0:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in the force of Eastern Maine, there's a town that no longer exists. 0:09 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a summer morning, sometime in the early 1900s. 0:13 [SPEAKER_00]: A traveler makes his way, down a flooded logging road, through dense strands of himlock and spruce. 0:22 [SPEAKER_00]: He's headed for Riceville, a company town built around a tannery on Buffalo stream. 0:33 [SPEAKER_00]: workers, families, children who attend the school house at the north end of town. 0:41 [SPEAKER_00]: But when he arrives, something is wrong. 0:45 [SPEAKER_00]: The buildings are still standing, the general store, the boarding house, the great hawking shell of what used to be a tannery, 0:54 [SPEAKER_00]: but there's no one here, no workers hauling bark, no children playing, no smoke rising from chimneys. 1:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone is gone. 1:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Later the stories were grow, whispers of a plague that swept through overnight. 1:14 [SPEAKER_00]: Bodies found in the street, a mass grave somewhere in the forest, an entire 1:23 [SPEAKER_00]: those stories aren't true. 1:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Not exactly. 1:28 [SPEAKER_00]: What really happened to Riceville is in some ways more unsettling than any ghost story. 1:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Because it could happen to any town, anywhere, that bets its future on a single industry. 1:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back, friend, to hometown history. 1:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past, to uncover how local stories shaped the world. 1:58 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters, and today we're exploring the legend of Riceville, Maine, a tannery town where everyone supposedly vanished overnight, and the far more human truth behind 2:14 [SPEAKER_00]: To understand what happened to Riceville, you need to understand what the town was and what it depended on. 2:21 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1879, a company called F. Shaw and Brothers established what they called a bark extract works. 2:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Deep in the forest of Hancock County Main, Township, 39, that was its official name, just a number on a map in the middle of nowhere, but it became quite a lot more than that. 2:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The operations started small, workers peeled bark from himlock trees, and processed it into Tannen. 3:05 [SPEAKER_00]: By 1880, census records show just 10 people living there. 3:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Rough men doing rough work in the main wilderness. 3:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Then the Tannery grew. 3:17 [SPEAKER_00]: By 1890, Riceville had exploded to 136 residents. 3:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine that 136 people in a place you couldn't reach without traveling miles, down 3:34 [SPEAKER_00]: They had a general store, a boarding house, for single workers, a school where children learned their letters, there was even a baseball team. 3:46 [SPEAKER_00]: These folks kept to themselves, worked brutal hours, 12-hour days, 6 days a week, and built something resembling a community, in the most unlikely place. 3:59 [SPEAKER_00]: But Riceville was vulnerable, every single person in that town depended on the tannery. 4:07 [SPEAKER_00]: If the tannery prospered, they prospered. 4:10 [SPEAKER_00]: If they failed, well, we'll get to that. 4:15 [SPEAKER_00]: The first crack appeared in 1883, F. Shaw and Brothers, the Boston-based company that owned Riceville, and dozens of other tanories across Maine, collapsed spectacularly. 4:30 [SPEAKER_00]: It was quite a shock to Boston financial circles. 4:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The company owed $8.5 million in 1883 money, that's an 4:43 [SPEAKER_00]: The rice field operation limped along under creditor management for over a decade. 4:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The workers kept showing up. 4:52 [SPEAKER_00]: The families kept their children in school. 4:55 [SPEAKER_00]: But the corporate instability cast a long shadow. 5:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Then in 1896, New Owners arrived. 5:05 [SPEAKER_00]: A group called Buzzle in Rise, Tannin Company purchased the operation and upgraded it from a simple bark extraction facility to a full-fledged tannery. 5:16 [SPEAKER_00]: They would process buffalo hides into sole leather for the shoe industry. 5:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Two years later, in 1898, James Rice and his brother's Francis X and John took full control, forming the Hancock leather company. 5:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The town was officially named Riceville, in James Rice's honor. 5:39 [SPEAKER_00]: They even established a post office, 5:43 [SPEAKER_00]: For the families living there, it must have felt like stability at last. 5:48 [SPEAKER_00]: By 1900, census records painted a detailed picture, 75 residents, 11 families with 35 children between them. 5:58 [SPEAKER_00]: 18 single workers living in the company boarding house, 21 pupils enrolled in the school house, 6:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Students, named Priest, Peterson, Willett, Buck, and Cole, these weren't statistics. 6:17 [SPEAKER_00]: These were people building lives in a place most of us would consider impossible to reach. 6:24 [SPEAKER_00]: And in 1902, the Hancock Lather Company invested $50,000 in facility improvements. 6:33 [SPEAKER_00]: business was good. 6:35 [SPEAKER_00]: The future looked secure. 6:39 [SPEAKER_00]: Company towns never have secure futures. 6:44 [SPEAKER_00]: December 30, 1906, a Saturday morning, winter and mane, cold, dark, the kind of cold that seeps through walls and makes your breath hang visible in the air. 6:59 [SPEAKER_00]: In the rollhouse, the building where workers gave leather, it's final finish using brass plates and mechanical rollers. 7:11 [SPEAKER_00]: According to newspaper accounts in the Banger Daily Commercial, that lantern exploded. 7:19 [SPEAKER_00]: The fire spread fast. 7:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The main tannery building, the sawmill, the engine and boiler house, multiple outbuildings. 7:30 [SPEAKER_00]: By the time it was over, the entire industrial heart of rice fill, 7:37 [SPEAKER_00]: The general store survived. 7:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The boarding house survived, but the tannery. 7:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The only reason anyone lived in township 39 in the first place was gone. 7:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The newspaper reported that roughly 25 men were employed at the time. 7:57 [SPEAKER_00]: It also reported that the Hancock leather company was now considering the matter of rebuilding the plant, but has reached no conclusion as of yet. 8:08 [SPEAKER_00]: They never rebuilt. 8:10 [SPEAKER_00]: James Rice owned at least one other tannery that had also burned under what sources describe as similar circumstances. 8:19 [SPEAKER_00]: His amherst operation had gone up in flames just a few years earlier. 8:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Was it insurance fraud? 8:27 [SPEAKER_00]: The historical record doesn't say definitively, but the pattern is notable. 8:34 [SPEAKER_00]: What we do know is this, the owners took their insurance payout, and the workers of rice fill were left with nothing. 8:42 [SPEAKER_00]: No jobs, no industry, no reason to stay in a place that had never been easy to reach, even when it was thriving. 8:52 [SPEAKER_00]: what happened next isn't dramatic. 8:57 [SPEAKER_00]: It isn't mysterious. 8:58 [SPEAKER_00]: It's simply economics. 9:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine you're one of those families. 9:03 [SPEAKER_00]: You've got children to feed. 9:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Your husband worked at the 9:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Now that employer doesn't exist, you can't eat scenery, you can't pay for supplies with community spirit. 9:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The Exodus was gradual. 9:25 [SPEAKER_00]: A family leaves this month, another family the next. 9:29 [SPEAKER_00]: The single workers from the boarding house scattered first, they had less tying them down. 9:36 [SPEAKER_00]: The families with roots take longer, but eventually they go to. 9:43 [SPEAKER_00]: The post office closed in 1906 right after the fire. 9:48 [SPEAKER_00]: When census takers came through in 1910, they found exactly zero people living in township 39. 9:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Four years, that's all it took to erase a community of 75 souls from the map. 10:04 [SPEAKER_00]: The building stood for decades afterward, visitors in the 1920s and 30s photographed a large white farmhouse, a barn, a water tower, nature crept and slowly, trees reclaiming fields, vines climbing walls, floors rotting through. 10:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Today there's almost nothing left, stone foundations, a fence to cemetery, with according to those who visited, no readable headstones, parts of old wood stoves, the ghost of a road, running north along Buffalo stream, what you won't find is a mass grave, what you won't find is evidence of a plague, 10:55 [SPEAKER_00]: So where did the stories come from? 10:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The ones about bodies and the streets. 11:02 [SPEAKER_00]: The cholera epidemic that killed everyone overnight. 11:06 [SPEAKER_00]: The travelers who found an entire town dead. 11:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Those legends don't appear in any source until the late 1990s, nearly a century after Riceville was abandoned. 11:20 [SPEAKER_00]: In 2000, a group called the Banger Ghost Hunters made Riceville their first investigation. 11:28 [SPEAKER_00]: They'd heard the stories, a plague, a mass death, something supernatural. 11:35 [SPEAKER_00]: For nearly a decade, they searched. 11:39 [SPEAKER_00]: En herald Bubba Murray, the group's director, admitted in a 2009 newspaper interview. 11:46 [SPEAKER_00]: We were told about a cholera epidemic, a plague, but we were never able to confirm anything because there was nothing to confirm. 11:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The Ghost Hunters deserve credit for one thing. 12:00 [SPEAKER_00]: They discovered actual historical documents, a school program from 1900, listing 21 students. 12:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Since his records, showing 75 residents, and crucially, newspaper accounts from 1906 describing the fire. 12:20 [SPEAKER_00]: The evidence they found didn't support the legend, they'd come to investigate, 12:25 [SPEAKER_00]: is supported something far more ordinary, a company town that died when it's company died. 12:34 [SPEAKER_00]: But that is what makes the legend understandable, even if it isn't true. 12:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Riceville left almost no records behind. 12:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Most documents likely burned in the fire. 12:47 [SPEAKER_00]: The town was never incorporated, just a numbered township, an unorganized territory, 12:54 [SPEAKER_00]: The residents were working-class folks who didn't leave diaries or letters that survived. 13:01 [SPEAKER_00]: The cemetery has no readable markers. 13:05 [SPEAKER_00]: When you have gaps in the historical record, imagination fills them. 13:11 [SPEAKER_00]: An imagination prefers plague and mystery to the mundane tragedy of unemployment. 13:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Riceville wasn't unique, across Maine, across America, company towns rose and fell with the industries they served. 13:30 [SPEAKER_00]: The Shaw Brothers alone operated 39 Tanneries that eventually shuddered. 13:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Kingman Maine, Grand Lake Stream, dozens of communities that bet everything on a single employer and lost. 13:47 [SPEAKER_00]: What makes Riceville different is the legend that grew in its absence. 13:52 [SPEAKER_00]: The ghost story that replaced the real story. 13:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The plague that never happened overshadowing the very human crisis that did 14:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Today, if you're determined enough, you can still reach the site, drive northeast from millford main, take the logging roads for 20 sun miles, hike through swamps and beaver dams, and you might find those foundations in the forest. 14:21 [SPEAKER_00]: You might find that fence cemetery, with its silent, unmarked graves. 14:27 [SPEAKER_00]: but you won't find evidence of mass death. 14:31 [SPEAKER_00]: You won't hear phantom train whistles, despite what some websites claim. 14:37 [SPEAKER_00]: You'll find what's left when a town loses its reason to exist and the forest takes it back. 14:46 [SPEAKER_00]: 75 people lived in riceville at the turn of the 20th century. 14:50 [SPEAKER_00]: 35 of them were children. 14:54 [SPEAKER_00]: They had a school, a store, a community, and when the tannery burned on a December morning in 1906, they had a choice. 15:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Stay in a place with no future or start over somewhere else. 15:09 [SPEAKER_00]: a chose to leave. 15:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Every single one of them. 15:14 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's not a mystery. 15:16 [SPEAKER_00]: That's survival. 15:19 [SPEAKER_00]: That's the story of Riceville, a tannery town that burned, a community that scattered, and a legend that grew in the silence they left behind. 15:31 [SPEAKER_00]: If you found this story as haunting as I did, share it with someone who appreciates the difference between a good ghost story and the harder truth underneath. 15:42 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters, every hometown has a story. 15:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, it's a town that vanished not from plague, but from the simple arithmetic of economics. 15:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Good night, friend.
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