Drive-Thru Towns

Andrew Wilcox
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  • Places & Travel

“Drive-Thru Towns” is about the places you only slow for a red light or a gas stop—tiny dots where something huge once happened. A forgotten invention, a vanished boomtown, a cult, a crime ring, a spiritualist camp, a song lyric, a ghost story. Each episode unpacks who, what, where, when, why, and how to reveal why that “nothing” town once mattered—and why it’s still worth pulling over for today.

  1. 3d ago

    Swan Island/ Perkins Township, Maine

    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—a green smudge of land stranded in the middle of Maine's Kennebec River. Once a bustling, self-contained community of shipbuilders, ice harvesters, and farmers, it is now an uninhabited state wildlife area where deer and bald eagles outnumber people by a lopsided margin. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox takes a short boat trip into a state of arrested decay. Swan Island has no bridge, no stores, and no modern residents, yet it holds five fully intact 18th-century homes still filled with domestic furniture and historic leftovers. It feels less like a demolished ruin and more like the 20th century simply got tired halfway through, packed a single bag, and wandered off downstream. We trace the island's history from its deep roots as a summer camp for the Indigenous Abenaki people to its 19th-century industrial peak, when "cold was cargo" and winter was mined directly out of the river. We explore the slow, quiet subtraction that led the town to completely disincorporate in 1918 simply because there weren't enough people left willing to sit in the town office chairs, creating one of the most hauntingly preserved ghost towns in New England. Preservation by Neglect: What it feels like to walk through the historic Tubbs-Reed and Robinson houses, where the furniture stands waiting for owners who left eighty years ago. Mining the Winter: Inside the brutal, practical business of the Kennebec ice trade, where blocks of river ice were packed in sawdust and shipped as far away as India. The Slow Subtraction: How a toxic mix of upstream paper mill pollution, the invention of artificial refrigeration, and the shift from wooden ships to steel quietly choked out the island's economy. Death by Disincorporation: The quiet sting of 1918, when a functioning American town administratively vanished not because of a fire or a flood, but due to a total absence of volunteers. A Sentence with the Verbs Missing: Exploring the Steve Powell Wildlife Management Area, where a layout of roads, farms, and cemeteries has been entirely repurposed as an animal habitat. If you are fascinated by the places where human history has been frozen in time and handed back to the wilderness, follow the show on Spotify. Instagram: @50statefamily LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com Inside the EpisodeConnect & Follow

    22 min

  2. 5d ago

    Wiscasset, Maine

    Wiscasset: The Nuclear Piggy Bank at the Prettiest Village in Maine Wiscasset’s nuclear power plant didn’t explode. It just stopped paying the town. From 1972 to 1996, the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant on Bailey Peninsula generated roughly 119 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity—and in the process, it funded some of the lowest property taxes in the United States. Thanks to this reactor-fueled piggy bank, a tiny coastal village was able to spend decades living like a small town with a Silicon Valley address, punching far above its weight in school systems, public services, and grand civic infrastructure. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox looks past the glossy, postcard-perfect windshield view of "The Prettiest Village in Maine." Route 1 drivers know Wiscasset for its stunning early 19th-century historic district and the legendary, standing-room-only tourist pilgrimage to Red’s Eats for lobster rolls. But beneath the scenic facade lies a complex, permanent conversation about what happens when an infrastructure giant leaves. When safety issues forced Maine Yankee to shut down permanently in 1996, the town was left to face the brutal math of maintaining an oversized civic blueprint on a regular small-town tax base. We explore the geographic logic that brought the reactor to the tidal waters of the Sheepscot River, the hangover of a disappearing municipal patron, and the ongoing legal battles surrounding the 550 metric tons of radioactive spent nuclear waste that Uncle Sam legally promised to move—but left behind in concrete-capped steel canisters. The Postcard and the Post-Nuclear: Balancing the title of "The Prettiest Village in Maine" with a massive, multi-decade legacy of nuclear power and fiscal imagination. The Nuclear Golden Age: How a 900-megawatt pressurized water reactor became the town's ultimate financial savior, funding top-tier schools and a multimillion-dollar community center. Oversized and Decoupled: The harsh reality of a town struggling to preserve an infrastructure built during a 25-year boom after the benefactor suddenly dies. The 550-Ton Hangover: Inside the legal gridlock over the Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation, and how a nuclear waste repository is ironically utilizing pollution-control laws to sue the town for tax exemptions. The American Thread: A cautionary tale of municipal infrastructure and imagination, echoing small towns nationwide that expand their expectations during an industrial boom only to inherit a landscape of compromise. If you want to pull back the curtain on the unexpected industries and hidden economics that fund America's most picturesque destinations, follow the show on Spotify. Instagram: @50statefamily LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com Inside the EpisodeConnect & Follow

    11 min

  3. Jun 11

    Flagstaff, Maine

    Flagstaff: The Town They Burned Before They Drowned It They set the town on fire—house by house, beam by beam—so that when the water finally came, there would be nothing left to float. No doors bobbing like driftwood. No roofs breaking loose like memory refusing to sink. Fire first. Then water. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox pulls over in western Maine, where the windshield view reveals nothing but Flagstaff Lake—a wide, quiet, postcard-perfect body of water. But beneath that placid surface lies a community that didn’t die of natural economic decay; it was systematically removed. We explore the deep roots of a once-thriving agricultural and timber valley whose name traces back to a flag planted by a pre-treason Benedict Arnold in 1775. We chronicle the early 20th-century push for hydropower, when Central Maine Power president Walter Wyman looked at the natural basin of the Dead River valley and saw a battery for downstream factories rather than a home for families. It is a haunting look at the cost of progress, the literal erasure of a town in 1949, and the modern ghost landscape that stubbornly reappears whenever the water level drops. The Pioneer Bowl: How a generous, fertile valley along the ominously named Dead River built a century of weight, permanence, and community before the grid arrived. Arnold’s Flag: The 1775 revolutionary origin story behind the town's name, born from a starving army's march toward Quebec. The Wyman Equation: Inside the quiet, boardroom decisions of the 1920s and 1940s where downstream electricity officially outweighed upstream lives. The 1949 "Clearance": The heartbreaking reality of residents holding funerals for their own town as crews torched homes and barns to ensure an efficient reservoir floor. The Shallow Memory: What happens when seasonal droughts pull back the curtain, exposing submerged brick foundations, standing chimneys, and old apple trees that still bloom out of the mud. The Unorganized Territory: A look at how a living community was bureaucratically reclassified into an official absence, now frozen over by winter ice-fishing huts. If you want to uncover the heavy human costs and hidden decisions buried beneath America's most beautiful landscapes, follow the show on Spotify. Instagram: @50statefamily LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com Inside the EpisodeConnect & Follow

    12 min

  4. Jun 9

    Bucksport, Maine

    Bucksport: The Paper Town with a Cursed Exoskeleton When Bucksport lost its massive paper mill, the town did what communities do when the giant in the room dies: it started telling better stories. For more than 80 years, the Verso mill was the entire point of Bucksport—it was the boilers, the skyline, and the steady union payroll that anchored generations of families on the Penobscot River. Then, in 2014, the mill shut down, taking 500 jobs with it and leaving a hole in the civic ledger big enough to change the town’s structural gravity. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox takes us to a Maine river town that refuses to become a museum of itself. We look past the windshield view of this industrial landscape to explore Bucksport's complicated transition from pulp to aquaculture—rebuilding its waterfront on the promise of massive, land-based salmon tanks. But hanging over this modern economic hustle, like a local joke that refuses to stay dead, is the town's original brand identity: The Curse of Colonel Buck. We visit the grave of the town's 1760s founder, Jonathan Buck, to see the infamous, inexplicable leg-shaped stain on his monument that folklore attributes to a condemned witch—a haunting reminder that this town has always understood the value of an unsettling story. The Founder’s Shadow: The legend vs. the ledger of Colonel Jonathan Buck, and why his "cursed" monument remains Maine's most enduring roadside oddity. Reprogramming the Penobscot: A look at the layered industrial history of a waterfront that successfully pivoted from a steel mill to a tanning company, to Maine Seaboard Paper, and finally to Verso. The Death of the Fortress: How the 2014 mill closure hit Bucksport like a structural failure disguised as a corporate business decision, silencing the grammar of labor. Salmon on the Bones: Inside the audacious, land-based aquaculture pivot by Whole Oceans to hatch the town's future in high-tech fish tanks. The Scale of Anxiety: How Bucksport utilizes both hard-nosed economic diversification and its rich folklore to navigate the modern coastal squeeze. If you want to hear more stories about the gritty American towns rewriting their futures after the factory whistles go silent, follow the show on Spotify. Instagram: @50statefamily LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com Inside the EpisodeConnect & Follow

    12 min

  5. Jun 8

    Durham, Maine

    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 that once dominated the skyline of Durham, Maine. At its absolute peak, this was not a mere camp meeting; it was a closed, self-contained city of up to 1,000 people governed by doctrine instead of zoning laws, complete with its own bakery, blacksmith, hospital, and textiles. Today, almost all of the massive compound has been reduced to brush and buried foundations, save for one striking anomaly: a grand chapel topped by the gleaming, gilded Jerusalem Tower, rising above the tree line like an architectural dare. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox pulls off Route 136 to examine a town that keeps its secrets buried deep in the ditch line. To the casual driver, the hilltop structure looks like any historic New England church. But this building has witnessed more radical belief, institutional coercion, and catastrophic collapse than many nations see in a century. We untangle the legacy of Frank W. Sandford, a magnetic Baptist minister who convinced hundreds of followers that he was the biblical prophet Elijah returned to Earth. Followers surrendered every earthly possession to build his kingdom on a barren stretch of sandy soil near the Androscoggin River. We chronicle the dark "scandal years" of forced fasts and child neglect that culminated in the infamous 1911 voyage of the racing yacht Coronet—a horrific maritime tragedy where Sandford's absolute certainty that God would provide groceries resulted in six of his followers dying of scurvy, earning the prophet a manslaughter conviction and a cell in federal prison. The Root System of a Cult: How a 19th-century religious compound left a permanent physical and cultural footprint on a rural Maine town that wanted to be left out of the argument. The Elijah of Bowdoinham: Inside the mind and terrifying charisma of Frank Sandford, the Bates College graduate who turned real estate into a staging ground for salvation. Fortress on the Sand: The geographic irony of building a massive spiritual kingdom on terrain so agriculturally ungenerous it would rather be a beach than a farm. The Tragically Deficient Voyage: The harrowing true story of the yacht Coronet, where a global missionary cruise turned into a floating theology experiment ending in death by a lack of vitamin C. The Fifty-Year Pruning: How the grand, hundreds-of-rooms Shiloh campus fractured after Sandford's prison sentence, leading to the dramatic demolition of the empire’s wings in the 1950s. The Practical Mercy Pivot: How modern Durham has engaged in "aftermath management," turning a notorious landmark into an independent church that handles food pantries and community car shows. If you want to unearth the hidden, complicated histories behind America's most unusual architectural landmarks, follow the show on Spotify. Instagram: @50statefamily LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com Inside the EpisodeConnect & Follow

    13 min

  6. Jun 4

    York, Maine

    York: The Town That Rented Itself by the Week York, Maine, is a town that has been destroyed, invented, abandoned, and sold back to the summer in three different centuries. Today, it looks like coastal New England pulled straight from a glossy brochure—complete with lobster shacks, sandy beaches, historic inns, and a traffic pattern that turns summer into a full-body civic condition. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox pulls off the highway to show you a village that is actually built over ruins twice over. Long before it became a seasonal city where the population swells from 12,000 to over 50,000 every June, York was Gorgeana—one of the earliest, most powerful English cities in America and a serious colonial port. We unearth the heavy layers of York’s history, from the devastating Candlemas Massacre of 1692 to the imposing timber walls of the Old Gaol (the oldest public building in the United States). Discover how the Embargo Act of 1807 broke York's maritime empire, and how the town pulled off the ultimate American survival trick: when the global shipping economy stops paying rent, you can always learn how to dress up your past and rent the view by the week. The First City: How Sir Ferdinando Gorges attempted to build an empire in the Maine woods, creating a political and commercial hub that once rivaled the biggest ports on the Atlantic. The Candlemas Massacre: A look at the brutal 1692 raid that burned the town to the ground, and how York's historic elegance is indelibly layered over early colonial violence and erasure. The Old Gaol: The architecture of timber, iron, and fear. Why the oldest public building in the country stands as a dryly ironic tourist attraction that forgot to retire. The Geographic Trap: How the very river that connected inland timber to seaborne wealth left York utterly exposed to global blockade, weather, and shifting markets. The Resort Pivot: The post-Civil War social invention that saved a stagnant village by transforming its historic homes into "heritage" and its scenic coast into a high-stakes vacation economy. If you want to look past the postcard and discover the gritty, adaptive history under America’s favorite summer destinations, follow the show on Spotify. Instagram: @50statefamily LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com Inside the EpisodeConnect & Follow

    14 min

  7. Jun 2

    Presque Isle and Caribou, Maine

    Presque Isle & Caribou: The Potato Empire with a Heartbeat In Presque Isle and Caribou, the soil isn’t just dirt—it is destiny with frost on it. For a generation, Aroostook County, Maine, was the potato capital of the world. These two northern strongholds sat at the dead center of that agrarian empire—railroad hubs, harvest havens, and military outposts where the rhythm of the school calendar bent to the soil, and the soil bent to the calendar. This is a deeply personal episode of Drive-Thru Towns. Host Andrew Wilcox reveals that without "The County," this podcast wouldn't exist. This is the dirt his mother was raised on, where his parents met on a blind date at the historic Northeastland Hotel while his father was stationed at the Presque Isle Air Force Base. From the bloodless Aroostook War of the 1830s that drew the international border to the sprawling runway of a Cold War missile base, we hit the brakes on the wide boulevards of Maine's deep north. We explore what happens to a proud region when the empire moves west, the machinery takes over, and a community has to learn the humiliating art of surviving after you’ve already been the absolute best at something. The Mother Road: Why Presque Isle and Caribou represent the literal origin story of Drive-Thru Towns, complete with childhood climbs up Haystack Mountain. The Bloodless War: How a 19th-century timber dispute with Great Britain drew a border around some of the richest agricultural soil in the United States before anyone knew what a spud was worth. The "Garden County" Empire: A look at the sprawling infrastructure of an industrial potato boom that saw Presque Isle threaded by three separate railroads. The Harvest Break: The unique, enduring tradition where schools close for weeks to let local teenagers work the mechanized fields—proving that the community still makes room for the crop. The Strategic Threshold: How the Presque Isle Air Base served as a critical Lend-Lease launchpad to Europe in WWII and later became the nation's very first operational intercontinental missile base. An Afterlife of Angels: A poignant reflection on the enduring spirit of northern Maine labor, tracing the legacy of local names like the Condons, Spragues, and Sheas, and a grandfather who could map incoming train tracks by memory well into his nineties. If you're drawn to the wide-open, oversized spaces of America's forgotten industrial and agricultural peaks, follow the show on Spotify so you never miss a milestone. Instagram: @50statefamily LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

    15 min

  8. May 28

    Millinocket and East Millinocket, Maine

    Millinocket: The Paper Town That Burned Without Fire It was called "The Magic City"—a massive industrial marvel carved entirely out of the deep Maine woods in just 18 months. Millinocket and its sister town, East Millinocket, rose to become one of the most powerful paper-making centers on the planet, turning out the physical sheets that carried the nation's news, catalogs, and daily words. In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox explores the anatomy of a company town that built its entire identity around a 24/7 payroll. We trace the region's evolution from a single log cabin visited by Henry David Thoreau in 1846 to a high-tech industrial empire built by global immigrant labor. When global competition and a shrinking print economy forced the mills to go dark in 2008 and 2014, the town didn't disappear—it rearranged its gravity. We look at the complex legacy of industrial paternalism, the rhythm of the historic Ambajejus Boomhouse, and Millinocket's modern reinvention as the rugged gateway to Mount Katahdin and the terminus of the Appalachian Trail. The Wilderness Myth Meets the Machine: How a town that began with a wilderness guide for Henry David Thoreau transformed into a mega-mill that swallowed the forest whole. The Magic City: A look at Great Northern Paper Company’s audacious 1899 timeline, building a world-class industrial hub from scratch practically overnight. Assembled by Migration: The lesser-known history of the international workforce—including hundreds of Italian, Polish, Finnish, and French-Canadian laborers—who built the town's civic spine. The Ambajejus Boomhouse: The mechanical nerve center out on the West Branch of the Penobscot River that managed millions of downstream logs. From Pulp to Pedometers: The irony and resilience of a town shifting its economy from heavy industrial manufacturing to hosting footsore hikers emerging from the 100-Mile Wilderness. If you love exploring the places where America's industrial grit meets its frontier legends, follow the show on Spotify so you never miss a detour. Instagram: @50statefamily LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

    14 min
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About

“Drive-Thru Towns” is about the places you only slow for a red light or a gas stop—tiny dots where something huge once happened. A forgotten invention, a vanished boomtown, a cult, a crime ring, a spiritualist camp, a song lyric, a ghost story. Each episode unpacks who, what, where, when, why, and how to reveal why that “nothing” town once mattered—and why it’s still worth pulling over for today.

Information

  • Creator
    Andrew Wilcox
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    33
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Andrew Wilcox
  • Show Website
    Drive-Thru Towns

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