Dyea, Alaska: The Town That Lost a Race and Died of It

There is a cemetery in Southeast Alaska where almost every headstone shares the same date: April 3, 1898.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox takes us to a flat river delta near Skagway that was once home to 8,000 people. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, Dyea was the gateway to the brutal Chilkoot Pass—the "Golden Stairs" to wealth or ruin.

We explore the "Palm Sunday Avalanche," a disaster that buried dozens of stampeders under walls of white, and the subsequent rise of the railroad that ultimately rendered the town obsolete. It wasn't the mountain that killed Dyea; it was a surveyor’s decision ten miles away.

If you enjoyed this journey into Alaska’s "ghost" geography, please follow the show on Spotify to catch every stop on our map.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: A special thanks to Chloe Jones for the hauntingly beautiful score. Explore more of her work at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

Drive Thru Towns — Season 2 Trailer: Alaska

Welcome to Drive Thru Towns.

Season 2 is here — and we're heading somewhere bigger, wilder, and colder than anywhere we've been before.

Alaska.

This season, we leave the moss-draped back roads of Florida behind and drive north — all the way to the edge of the continent, and sometimes beyond it. We're talking about a town the earth swallowed whole in under five minutes. A road built in eight months by soldiers whose names were literally erased from the photographs. A village everyone abandoned — and nobody can fully explain why. A bunker city carved into a mountain by a Cold War military that needed a secret. And the very top of the world, where America simply runs out of road.

Alaska has always been the place where history went to disappear. This season, we're going to find it.

This season covers:

• The earthquake ghost town of Portage — swallowed by the tides of Turnagain Arm in 1964
• Dyea — the gold rush boomtown that lost a race to its neighbor and vanished inside a single season
• Whittier — the secret WWII bunker city where most of the town still lives under one roof
• Ninilchik — a Russian colonial settlement where an Imperial-era dialect of Russian is still spoken today
• The ALCAN — the highway that connected a continent, built on a history it spent 75 years trying to erase
• Utqiagvik (Barrow) — 1,500 years of continuous habitation at the top of the world, where America ends and the dark begins
• And much more

Season 2 of Drive Thru Towns drops soon. Follow now so you don't miss the first episode.

Connect with the ShowHost: Andrew WilcoxFollow for more episodes: [Click Follow on Spotify]Instagram: @50statefamilyLinkedIn: Andrew WilcoxEmail: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

CreditsSpecial thanks to Chloe Jones for the music: chloejonesmusic.co.uk

Havana & Quincy: The Millionaires of Shade Tobacco

Welcome to Drive Thru Towns. In this episode, we travel the rolling hills of Gadsden County to explore Havana and Quincy, Florida—two towns built on the "green gold" of shade tobacco and a single, legendary investment that changed the face of the American South.

This isn't just a story about farming; it’s a masterclass in risk, vision, and the "fads" that end up defining centuries. We pull over to look at:

• The Shade Tobacco Empire: How a specific, fragile leaf grown under massive tapestries of cheesecloth turned Gadsden County into the cigar-wrapper capital of the world.

• The Coca-Cola Millionaires: The incredible true story of Pat Munroe, the Quincy banker who pressured his neighbors to buy shares of a "failing" soda company during the Great Depression—turning a small Florida town into the wealthiest per-capita community in the United States.

• The "Fad" That Lasted: A personal look at the skepticism of those who passed on the Coca-Cola stock, including the host's own family history at the Salem cemetery.

• The Architecture of Wealth: From the grand Victorian "Coca-Cola Mansions" of Quincy to the repurposed tobacco barns of Havana that now house the state's premier antique collections.

• A Landscape of Ghosts: Moving through the "Havana Curves" where the ghosts of the tobacco industry still whisper from the shadows of abandoned curing barns.

Havana and Quincy remind us that history is often made by the things we can’t see coming—and that sometimes, the best move you can make is betting on the thing everyone else calls a "fad."

Host: Andrew Wilcox

Follow for more episodes: [Click Follow on Spotify]

Instagram: @50statefamily

LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

Special thanks to Chloe Jones for the music: chloejonesmusic.co.uk