HeyJaredDrive-Thru Towns
“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.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 15
- Latest publication
- Sep 1, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 7, 2026
Latest episodes
Klamath, CA (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Klamath: The River That Reclaimed Itself People have been living at the mouth of the Klamath River for ten thousand years. To put that in perspective: the Roman Empire takes you back two thousand years. The Egyptian pyramids, four thousand. Long before there was a United States, before any European explorer stepped onto these shores, and before anyone paved a highway through the Pacific Northwest and called it a drive-thru, the Yurok people were here. They fished this river, spoke their language
Angel's Camp, CA (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Angels Camp: The Gold Rush Outpost That Made America Laugh The world record for a frog jump is twenty-one feet, five and three-quarter inches, measured across three consecutive leaps. Set in 1986 by a bullfrog named Rosie the Ribeter, that record has stood uncontested for forty years. Every May, competitors descend on a small California town to break it. They train their frogs, obsess over takeoff angles, and swap theories on bullfrog psychology. The winner gets a brass star embedded in a histor
Bombay Beach, CA (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Bombay Beach: The Salton Sea's Post-Apocalyptic Art Riviera I want you to picture curtains moving. Not blowing—moving. The deliberate kind. The kind that means someone just let go of the fabric a half-second before you looked up. That is Bombay Beach, California—a grid of silent, dust-caked streets sitting 223 feet below sea level on the edge of the Salton Sea, right where the San Andreas Fault simply gives up and stops. There are no stoplights, no dog walkers, and no kids on bikes. Yet, by the
Locke, CA (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Locke: The Chinese Empire Built on a Nine-Acre Handshake Imagine a town built entirely by Chinese immigrants, for Chinese immigrants, on land those very same immigrants were legally forbidden to own. Under the California Alien Land Law of 1913, these families couldn’t buy the dirt beneath their feet. Instead, they built a thriving community—fifty buildings, a school, a theater, and five bustling gambling halls—on a verbal, nine-acre handshake lease with a white rancher named George Locke. For ei
Old Shasta, CA (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Old Shasta: The Gold Rush Queen Erased by a Railroad Spelling Bee The town that killed Old Shasta isn't even named after the right guy. In 1880, a railroad company won a lawsuit that officially named its new hub "Redding"—not after Pierson B. Reading, the pioneer who actually founded the region, but after Benjamin B. Redding, a Sacramento politician and land agent who never lived there. With that one court ruling, a Gold Rush empire was systematically dismantled and bypassed, leaving its grand b
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.