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Drive west on Interstate 40 out of Amarillo, past the grain elevators and the flat-to-the-horizon cotton fields that make the Texas Panhandle feel like the edge of something rather than the middle, and somewhere around Exit 60 you’ll start seeing the signs. Not official green highway signs. Hand-painted plywood boards propped against fence posts, nailed to telephone poles, stuck in the dirt at jaunty angles, all pointing the same direction and all advertising more or…
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Drive north on Interstate 75 out of Macon, Georgia, take the Bass Road exit, and if you know where to look, you can still see it through the tree line: a low chain-link fence, a stretch of cracked asphalt shaped like a racetrack, and what used to be a mini-golf course now mostly reclaimed by kudzu and pine saplings. There’s a rusted metal frame back there too, tall enough to have once held something people…
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The families came by wagon and buggy, and most of them brought lunch. That detail is the strangest part of the whole story. On a July morning in 1912, in a patch of pine woods in eastern Montgomery County, Texas, two sides of a church dispute rode toward the same small building with guns hidden under wagon seats and inside coat pockets, and they packed a picnic anyway, because whatever was about to happen, it…
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The train still stops at Thurmond, but almost no one is waiting. Steel rails curve beside the New River, squeezed between dark water and the steep, wooded walls of the gorge. Across the tracks stand brick commercial buildings from another age: a bank, hotel, engine house, and storefronts facing what once passed for the town’s main street. There is no broad avenue through Thurmond, no courthouse square, and little room for either. The railroad was…
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The funeral took a full day to get through. On April 13, 1917, twelve thousand people packed into Chester Rural Cemetery in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, to bury the dead from a factory explosion that had torn through a munitions plant three days earlier. Fifty-five of the coffins held no names. The bodies inside them had been too damaged, or too scattered, for anyone to identify who they’d been in life. They went into a mass…
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