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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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The radio was still playing when they found the room. The lights were on. A psychology textbook lay open on the desk, mid-chapter. His wallet sat where he’d left it. His car keys, too. And on a night cold enough that snow was falling outside, his coat hung untouched on its hook. What was missing was Ronald Tammen. He was nineteen years old, a sophomore at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, a small college town…
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The bank is the first thing you notice, because it’s the only thing still standing at full height. Three stories of poured concrete and dressed stone, empty window frames staring out at nothing, in a stretch of the Nevada desert where the nearest working traffic light is twenty-some miles away. There’s no town around it anymore. No streets, no other buildings taller than a foundation line in the dirt. Just the bank, a train depot,…