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Hometown History

Black Label

Discover forgotten stories from small-town America that never made it into history books. Hometown History is the podcast uncovering hidden American history—overlooked events, local mysteries, and untold tragedies from communities across the nation. Every week, meticulous research brings pre-2000 small-town stories to life in 20-minute episodes. From forgotten disasters to local legends, hidden chapters to pivotal moments, each episode explores a different town's overlooked history. Perfect for history enthusiasts seeking forgotten American stories, small-town history, and local history that shaped our nation. Respectful storytelling meets educational depth—history podcast content for curious minds who want to learn about America's hidden past without hour-long episodes.

  1. Carrollton, Mississippi: The 1886 Courthouse Massacre That History Forgot

    2D AGO

    Carrollton, Mississippi: The 1886 Courthouse Massacre That History Forgot

    In January 1886, two brothers named Ed and Charley Brown accidentally spilled molasses on a white man's sleeve while making a delivery to a saloon in Carrollton, Mississippi. The man accepted their apology. The matter should have ended there. Instead, a local attorney named James Monroe Liddell decided to make the accident his personal cause, confronting the Browns weeks later and igniting a chain of events that would end in one of the deadliest acts of racialterrorism in American history. On March 17, 1886, as the Brown brothers stood trial in the Carroll County Courthouse, between fifty and one hundred armed white men stormed the building and opened fire on every Black person inside. Twenty-three people were killed. No one was ever charged. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    22 min
  2. Dover, Delaware: The Poisoned Chocolates That Changed American Law

    APR 21

    Dover, Delaware: The Poisoned Chocolates That Changed American Law

    In August 1898, a small package arrived at a prominent home in Dover, Delaware, bearing no return address. Inside: a box of chocolate bonbons, a cambric handkerchief, and a note reading "With love to yourself and baby." Mary Elizabeth Penington Dunning shared the candy with her sister Ida Harriet Deane and several guests on the family porch that evening. Within hours, everyone who ate the chocolates was violently ill. Within days, Mary and Ida were dead from arsenic poisoning. The killer was Cordelia Botkin, a woman sitting three thousand miles away in San Francisco. She had nevermet her victims. Her target had been the family of her former lover, Associated Press correspondent John Preston Dunning, who had ended their three-year affair when he departed for the Spanish-American War. Botkin purchased arsenic from a drugstore on Market Street, laced a box of bonbons from George Haas and Sons Confectionery, and mailed the package from the Ferry Post Office. She had weaponized the United States Postal Service. The investigation that followed linked Botkin to the crime through handwriting analysis, drugstore receipts, candy shop identification, and a price tag she forgot to remove from the handkerchief. San Francisco Police Chief Isaiah W. Lees coordinated the cross-continental investigation, and handwriting expert Daniel T. Ames matched Botkin's penmanship to the package and anonymous letters she had previously sent to the family. Her trial in San Francisco captivated the nation, with William Randolph Hearst's Examiner erecting a public bulletin board outside the courthouse to update the crowds. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    22 min
  3. Dover, Delaware: The Poisoned Chocolates That Changed American Law

    APR 21 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Dover, Delaware: The Poisoned Chocolates That Changed American Law

    In August 1898, a small package arrived at a prominent home in Dover, Delaware, bearing no return address. Inside: a box of chocolate bonbons, a cambric handkerchief, and a note reading "With love to yourself and baby." Mary Elizabeth Penington Dunning shared the candy with her sister Ida Harriet Deane and several guests on the family porch that evening. Within hours, everyone who ate the chocolates was violently ill. Within days, Mary and Ida were dead from arsenic poisoning. The killer was Cordelia Botkin, a woman sitting three thousand miles away in San Francisco. She had never met her victims. Her target had been the family of her former lover, Associated Press correspondent John Preston Dunning, who had ended their three-year affair when he departed for the Spanish-American War. Botkin purchased arsenic from a drugstore on Market Street, laced a box of bonbons from George Haas and Sons Confectionery, and mailed the package from the Ferry Post Office. She had weaponized the United States Postal Service. The investigation that followed linked Botkin to the crime through handwriting analysis, drugstore receipts, candy shop identification, and a price tag she forgot to remove from the handkerchief. San Francisco Police Chief Isaiah W. Lees coordinated the cross-continental investigation, and handwriting expert Daniel T. Ames matched Botkin's penmanship to the package and anonymous letters she had previously sent to the family. Her trial in San Francisco captivated the nation, with William Randolph Hearst's Examiner erecting a public bulletin board outside the courthouse to update the crowds.

    22 min
  4. Brattleboro, Vermont: The Asylum Tower Holding a Century of Secrets

    APR 14

    Brattleboro, Vermont: The Asylum Tower Holding a Century of Secrets

    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 sealed the door shut. At the base of that tower sits a cemetery holding more than 650 burials, many marked only with numbers. This is the story of Anna Hunt Marsh, the daughter of Vermont's Lieutenant Governor, who watched her husband's patient die from ice water submersion and forced opium comas in 1806. She spent twenty-eight years turning that grief into action. When she died in 1834, her will contained a single sentence that would change Brattleboro forever: ten thousand dollars left for the purpose of building a hospital for the insane in Windham County. She became the first woman in American history to found a mental health institution. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    20 min
  5. Brattleboro, Vermont: The Asylum Tower Holding a Century of Secrets

    APR 14 • SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

    Brattleboro, Vermont: The Asylum Tower Holding a Century of Secrets

    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 sealed the door shut. At the base of that tower sits a cemetery holding more than 650 burials, many marked only with numbers. This is the story of Anna Hunt Marsh, the daughter of Vermont's Lieutenant Governor, who watched her husband's patient die from ice water submersion and forced opium comas in 1806. She spent twenty-eight years turning that grief into action. When she died in 1834, her will contained a single sentence that would change Brattleboro forever: ten thousand dollars left for the purpose of building a hospital for the insane in Windham County. She became the first woman in American history to found a mental health institution. Timeline of Events: 1806: Richard Whitney dies under Dr. Perley Marsh's experimental treatments in Hinsdale, New Hampshire 1834: Anna Hunt Marsh dies, leaving $10,000 (over $300,000 today) to establish a psychiatric hospital 1836: The Vermont Asylum for the Insane opens in Brattleboro with no chains, no cells, and no fences 1887-1894: Patients construct the 65-foot Retreat Tower from locally quarried granite on the ridge above campus 1938: Tower entrance sealed after multiple patient deaths Historical Significance: The Brattleboro Retreat remains one of the oldest continuously operating psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Founded on the radical premise that the mentally ill deserved kindness rather than chains, it pioneered America's first patient-produced newspaper, the first swimming pool at any hospital in the world, and a campus that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. In 2016, a cemetery restoration project recovered names for the numbered graves where possible and installed a memorial marker for those whose identities were permanently lost. The tower itself was restored by volunteer stone workers in 2019. Anna Hunt Marsh never saw the asylum open. She missed it by two years. But nearly two hundred years later, her institution still treats patients on the same ground her trustees purchased with her money. Sources: Brattleboro Reformer archives, Vermont Public Radio, National Register of Historic Places documentation, Brattleboro Retreat institutional records, Atlas Obscura.

    20 min
  6. Waterbury, Vermont: The Asylum That Turned a Towns Name Into a Warning

    APR 7

    Waterbury, Vermont: The Asylum That Turned a Towns Name Into a Warning

    In 1891, the first twenty-five patients stepped off a train and walked into the Vermont State Asylum for the Insane in Waterbury, a sprawling brick-and-stone campus built along a ridge above the Winooski River. The facility was supposed to heal broken minds through fresh air and structured labor. Instead, it grew into something the entire state whispered about -- a place so defined by confinement that saying someone "ought to go to Waterbury" became shorthand for madness itself. This episode traces the full arc of the Waterbury asylum, from its founding under Governor William P. Dillingham through the decades of overcrowding that packed 1,728 patients into wards designed for far fewer. It follows the rise of Dr. Eugene A. Stanley, the superintendent who opened patient records to University of Vermont zoology professor Henry Perkins and the Eugenics Survey of Vermont -- a program that cataloged more than 6,000 Vermonters by bloodline and targeted Abenaki, French-Canadian, disabled, and low-income families for sterilization. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    23 min
  7. Riceville, Maine: The Ghost Town Whose Plague Never Happened

    MAR 31

    Riceville, Maine: The Ghost Town Whose Plague Never Happened

    Episode Summary In the deep forests of Hancock County, Maine, there's a place that time forgot--Riceville, a company town that once thrived around a tannery on Buffalo Stream. For over a century, whispers have circulated about a plague that supposedly wiped out the entire population overnight, with tales of bodies in the streets and a mass grave hidden somewhere in the woods. The truth is far more human, and perhaps more unsettling: Riceville died not from disease, but from a single catastrophic fire and the cold economics that followed. At its peak in 1890, Riceville was home to 136 residents. Workers peeled bark from hemlock trees and processed it into tannin for the leather industry. The community had a general store, a boarding house, and a schoolhouse where children learned their letters. Some accounts even mention a baseball team. But every soul in Riceville depended on one employer--the tannery. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    16 min
  8. Prudence Island: The Keeper Who Relit the Light After Losing Everything

    MAR 24

    Prudence Island: The Keeper Who Relit the Light After Losing Everything

    I have covered a lot of tragedies on this show, but this one hit different. George Gustavus lost his wife and his twelve-year-old son when a seventeen-foot storm surge destroyed his home during the 1938 hurricane. He was pulled from the water half a mile away. And that same night--still soaking wet, still grieving--he climbed back up the lighthouse tower and helped restore the beacon. The light at Prudence Island has never gone dark since. Some stories remind you what duty really means. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    18 min
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Discover forgotten stories from small-town America that never made it into history books. Hometown History is the podcast uncovering hidden American history—overlooked events, local mysteries, and untold tragedies from communities across the nation. Every week, meticulous research brings pre-2000 small-town stories to life in 20-minute episodes. From forgotten disasters to local legends, hidden chapters to pivotal moments, each episode explores a different town's overlooked history. Perfect for history enthusiasts seeking forgotten American stories, small-town history, and local history that shaped our nation. Respectful storytelling meets educational depth—history podcast content for curious minds who want to learn about America's hidden past without hour-long episodes.

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