGreat Northern Railway division point recordsMontana Cowboy Hall of Fame, Long George FrancisMontana Attorney General's office records, 1918If you liked this: Episode 188, Lewistown, Montana. Another Montana story where the respectable version ofevents 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 atmythsandmalice.com/hometown-historyEpisode 213 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane WatersAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In 1871, two Kentucky drifters named Philip Arnold and John Slack walked into a San Francisco mining broker'soffice carrying a buckskin pouch of rough stones: diamonds, rubies, and sapphires they claimed to havepulled 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, thoughonly a tenth of the sample was sent for appraisal. Civil War General George McClellan, Congressman BenjaminButler, and newspaper editor Horace Greeley joined as investors only after the appraisal came back. Miningengineer Henry Janin, who had inspected more than 600 mines and never endorsed a failure, called the diamondfield wonderfully rich. Bank of California founder William Ralston and a syndicate of the wealthiest menon the West Coast paid Arnold and Slack $660,000, roughly $17.7 million today. The scheme came apart onlywhen geologist Clarence King, leading a federal survey of the fortieth parallel, went to the site near theWyoming and Colorado border and found cut gems mixed in with the rough ones. The field had been salted withstones bought in London and minerals gathered from Navajo country in the American Southwest.Timeline of Events1829: 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 comesback 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 itwonderfully 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 orsomething 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 SignificanceThe Great Diamond Hoax exposed a fatal weakness in Gilded Age investment culture. The same hunger forthe next big strike that had built San Francisco could be turned against its wealthiest citizens. CharlesTiffany'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 StatesGeological Survey. The case proved that scientific evidence could beat speculation and greed, at leastonce. The salted mesa is still called Diamond Peak, and hikers occasionally turn up remnants of Arnold'splanted garnets more than 150 years later.SourcesSmithsonian MagazineWyoHistory.org, Wyoming State Historical SocietyNewspapers.com archives of 1872 San Francisco press coverageReports of the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth ParallelIf you liked this: Episode 174, Osage County, Oklahoma. Another story about what sudden mineral wealth doesto 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 atmythsandmalice.com/hometown-historyEpisode 212 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane WatersAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Shawneetown, Illinois was laid out in 1810, which makes it one of the oldest towns in the state. BeforeIllinois 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 theinterstate. If you were moving people or freight through the middle of the country you moved them on thatwater, and Shawneetown was a place you had to stop. In 1816 the first bank in the Illinois Territory waschartered there, run by a man named John Marshall out of his own log cabin and then the brick house hebuilt, which is still standing.Then the river started coming for it. From eighteen eighty-four through nineteen thirty-seven, the townkept building its wall higher. In eighteen eighty-four, the river passed through a gap in an unfinishedlevee. In 1898 a finished one let go on a Sunday afternoon and drowned twenty-five people. In 1913 thetown put another hundred and thirty thousand dollars into making it taller. By the mid-1930s the wall wasbuilt to hold back a sixty-foot river. Sixty feet of river, held off by packed earth, by people who hadthree floods in living memory and nothing bigger than that to imagine.Timeline of Events1810: 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 quartercentury 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 thousanddollars.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'swife Sylvester and his daughters Dora and Mary, nineteen and twelve. About 143 houses are wrecked or floatoff 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 theriver 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 thewall.Historical SignificanceThere is a thing a river wall does that nobody puts in the county history. When it gets tall enough youcannot see the river anymore. It is right there, a couple hundred yards off, and gone from your day. Kidsgrow up on the Ohio and have to climb something to look at it. The wall stops being a defense, starts beingscenery, and then stops being anything at all. In 1937 the water came over the top and kept coming, and thetown, which sits low behind that wall, went under about fifteen feet. The bank stayed up; water climbedtwo stories on it and left a mark on those columns you can still find today. Shawneetown had roughly fourhundred homes. When the water pulled back weeks later, twenty of them were fit to live in. The streetswere still there and the lots were still there. Nineteen houses out of every twenty standing on them werebeyond living in.SourcesWPA Guide to IllinoisHanneman Archive accounts of the 1898 levee breakGallatin County historical recordsNational Register of Historic Places documentation, Shawneetown BankU.S. Geological Survey Ohio River gauge recordsIf you liked this: Episode 170, Ottawa, Illinois. Another Illinois town where the industry that built itdecided 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 atmythsandmalice.com/hometown-historyEpisode 211 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane WatersAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In the summer of 1942, Pascagoula, Mississippi, was a quiet Gulf Coast town that the Ingalls Shipbuildingyard had turned into a wartime boomtown almost overnight. That summer someone began cutting through windowscreens at night, slipping into bedrooms, and snipping locks of hair from sleeping residents. Localnewspapers called him the Phantom Barber. He first struck on June 5, 1942, taking hair from two girls atthe 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 sandyfootprint on the empty bed by her window. Mrs. R.E. Taylor woke to a sickening smell in the room, andinvestigators suspected chloroform, while her family slept around her. Then the crimes turned violent, andTerrell Heidelberg and his wife were beaten with an iron bar. Police arrested a 57-year-old chemist witha German background named William A. Dolan, convicted him of attempted murder, and sentenced him to tenyears. He was never charged with a single hair-cutting incident. Dolan received a limited suspension ofhis sentence after the polygraph, later made indefinite, with some accounts reporting a later pardon, andthe identity of the Phantom Barber was never established.Timeline of Events1938: 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 emptybed 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 GovernorHugh White.Historical SignificanceThe Phantom Barber case sits where wartime paranoia, rapid social upheaval, and criminal justice failuremeet. Pascagoula's overnight transformation into a boomtown two or three times its size built the perfectconditions for fear. Neighbors no longer recognized each other, night-shift workers left their familiesalone in unfamiliar houses, and wartime anxiety was already running high. The panic reached ship productionitself, because workers refused to leave home for night shifts at Ingalls. Dolan's eventual pardon suggestsMississippi came to acknowledge the conviction was wrong. No hair-cutting incident was ever reported againafter Dolan's imprisonment, and the case remains one of the strangest unsolved mysteries in American crime.SourcesMississippi EncyclopediaNewspapers.com archives of 1942 Pascagoula and Jackson County coverageNational Park Service records on Gulf Coast wartime industryContemporary Ingalls Shipbuilding employment recordsIf you liked this: Episode 198, Carrollton, Mississippi. Another Mississippi story the official recordtried 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 atmythsandmalice.com/hometown-historyEpisode 210 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane WatersAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 ofbark and mill waste surrounded a population of two thousand people, nearly all of them employed by WilliamButler Ogden's woodenware factory, the largest in the country. That night a firestorm driven by gale-forcewinds 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 vesselsinto the river and stood chest-deep in the water for hours while the town burned around him. His 1874account, The Finger of God Is There, remains the most detailed firsthand narrative of the disaster.Timeline of EventsSummer 1871: A severe drought grips the upper Midwest and small brush fires burn unchecked for weeks acrossnortheastern Wisconsin.October 8, 1871, morning: The wind shifts to the southwest and accelerates. Scattered fires begin mergingacross 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 settlementsincluding Sugar Bush are devastated as well.1874: Father Peter Pernin publishes his eyewitness account, preserving the most complete record of thefire.Historical SignificanceThe Peshtigo fire killed between 1,200 and 2,500 people in a single night, making it the deadliest firein American history. The exact toll will never be known, because entire families were erased with nobodyleft 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 theregion had burned, and by the time word reached the outside world the Great Chicago Fire, which startedthe 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 itnorth once the scale of the Peshtigo catastrophe became clear. In Peshtigo itself, the fire is rememberedas 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 lessby national recognition than by the families who rebuilt on burned ground and refused to let their dead beforgotten.SourcesFather Peter Pernin, The Finger of God Is There, 1874Peshtigo Fire Museum and Peshtigo Fire Cemetery recordsWisconsin Historical Society accounts of the October 1871 firestormIf you liked this: Episode 202, Gainesville, Georgia. Another town erased in minutes by something nobodysaw coming.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy