Billmeyer and the White Cliffs of Conoy

In this episode, we explore the vanished company town of Billmeyer, Pennsylvania, and the strange white cliffs it left behind along the Susquehanna River. What begins as the story of a small lime-burning operation grows into a much larger tale of industrial ambition, as Billmeyer becomes a booming quarry town whose limestone and dolomite helped fuel the steel industry, support wartime production, and build major pieces of Pennsylvania infrastructure. 

The episode also follows the human side of that rise and fall, from the rough culture of an isolated company town to the hardships of the 1918 flu quarantine, when residents were so cut off that supplies had to be thrown from passing trains. As the industry faded, the town slowly emptied, its homes and businesses disappeared, and the landscape was reclaimed by water, forest, and time. 

Today, little remains of Billmeyer except foundations, memories, and the haunting white cliffs of Conoy, formed from generations of industrial waste. More than a ghost town story, this episode is about labor, geology, impermanence, and the strange ways abandoned industry can become part of the natural landscape. 

To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Have you ever been like walking through the woods, maybe on a weekend hike just to clear your head, and you stumble across a place that feels completely out of time?

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Oh, yeah. Like you've stepped into a different era.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Exactly. Or honestly, maybe even out of this world. So just imagine this scenario for a second. You are walking through a dense, um very traditional Pennsylvania forest.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Right, lots of greenery.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Yeah. You've got that thick green canopy overhead, birds are chirping, the air smells like damp earth and pine needles. It's exactly what you expect.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

The classic hiking experience.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Totally. And then suddenly the trees just they just break. And you are standing on the edge of this towering bright white, chalky lunar landscape.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Just right there in the woods.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Just smack in the middle of the woods, dropping off into a dark river. I mean, it literally looks like a piece of the moon broke off, plummeted through the atmosphere, and embedded itself right in the banks of the Susquehanna River.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Aaron Powell It really is a profoundly jarring visual.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Because, you know, the human brain just doesn't quite know what to do with it at first glance.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Aaron Powell It's just so out of place.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Exactly. Blinding white cliffs simply do not belong in the middle of the rural Pennsylvania wilderness. It just, well, it violates your geographical expectations.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Aaron Powell Right. Your brain immediately says, you know, this shouldn't be here. And today that is exactly where we are taking you on this deep dive.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

To the ghost town of Bill Meyer.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

Yep, Bill Meyer, Pennsylvania, and the really bizarre white cliffs of Connoy. So um I was looking at this incredible aerial photograph from 1950.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Oh, that photo is fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 1:37

It's wild, right? You can literally see an entire town squeeze between this massive black void in the earth and the river. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Just completely boxed in.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Yeah. And it got me digging into this stack of sources. We've got local history blogs, a trail guide, um, even a transcript from an old historical video about the area. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

There's a heartwarming local news article, too, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:57

Yeah, that one really got to me. We'll get to that later. But I wanted to do this deep dive because this wasn't just like a quirky little settlement.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

Aaron Powell This was a town that possessed thousands of residents. I mean, it was a town that quite literally fueled the American war machine, and then it completely vanished into thin air.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Aaron Ross Powell And to really grasp how an entire industrial hub can just evaporate like that, you have to look at the physical constraints of where they built it.

SPEAKER_02 2:20

Aaron Powell Which goes back to that aerial photo.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Aaron Powell Exactly. That aerial photograph you mentioned is vital here. If you're listening, try to visualize this landscape in stark black and white.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Aaron Powell Okay, painting the picture.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Aaron Ross Powell So at the very bottom left of the frame, you have the Suscana River. It's wide, dark, imposing.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

And running exactly parallel to the riverbank, just hugging the water, is a heavy set of railroad tracks.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

It creates this hard, unnatural boundary line, right? Water on the left, iron rails on the right.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Precisely. And sandwiched in that incredibly narrow margin between the riverbank and those railroad tracks, are the clustered buildings of Bill Meyer.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Barely any room to breathe.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

None. Now move your eye just inland from those tracks. Taking up a massive portion of the center of the photograph is a gigantic, dark, flooded quarry pit.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

It seriously looks like a black abyss carved out of the earth.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

It does. And above that pit, cutting across the top right of the photo, is Route 441, which is lined with your typical sprawling Pennsylvania agricultural fields.

SPEAKER_02 3:22

The classic farm country.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Right. And the township is Connie, situated in what some of the older local sources uniquely spell as Lancaster County.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

Oh yeah, I saw that. Lancaster with a K.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Yeah. It's a phonetic, historical spelling of Lancaster.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

But you know, the geography is really the defining feature here. Yeah. Billmeyer was entirely boxed in.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Right. It's trapped. I mean, the river is a wall on one side, and the sheer drop into a quarry is a wall on the other.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Aaron Ross Powell It was an inescapable geographic pocket, completely isolated from the sprawling, peaceful farmland just up the road.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Aaron Ross Powell So the people there were living in a literal and metaphorical pressure cooker.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

But before we get to the pressure cooker, we have to look at the ingredients that went into it, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:04

It's the foundation of the boom.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

Yeah, because long before this area was a roaring center of industry, boxed in by tracks and flooded pits, it was just a quiet hillside.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Going way back.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

I'm talking about the early 1840s. There's no massive town, no lunar landscape, just, well, a few small fires burning on a hill.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

And those fires represent the geological gold mine beneath the topsoil. The limestone. Right. The lower Susquehanna River Valley happens to be incredibly rich in pure calcium limestone. Yeah. And in 1847, a local businessman named John Haldeman realized what he was standing on.

SPEAKER_02 4:40

But he started really small, didn't he?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Exceptionally small. He built just four lime kilns on the property.

SPEAKER_02 4:46

Just four kilns? That seems almost quaint.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Very localized.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

Like a guy baking bread in his backyard. But what exactly was he doing? I mean, why is pure calcium limestone so valuable that you would set up an entire business just to burn it?

SPEAKER_00 5:00

That's the key part.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

Because I feel like we need a quick chemistry lesson here. I've seen limestone, it's just gray rock. Why are we throwing it into an oven?

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Well, it's a great question because the burning isn't to get rid of the rock, it's to transform it chemically. The process is called calcination.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Calcination, okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Right. So when you take calcium carbonate, which is what limestone is, and you heat it to extremely high temperatures.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

How high are we talking?

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Around 900 degrees Celsius or 1650 degrees Fahrenheit, a major chemical reaction occurs.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Wow. That is hot.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

The heat drives off carbon dioxide gas, and what you're left with is calcium oxide. Historically, this is known as quicklime.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

Okay, so you cook the rock to fundamentally change its molecular structure.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

But who wants quicklime in 1847?

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Local farmers mostly.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Wait, farmers for crops.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Yeah. Quicklime is highly alkaline. If you have soil that is too acidic, which is a really common problem in agriculture because acidic soil prevents plants from absorbing nutrients.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Right, so you spread this lime over your fields. It neutralizes the soil acidity, essentially unlocking the nutrients so your crops can grow.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

That makes total sense.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

It was also sold to builders who mixed it with water and sand to create lime mortar, plaster, and whitewash for buildings.

SPEAKER_02 6:18

So this is a hyper-local economy. I mean, John Haldeman is digging up local rocks, chemically altering them in four little stone ovens, and selling the product to the farmer down the street to fix his tomato yields.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Very solid localized business model.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

And he's doing well. The sources say those four little kilns were pumping out 30,000 bushels of lime a year.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

He was definitely successful. And Haldeman held onto it for decades, right through to 1860.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

But then things change.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Right. Eventually he starts leasing the operation out. From 1870 to 1894, the quarry changes hands a few times. Just bouncing around. Exactly. The operation hums along, but it doesn't explode. The match that sets this whole thing on fire doesn't actually come from Coney Ann Township.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Oh, where is it from?

SPEAKER_00 7:03

It comes from across the river in York, Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_02 7:06

Right. Enter a guy named Johnny Baker. The historical records describe him as an ambitious lime burner.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

It's a fantastic title.

SPEAKER_02 7:13

Which is such a good title, by the way. But Baker seems to be the one who realizes that this quaint little fertilizer operation could be something, you know, completely different.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Aaron Ross Powell Baker was a visionary in terms of scale, absolutely. But the catalyst for his involvement was actually familial.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

How so?

SPEAKER_00 7:30

In 1887, he married a woman named Mary Billmeyer.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Ah, there's the name.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Exactly. That marriage functionally merged two ambitious families. Two years later, in 1889, Baker partnered with his new brother-in-law, George S. Billmeyer.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Keeping it in the family.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Yep. Together, they formed the Wrightsville Lime Company. They start aggressively buying up properties, expanding their footprint, testing the waters.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

And then comes the big move.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Right. In 1896, they make their master stroke.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

They sweep in and buy all of Haldeman's original properties in Conoy Township. Every kiln, the entire quarry, the surrounding land, they completely take over the valley.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

And they rebrand the entire operation.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

A total corporate makeover.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

The company becomes the J.E. Baker Company, and they name this new, rapidly expanding quarry town, Bill Meyer, as a tribute to Baker's wife and his business partner's family.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

Okay, let's unpack this for a second, because I look at this transition in 1896 and it feels like watching a modern corporate takeover.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

It really does.

SPEAKER_02 8:32

It's like someone buying a cute, family-run roadside farm stand and overnight transforming it into a massive multinational agricultural conglomerate.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

That's a perfect analogy.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

But what I don't fully understand is the timing. Why did Baker suddenly want to scale up so aggressively right at the end of the 19th century?

SPEAKER_00 8:50

It wasn't about fertilizer anymore.

SPEAKER_02 8:52

Right. I mean, he wasn't just planning to sell more lime to local farmers.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

Not at all. To understand Baker's aggression, you have to zoom out and look at the macroeconomics of the United States in the late 1890s.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

The big picture.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yes. The entire nation was undergoing a fundamental metamorphosis, and that metamorphosis was built on one material. Steel. Steel. The great American steel boom.

SPEAKER_02 9:14

Right, because cities were suddenly building upwards with skyscrapers instead of just outward.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Exactly. Railroads were laying down heavier tracks to connect the coasts. Engineers were designing massive suspension bridges. The entire country was hungry for metal.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

But here is the catch.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

You cannot make high-quality steel without limestone. And more specifically, for the high-intensity processes they were developing, you desperately needed a specialized type of rock called dolomite.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Okay, pause here. Because this is a crucial piece of the puzzle. I know steel comes from iron ore. Right. So where does dolomite, this specific type of rock from a sleepy town in Pennsylvania, fit into making a steel skyspiper? Does it make the metal harder?

SPEAKER_00 10:00

It doesn't harden it, actually. It cleans the metal. Cleans it. Yes. When you melt down iron ore to make steel, the raw iron is full of impurities. Things like sulfur, phosphorus, and silica.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

Stuff you don't want in your building.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Exactly. If you leave those impurities in, your steel will be brittle. It will crack. A bridge built with brittle steel will collapse.

SPEAKER_02 10:18

Yikes. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

So you need to extract those impurities. Dolomite acts as what metallurgists call a flux.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

A flux, like it creates a flow.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Sort of. When you introduce dolomite into the molten iron, the extreme heat causes it to break down.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Okay, I'm falling.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

The chemical components of the dolomite actively seek out and bond with the sulfur and phosphorus impurities in the liquid metal.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

Once they bond, they form a substance called slag. Because slag is lighter than liquid steel, it floats directly to the top of the vat.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Like foam on a soup.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Exactly. Then the steelworkers can literally just skim the slag off the surface, leaving behind pure, incredibly strong steel.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

That is brilliant. It's basically like throwing a chemical sponge into a vat of liquid metal, and the sponge soaks up all the garbage and floats to the top.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

A chemical sponge is a great way to visualize it.

SPEAKER_02 11:10

So John E. Baker looks at his newly acquired quarry and realizes he's not sitting on a fertilizer plant. He is sitting on millions of tons of industrial sponges that the biggest companies in America desperately need.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Precisely. He immediately added a massive limestone crushing venture to the operation.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Ramping it up.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

He wasn't just slowly burning lime in four ovens anymore. He was industrializing the extraction of the earth itself. He was preparing to feed the beasts of American industry.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

But the beast was about to get much, much bigger, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 11:44

Because the steel boom of the 1890s was just the appetizer. What completely altered the destiny of Bill Meyer and supercharged its production to a level that is almost hard to comprehend was an international crisis.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

World War I, 1914 to 1918.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

Right. When that war kicked off, the global demand for steel went completely parabolic.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Off the charts.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

The sources we have point out that iron and steel companies were responsible for manufacturing basically everything a soldier needed to survive on the battlefield.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

It wasn't just the big items.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

Exactly. We aren't just talking about big things like the armor for early tanks or the hulls of dreadnought ships. We are talking about the steel shanks in their trench boots.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

The metal for their helmets.

SPEAKER_02 12:28

Every single rifle, every bullet casing, every artillery shell, the sheer tonnage of metal required to sustain a global mechanized conflict was unprecedented in human history. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

And that unprecedented demand created an immediate, terrifying vulnerability in the American supply chain.

SPEAKER_02 12:46

This is where it gets crazy.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

This is where international geopolitics directly slams into this tiny town on the Susquehanna River. Before World War I, the American steel industry relied almost exclusively on a mineral called magnesite. Yes, to line their massive open hearth furnaces. And they imported almost all of that magnesite from Austria.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Aaron Powell Here's where it gets really interesting. That is a massive problem when a global war breaks out against, you know, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and naval blockades go up.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

A catastrophic problem. The international trade routes entirely collapsed.

SPEAKER_02 13:20

Just shut down overnight.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

America was completely cut off from its Austrian magnesite supply.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

Wait, let me make sure I understand the mechanics here because I get using dolomite as a sponge to clean the steel. But you're saying they needed this Austrian magnesite to line the furnaces.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

Why? Can't you just melt iron in a big iron pot?

SPEAKER_00 13:38

No, because open hearth steel furnaces operate at temperatures exceeding 1600 degrees Celsius, around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh wow. If you melt steel inside a normal metal container, the container itself will melt. It's like trying to boil water in a cup made of ice.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Ah, okay. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

You need a material that can withstand unimaginable heat without losing its structural integrity. That is called a refractory material.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

Okay, refractory material.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

The steel industry used magnesite bricks and crushed magnesite to build the floors and walls of these furnaces, creating an insulating shield. Without it, the furnaces would literally melt themselves into a puddle of slag.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

This is wild. I mean, I'm thinking about the modern supply chain shocks we've lived through recently.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

It's very similar.

SPEAKER_02 14:26

When the pandemic hit, suddenly we couldn't get semiconductors from Taiwan, and the entire global auto industry just ground to a halt. You couldn't buy a car because one tiny chip was missing. This sounds exactly the same just a century earlier. The entire US war machine, the ships, the guns, the helmets, is about to grind to a halt because they can't get specialized heat-resistant dirt from Austria.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

It is the exact same concept of a critical supply chain choke point. The American steel industry was in a full-blown panic.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

I bet.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

But the J.E. Baker company saw the crisis and realized they were sitting on the solution. If we connect this to the bigger picture, the rock they were blasting out of the cliffs at Billmeyer wasn't just standard limestone.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

It was special.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

It was the purest carbonate rock in the entire region. It was incredibly rich in high quality dolomite.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

The famous Donegal dolomite.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Yes. Baker stepped up and proved that processed Donegal dolomite could serve as a highly effective domestic substitute for Austrian magnesite.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

So they didn't need Austria anymore.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Right. They could crush it, burn it, and use it as the basic refractory material to patch and build the bottoms of those open hearth furnaces. Overnight, Bill Meyer became the essential ingredient keeping the nation's wartime factories running.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

Just think about the butterfly effect of that. You have millions of troops dug into trenches in Europe, a complete restructuring of the world order, and a critical linchpin keeping the American factories producing the weapons is just this isolated tiny town in Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Staggering.

SPEAKER_02 15:59

It really is. I mean, if Bill Meyer doesn't happen to have that exact geological purity of rock, does the U.S. steel industry stall? Do the Allies struggle to arm themselves? It really shows how fragile global supply chains were even back then.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

It completely shifts your perspective on how wars are won. It's not just strategy on the battlefield, it's geology and logistics. And to meet that sudden, insatiable national demand, the physical scale of the operation at Bill Meyer had to undergo a violent metamorphosis.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

They had to grow fast.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Remember John Haldeman's Four Little Ovens?

SPEAKER_02 16:33

Yeah, the bread ovens.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

That era was over. To supply the war effort, the workforce swelled to over 700 men.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

700.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

The plant was aggressively expanded until it boasted 10 massive pot kilns and 62 flame kilns.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

62 flame kilns? Wait, how is a flame kiln different from those original four ovens?

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Well, the original kilns were batch processors. You'd load them up, fire them, let them cool, empty them out. It's slow.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

Okay, so a lot of downtime.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Right. Flame kilns were designed for continuous, relentless industrial production. In a flame kiln, the firebox is kept separate from the stone.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

The heat is drawn up into the shaft where the limestone is continuously fed from the top. As the rock drops down through the inferno, it calcenes, and the finished product is continuously drawn out the bottom.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

So it never stops.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Never. It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

SPEAKER_02 17:24

So you have over 70 of these massive industrial ovens burning around the clock in this tiny boxed-in sliver of land.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

I'm trying to imagine the sensory experience of just standing in this town during the war. It must have been like hell on earth.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Aaron Powell The historical accounts describe it as exactly that. You have to layer the sounds and the sights.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Just the noise alone.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Deep in the earth, you have the concussive chest thumping booms of dynamite blasting apart the bedrock.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Then you have the massive rotary stone crushers. These were giant iron machines designed to chew up boulders and grind them into gravel. The screeching and grinding of iron on stone was deafening.

SPEAKER_02 18:02

And the trains, too.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Yeah. You had crude, heavy carts filled with quarried rock clanking relentlessly along the narrow gauge tracks.

SPEAKER_02 18:10

And above all of that noise, the heat.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

The kilns created an absolute inferno. And because they were constantly crushing and burning rock, the air was entirely saturated with thick, white, suffocating dust.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

Breathing that in all day.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

It coated everything. The buildings, the trees, the workers' lungs. It was a nonstop industrial roar in a constant state of sweat, dirt, and danger.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

Which naturally brings up the human element. Because you can't have 700 men working around the clock in an inferno without building a place for them to sleep, eat, and live.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

They had to live somewhere.

SPEAKER_02 18:44

Right. And you certainly can't cram that many exhausted, dirt-covered people into an isolated pressure cooker without a very specific kind of culture developing.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

And that is the sociological side of Bill Meyer.

SPEAKER_02 18:54

Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

As the workforce grew, the town's population peaked at about 1,000 residents through the 1910s and into the 1920s. And because they were so geographically isolated from everything else, it evolved into a classic, fully functional company town.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

So when you say company town, my mind immediately goes to those brutal old coal mining towns in West Virginia.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

The classic stereotype.

SPEAKER_02 19:19

Yeah, the ones where workers are basically indentured servants paid in company script that they can only spend at the company store, effectively trapping them in debt forever. Was Bill Meyer that predatory, or was it a different model?

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Aaron Powell It was a more paternalistic but equally controlling model. The J.E. Baker Company owned the physical infrastructure of their lives.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Aaron Ross Powell They owned the houses.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Yep. They built rows of simple, identical wood frame housing along the main street for the workers and their families, which the company rather grandly named Society Row.

SPEAKER_02 19:49

Society Row. Very fancy for a dust bowl.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Right. They built a schoolhouse so the workers' children could be educated on site. They built a small chapel for Sunday worship. They even built a massive boarding house to warehouse the hundreds of single, unmarried men who came looking for wages.

SPEAKER_02 20:06

And at the center of it all, the company store.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

Yes. The Karoji General Store. But interestingly, rather than running it directly to exploit the workers with scripts, the company leased it to a local Bainbridge merchant named William W. Mundorf.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Oh, a third party.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Right. And he ended up running that store for an astounding 47 years. You basically watched the entire life cycle of the town from behind the cash register.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

Almost half a century. I mean, he must have seen an incredible cross-section of humanity walk through those doors.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Definitely.

SPEAKER_02 20:36

Because according to the sources, the workforce in Billmeyer was surprisingly diverse for rural Pennsylvania in the 1910s.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

It was remarkably cosmopolitan, but born out of sheer necessity.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

How so?

SPEAKER_00 20:48

The work was so grueling, it was heavy, filthy, intensely dangerous labor with notoriously long 12 to 14 hour shifts and relatively low pay. Local farm boys didn't want those jobs if they could avoid it. So the company had to cast a wide net to recruit laborers.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

The classic story of American industry, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

Exactly. The workforce became fully integrated. You had a large population of African American workers who had moved north during the early waves of the Great Migration, seeking industrial wages away from the Jim Crow South.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

You had a massive influx of recent European immigrants from a variety of countries, many of whom barely spoke English, stepping right off the boat and into the quarry.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

And you had the regional laborers from surrounding counties who were desperate for work. All of these distinct cultures were thrown together into this tiny isolated sliver of land united by common backbreaking labor.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

But let's not romanticize the melting pot here. The historical accounts are very clear. The culture in Billmeyer was incredibly rough.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Very rough.

SPEAKER_02 21:53

I mean, you have a thousand people trapped between a river and a rock wall, breathing dust, working around explosives, and making decent wages. They worked Unimaginably hard and they played just as hard.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

The town actually earned a notorious nickname across Lancaster County.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

What was it?

SPEAKER_00 22:08

The rough town out of sight by the river.

unknown 22:10

Oof.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

Out of sight by the river. That sounds ominous.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

It was a well-earned reputation. The sources note that heavy drinking, illegal gambling, and vicious physical fights were simply standard weekend entertainment.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

Just blowing off steam.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

In the early chaotic days of the town's expansion, there were even several unsolved murders. It was a rowdy, pugnacious, highly combustible environment.

SPEAKER_02 22:36

The details about their paydays are almost comical in their chaos.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

Oh, the payday stories are famous.

SPEAKER_02 22:41

When the men finally got their wages, they would flood out of Billmeer looking for a release valve. They would hike up and crowd into the pubs in the neighboring town of Bainbridge. Right. Or, and this is my absolute favorite historical detail, they would literally rent small boats, row across the dark Susquehanna River just to go drink in the bars in York County, and then row back.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

You have to admire the dedication to a night out.

SPEAKER_02 23:03

Right. Just rowing across a huge river drunk.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

But it caused massive civic problems. A descendant of a family who owned a boarding house in Billmire recalled that the brawls on paydays became so massive, so destructive, and so disruptive to the town's productivity that the J.E. Baker Company executives had to formally intervene.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

But they couldn't just ban alcohol, right? I mean, these guys would have rioted and burned the kilns down.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Exactly. Prohibition in a company town of dynamite wielding men is a bad idea.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Terrible idea.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

So they instituted an administrative solution. They literally staggered the pay weeks for different demographic groups of workers.

SPEAKER_02 23:43

That is hilarious. A staggered payroll system designed purely as a riot control measure.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

It worked, though.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

It's a 1920s HR nightmare. We can't pay the drillers and the crushers on the same Friday, or they'll burn down the general store.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

It really highlights the extreme tightrope the company was walking. But there is a fascinating contradiction in how the company treated these men.

SPEAKER_02 24:04

Yeah, I was thinking about this. There's a weird contradiction here, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:07

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_02 24:08

Well, on one hand, you have this incredibly dangerous, grueling environment with literal bar brawls, this ruthless industrial grind where life is cheap. But on the other hand, you also have the company owner, John Baker, doing something surprisingly compassionate.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

Yes. The burials.

SPEAKER_02 24:24

Right, buying plots in the local Bainbridge Cemetery specifically to honor his deceased workers and their families who couldn't afford a funeral. It's this strange mix of a ruthless industrial grind and paternalistic company town care.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

It's that strange paternalistic web of the company town. They own your labor, they own your house, and they own your grave.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

It's dark, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

And all of that interpersonal drama, the brawls, the burials, the grueling shifts, it was all magnified by their geography. This forced a diverse group of people into a tight-knit community. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 24:56

The isolation really amplified everything.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Aaron Powell Exactly. Only the bravest or most foolhardy dared to venture beyond the barrier at the end of the road, one local history book noted. When all of your frustrations, your exhaustion, and your vices have nowhere to go outward, they turn inward.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

But that isolated, inward-facing pressure cooker was eventually tested by something far bigger than a bar fight or a war in Europe.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Something microscopic.

SPEAKER_02 25:21

Exactly. It was tested by an invisible biological threat that swept the entire globe. It proved that even a town out of sight wasn't entirely immune to the outside world.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

The 1918 influenza pandemic.

SPEAKER_02 25:35

Yes. The 1918 flu, which killed tens of millions of people worldwide, found its way into the narrow valley of Bilmire.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

And it hit them incredibly hard.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

Because of how densely packed the worker housing was and how poor the ventilation was in that dust-choked valley, the virus just spread like wildfire.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

The response from the local government was extreme.

SPEAKER_02 25:57

What did they do?

SPEAKER_00 25:58

The entire town of Bilmire was placed under strict, unyielding quarantine. No one was permitted to leave the town limit.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

Locked down completely.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

And the outside world, terrified of the outbreak, absolutely refused to enter. But during the height of the epidemic, the train conductors refused to halt. They wouldn't even touch the brakes as they approached the town.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

The visual of this is practically cinematic in its bleakness. I mean, to keep the town alive, to get them their basic food supplies and their mail, the train conductors literally had to heave packages and sacks of flour out of the open doors of moving train cars as they sped past the platform.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Just throwing it out the door.

SPEAKER_02 26:39

Imagine the reality of that. Imagine being a mother in Billmire, trapped in a house with sick children, completely boxed in by a dark river and a quarantine line, walking down to the tracks to catch a sack of food thrown from a train that is too terrified of you to even slow down.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

It is a devastating illustration of their vulnerability. They fuel the nation's war, but when disease struck, they were entirely cut off and left to fend for themselves.

SPEAKER_02 27:06

Left on their own.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Yet, despite the isolation and the tragedy of the epidemic, the community Bill Meyer was remarkably resilient.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

They made it through.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

They survived the quarantine. They bounced back. As the nation recovered from both the First World War and the flu, Bill Meyer's operations didn't just resume, they shifted focus to match the new era.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

Right, because once the war ended, the massive demand for steel armor and artillery shells obviously dropped.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

The military contracted.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

But America in the 1920s was entering a massive domestic boom. They were building roads, bridges, and infrastructure, and the stone they were pulling out of the earth in Bill Meyer pivoted from fueling global destruction to building the very fabric of Pennsylvania itself.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

And we see the physical legacy of Bill Meyer's post-war era spread out across the county today.

SPEAKER_02 27:56

Yeah, the bridges.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

The stone from their quarries was contracted to build the massive Shocksmill Railroad Bridge. That bridge was a vital heavy-duty component of the Enola Low Grade Freight Line, which fundamentally connected the industrial hubs of Philadelphia and Harrisburg.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

Which was actually started back in 1905, right. They had been supplying infrastructure for a while. Aaron Powell Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

They had a history of it.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:19

And then a few years later, in the late 20s, they supplied the hundreds of thousands of tons of stone required for the Route 462 Veterans Memorial Bridge.

SPEAKER_02 28:29

Also known as the Columbia Wrightsville Bridge.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Yes, which was completed in 1930 and was an engineering marvel of its time.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

So what does this all mean? I reflect on the irony here, and it's almost painful to think about.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

The irony of the bridges?

SPEAKER_02 28:42

Yeah. You have these workers who, just a few years prior, were physically trapped during a quarantine. They were literally catching their mail from speeding trains because they were entirely cut off from the freedom of movement that society enjoyed.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Right, they couldn't leave.

SPEAKER_02 28:57

Yet the stone they were mining with their bare hands in that deafening inferno heat was being used to construct the massive structural bridges that connected the rest of the state. They were breaking their backs to build the very infrastructure of travel and movement that they themselves couldn't utilize.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

What's fascinating here is the resilience of the community, but also that poignant, almost tragic irony. The town wasn't just a localized pocket of labor. It was a foundational pillar for modernizing the state's infrastructure. The sweat and the health of those workers are quite literally cemented into the massive stone arches that thousands of people still drive over today.

SPEAKER_02 29:36

Completely oblivious to where that stone came from.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 29:39

But as with all towns built entirely on the extraction of a finite resource, there is an invisible clock ticking, right? The earth only has so much to give, and the market only cares as long as the extraction is cheap. Which brings us to the inevitable long, slow decay of Bill Meyer.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

The fatal turning point really arrived in the 1940s. The massive wartime demands of World War II were largely handled by different materials and newer technologies, and the local infrastructure boom had plateaued.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

So the demand just drops. The ultimate betrayal of the company town. The company just finds a better deal.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Precisely. They moved their capital and their operations to more modern, vastly more cost-effective script mining operations in states with cheaper overhead. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 30:36

Like Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Right. They packed up the future and left Bill Meyer holding the bag in the past.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

And the decline wasn't like a sudden explosion. It was a painful, agonizing withering away. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

A slow bleed.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

By 1954, a local newspaper article painted an incredibly bleak picture of the valley. The roaring workforce of over 700 men had completely evaporated. Only a skeleton crew of about 40 to 50 men remained to do basic low-level extraction.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Out of the hundreds of families that once crowded Society Row, only 18 families were left living in the deteriorating houses. The physical infrastructure of the community was collapsing in tandem with the population. The post office, which had once been the bustling vital hub of a thousand people, had been downgraded.

SPEAKER_02 31:26

Yeah, a journalist from the time noted that it was replaced by a sad row of 18 mailboxes standing by the road.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

That one detail, a sad row of 18 mailboxes, is so evocative.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

It perfectly captures the hollowing out of a community. You can almost hear the silence. Oh, right, the store owner.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

The guy who ran the company's store through the boom, the brawls, and the flu. After 47 years behind the counter, he finally packed up his inventory and prepared to close the doors for good.

SPEAKER_02 31:57

The heartbeat of the town was stopping.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

The final blow came in 1957. All mining operations officially ceased. Done. The kilns went cold. The last handful of workers were laid off and forced to leave the valley to look elsewhere for their livelihoods. The town was entirely abandoned. Finally, in 1961, the company made the decision to turn off the massive industrial pumps.

SPEAKER_02 32:19

And we have to remember the geography here.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Yes, the pit.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

They had dug a massive gaping crater into the earth right next to the water table of a major river. They had to run heavy pumps 24-7 for decades just to keep the quarry from filling with water so the men could work.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

Exactly. And the moment you turn those pumps off, nature takes over. The earth immediately reclaims what you took. The massive black pit, rapidly filled with over 70 feet of striking mineral-rich blue-green water.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

70 feet of water.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

The quarry was completely submerged.

SPEAKER_02 32:53

Which brings us to one of the most deeply moving pieces of source material we uncovered. It fast forwards the story decades later, to the summer of 2016. A man named Norm A. Tyson decides to return to Bill Meyer.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

Norm Tyson was 101 years old at the time of this visit, just weeks away from turning 102.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

Bonkers.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

He was the oldest living former employee of the J.E. Baker Company, and quite possibly the very last living employee to have actually worked on the site when it shuttered in 1957.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

He started working there way back in November 1939 as an electrician. He lived right there in a house on Society Row for 21 years with his wife. He raised his family there. He built his life around the rhythms of the crushers and the kilns.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

And in 2016, 58 years after he packed up and left, he comes back.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

He's dressed to the nines, a sharp white dress shirt, white pants, walking carefully with a glass cane, and he looks out over the landscape. What does a man see when he returns to the center of his universe six decades later?

SPEAKER_00 33:56

Well, he found the county's largest ghost town. But more tragically, he found an erased landscape. Erased. The sources note he was visibly disoriented, standing on the trail, trying to visually reconstruct the streets and the buildings in his mind. He kept shaking his head, apologizing to the reporters with him for his confusion, saying, Everything is different. I don't recognize nothing anymore.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

I can't shake that quote. I don't recognize nothing anymore.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

It's heartbreaking.

SPEAKER_02 34:21

Imagine returning to the place you lived and worked for two decades. Imagine the psychological weight of that. You return to the place where you spent the prime of your life, where you knew the name of every neighbor on your street, where you heard the constant, deafening roar of the crushers every day.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

The smell of the quick lime.

SPEAKER_02 34:39

Yeah. And it's all just gone. The chapel is gone, the houses are gone. The main street where a thousand rough, hardworking people used to walk is now just a paved, recreational hiking trail. It's as if nature just hit the delete button on his life's work.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

The only thing he could actually recognize was the waste material left behind.

SPEAKER_02 34:58

Just the cliffs.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

It is a stark, almost brutal reminder of the impermanence of our built environments. Nature is incredibly efficient at erasing human arrogance. The physical erasure of Bill Meyer was slow but absolute.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

Yeah, it didn't happen overnight.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

No. For decades after the closure, the village buildings just sat there in the shadow of the cliffs, abandoned and rotting. Vines wove through the stone foundations, roofs collapsed under heavy winter snows, floors rotted away.

SPEAKER_02 35:24

Just a decaying ghost town.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

It wasn't until 2007 that the township finally moved in to demolish the remaining highly dangerous derelict buildings. That demolition was the final nail. It transitioned Bill Meyer from a physical place you could explore into a sheer memory.

SPEAKER_02 35:43

So the town was officially gone.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

Once the industrial roar stopped, the whistling winds returned, the canopy closed back over the scar, and nature became the final permanent resident.

SPEAKER_02 35:54

And what nature couldn't completely swallow, it somehow transformed into something entirely alien. Which leads us perfectly back to the very beginning of our conversation, the visual that kicks off this whole mystery.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

The towering white ridges in the middle of the woods.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

The white cliffs of Connoy.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

Today, if you go down to the northwest Lancaster County River Trail, which is a beautiful, peaceful place to ride a bike, you are literally walking on the paved over corpse of Bill Myers' Main Street.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

That's a morbid but essential way to put it.

SPEAKER_02 36:23

And if you look closely, hit her in the thick forest right off the edge of the trail, completely swallowed by aggressive vines of poison ivy.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Or, as the trail guide cutely warns, leaves of three, let them be. Right.

SPEAKER_02 36:36

You can still find the crumbling cement foundations of the church. You can find the base of the post office where those 18 sad mailboxes used to stand. There's even a rusted, decaying 1940s Pontiac just sitting abandoned in the woods next to a foundation.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

A ghost car left behind when the town crumbled.

SPEAKER_02 36:54

But those foundations aren't why thousands of people travel there every year. The crown jewel of this area are those cliffs. They stand 30 feet tall, jutting dramatically out over the Susquehanna River, providing these sweeping panoramic views of the water and the distant hills.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

But as we've learned by unpacking this history, they are not a natural geological formation.

SPEAKER_02 37:16

Not at all.

SPEAKER_00 37:16

They are the bleached, compacted industrial waste from over a century of aggressive limestone and dolomite quarrying.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

You are standing on a mountain of trash.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

Literally.

SPEAKER_02 37:28

Which is just wild to think about.

SPEAKER_00 37:30

For decades, the workers simply took the unusable lime, the limestone dust, and the waste rock, and dumped it right over the edge of the riverbank. It was the cheapest way to dispose of the byproduct.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

Just throw it over the edge.

SPEAKER_00 37:43

Exactly. Over a century of dumping, millions of tons of this material piled up. Time, relentless weather, and the sheer pressure of its own massive weight compacted it and bleached it into this ghostly solid white escarpment.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

And that's what created the cliffs.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

It formed a chalky lunar landscape that looks utterly and beautifully out of place in a lush, green Pennsylvania forest.

SPEAKER_02 38:06

Go back to that aerial photo we started with, the one that showed the town Boxed in. The contrast today is almost violent.

SPEAKER_00 38:13

It's very stark.

SPEAKER_02 38:14

You have the deep, dark, almost unnaturally blue-green water of the flooded quarry pit on one side. You have the lush green agricultural fields above Route 441. And then slicing between them the stark, glaring, blinding white of the cliffs jetting out into the dark water of the river.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

It is an incredible juxtaposition of industry and nature.

SPEAKER_02 38:33

It's almost poetic. Think about it. The town itself, the homes they lived in, the people they loved, the store that Mundorf ran for almost 50 years, the chapel where they prayed, all of that is rotting away, demolished, or buried under a foot of poison ivy.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

The human element has been erased.

SPEAKER_02 38:50

But the waste they produced, the refuse of their brutal, dangerous labor, has somehow become a lasting monument. People literally load up their cars, drive for hours, and bike down a scenic trail on the weekends just to look at an industrial trash pile. Time and nature have somehow alchemized environmental destruction into something profoundly beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

It's a fascinating phenomenon. But this raises an important practical issue about how we interact with these spaces today. The concept of industrial relics is incredibly compelling. We love ruins.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

Right, ruins are cool.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

But these specific ruins require respect and caution. The sources we read specifically advise that if you do visit, and for reference, they note it is located about 1.5 miles south of Cozer Park in Bainbridge. You must use extreme common sense.

SPEAKER_02 39:38

Right, because despite how it looks in photos, you aren't standing on solid ancient granite.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

Exactly. You are standing on loose, eroded quarry waste. The edges of those cliffs can be highly unstable and prone to collapse without warning.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

Oh wow. Good to know.

SPEAKER_00 39:55

Furthermore, there is still dangerous industrial debris, rusted metal, old wire, jagged concrete hidden in the thick brush just off the path. While it is a breathtaking overlook today and the paved trail itself is perfectly safe, you are still navigating a site of heavy industrial decay. You have to respect the ghosts of the landscape.

SPEAKER_02 40:15

Well, let's pull back and look at the whole arc of this incredible journey.

SPEAKER_00 40:18

It's quite a story.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

We started with a local businessman named John Haldeman lighting a few modest lime kilns on a quiet hillside in 1847 to help local farmers grow better tomatoes.

SPEAKER_00 40:29

The humble beginnings.

SPEAKER_02 40:30

Right. And we watched that small operation get swallowed by corporate ambition and explode into the J.E. Baker Company. It became a booming, rowdy, isolated company town of a thousand people, working 14-hour days to supply the critical Donegal dolomite that literally kept the American steel industry from collapsing during World War I.

SPEAKER_00 40:51

A global impact from a tiny town.

SPEAKER_02 40:53

We saw this incredibly diverse group of workers survive the 1918 flu epidemic by catching sacks of flour from speeding trains. We saw them tear apart the earth to build the bridges that modernized Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_00 41:05

The infrastructure boom.

SPEAKER_02 41:07

And then we watched them slowly fade away as the economy moved on, leaving behind a 101-year-old man looking for his living room, a rusted 1940s pontiac swallowed by the forest, and towering bizarre cliffs of blinding white waste.

SPEAKER_01 41:26

It really makes you think.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

It does. And looking at the totality of Bill Meyer's story leaves me with one final lingering thought for us to consider.

SPEAKER_01 41:33

What's that?

SPEAKER_00 41:34

When you stand on the white cliffs of Connie, this massive, beautiful, permanent-looking structure that is actually just the discarded garbage of a bygone, forgotten era, you have to look at our modern world differently.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

How so?

SPEAKER_00 41:48

What massive, seemingly permanent industries are we building right now? What complexes of concrete, noise, and sweat are we pouring our lives into today, firmly believing they are the center of the universe that will one day be nothing more than a scenic hiking trail.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 42:03

What beautiful, confusing ruins are we accidentally leaving behind for the people of the year 2100 to marvel at? Completely unaware of the daily grind, the stresses, and the human lives that actually created them?

SPEAKER_02 42:14

That is the perfect question to leave on. The things we think are permanent are just the rough drafts of tomorrow's landscape. Next time you are walking through the woods and you see a strange mound of dirt, an unnatural rock formation, or a rusted piece of iron poking through the leaves. Remember the 700 men of Bill Meyer. Keep looking for the hidden histories in your own backyards because you never know what vanished, roaring world you might be standing on. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.