what is going on everyone welcome back to the world according to Briggs have
you ever wondered how a town collapses or becomes a ghost town I know I did
then I did some reading there are more than a few reasons a town fails
sometimes it's things like a natural disaster or it could be a man-made
disaster like Centralia Pennsylvania is mine fire most the time it's a company
shutdown that the town depended on sometimes it's a gradual thing and
sometimes it's overnight in my missing persons video I talked about a whole
town that just up and left within a couple weeks back during the Depression
that type of thing happened a lot industries just went away and so did the
people but this one was kind of weird because nobody knew anyone was leaving
they just all left the United States is filled with boom and bust towns along
our history there are some cities right now that are struggling to stay afloat
because an industry failed in that area Detroit's a perfect example for getting
better but they're almost a ghost town for a long time today's list is about
ten towns that disappeared because of a single company or industry that they
depended on for work in a nutshell it's company towns that failed when the
company folded now I'm gonna tell you upfront that these towns have very
little presence on the internet so as far as pictures and video I'll be using
some footage from the area as best I can so don't be expecting like pictures of
the town some of them been gone since the depression that being said why don't
we take a look at my top ten towns destroyed by losing a single employer
number ten gray Sonia Arkansas the company arkadelphia lumber gray Sonia
was once home to the largest lumber mill in the south it had over a thousand
workers handling their wood gray Sonia was built by the arkadelphia Lumber
Company founder William Grayson in 1907 yeah he named a town after himself it
had a fire house several hundred houses a restaurant a cafe three hotels a
theatre a school a church a running water system a baseball field a park and
electricity life was good and gray Sonia that was until the Great Depression
wiped the whole place out arkadelphia went out of business and an entire town
was out of work by 1951 the last resident had left his name was Charlie
nobody told him they were leaving he showed up for softball practice and
nobody was there now few structures left in an old railroad
bridge but that's about it the rest is just a memory you look at the Google
Maps thing you could see the outline of some of the buildings but that's about
it number nine mark town Indiana the
company mark manufacturing built more than a century ago by industrialist
clayton mark who manufactured steel pipes and tubes mark town was built to
keep its workers it doesn't sound like a bad deal from everything I've read you
get paid and you have a nice home these homes were nice not some rundown tent
city the houses were made of brick and finished with stucco and painted bright
colors they all had running water coal fed furnaces and a full basement from
all accounts it was a nice place to live here's the thing it's still there sort
of they are now part of a town called East Chicago Indiana not too far it's
like between Gary Indiana and Chicago anyway
if you look at it from Google Earth you have this little patch of green in the
middle of this large industrial area it looks kind of strange I checked and
there's a couple 3-bedroom 1-bath homes for sale here all under $30,000 I was
thinking wow that's a good deal they don't look bad once you get past the
boarded up windows and then I saw the pictures of the inside one of them
looked like they had trapped a crazy person in there with nothing but whiskey
a sledgehammer and a box of spray paint now at its peak 14,000 people lived here
these days it's about 3000 and it's getting fewer and fewer all the time
mark towns 200 homes we're almost destroyed for a highway project some
years back many of the homes are in bad shape but they've plowed a couple of
them over to make a nice little green space and you know park near the
refineries number eight Bruceton Tennessee
the company Henry I Siegel the Henry I Segal company used to make jeans and
suits in three plants in Bruceton Tennessee employing more people than the
town actually had to offer at its peak they had 1,700 people in the 1980s
working at the three different plants the town's population was only about
1400 at the time so you know they were drawn in from other communities well the
town was booming for years everyone had a job that wanted a job and the jobs
paid okay things changed in the late 1980s and fewer and fewer people had
jobs at the plant it laid off its last 55 workers in 2000 the plants are empty
and growing vines now the bank gone two supermarkets are gone the
clothing stores gone a pharmacy is the only thing hanging on in 2005 Ohio based
purity foods moved in here but it's since gone out of business as well
population has been declining for years and the future looks pretty grim these
days anyone still living here is probably retired on Social Security or
works out of town number seven Livermore New Hampshire the company Grafton County
Lumber Company lumber towns live fast and die young sort of like a goldfish
founded in 1876 by a pair of lumber tycoon brothers Daniel and Charles
Saunders the town was named for Samuel Livermore
a former United States Senator who was the grandfather of Daniel Saunders wife
the town of Livermore suffered through gross mismanagement fire floods storms
and deforestation until the last mill closed in 1926 the population dropped
from around 200 in 1900 to about 23 in 1930 by 1949 the last resident left but
get this in the 2000 census three people lived there I don't know what was going
on there it had been 50 years since the place had had any residents I mean aside
from the occasional hippie commune in the 1960s or something you know what
that is an untapped business hippie commune air B&B or timeshare actually
wonder if you can get a loan for that anyway as far as the three people live
in there in 2000 I figure some census worker was having a slow day saw three
hobos walking down a dirt road when he drove by a yield you're going in the
book today the surrounding forest has taken it back no word on the hobos
number six batsto village New Jersey the company batsto ironworks back in 1766
the batsto ironworks was using bog or dug up from the beds and banks of nearby
rivers to make household pots and kettles if you've ever seen rusty mud in
a creek swamp or pond you've seen bog or it also began making supplies for the
Continental Army during the American Revolution but spent more than a century
afterwards producing household goods and giving employees the run of the company
store blacksmith's Mills barns and stables in the mid-1800s the demand for
iron decline and batsto turned to glass making that didn't last long
because people really weren't smoking a lot of weed yet so there was really no
need for blown-glass have noticed like 1 out of every 5
twenty-year-old stoners wants to become a professional glass blower I don't know
how many have run into that say that to me it's just really weird anyway so soon
batsto was in bankruptcy and he had a whole bunch of glass blowers with no
glass to blow the last permanent resident left in 1989 and the town of
batsto has been a New Jersey Historic Site ever since number 5
Segundo Colorado the company Colorado fuel and iron the story of a coal and
iron mining town is the story of a dying town and that's the story of Segundo
Colorado Segundo is actually two different places thanks to the position
of a couple mines this is another town that depended on iron mining and as the
demand for iron decline so did the need to keep iron miners employed segundos
last mining operation shut down in nineteen sixty Segundo is actually
Spanish for second as in to get it okay anyway moving on there's nothing out
here but mining if you weren't a miner in this town you were the wife or a kid
of a miner at its peak Segundo is thought to have had about six or seven
hundred residents today the population has fallen below 100 and a few people
that do come here they come here for the hiking and wildlife viewing and that's
about it Segundo is a dying town number four
Pullman Illinois the company the Pullman Palace car company in 1884 George
Pullman built a manufacturing complex and town on about four thousand acres of
land south of Chicago this was to house his employees making his luxury rail
sleeping cars while the plan was to keep the workers happy which would increase
productivity and draw skilled workers away from Chicago it didn't quite work
out that way the town had more than a thousand homes with yards indoor
plumbing gas and daily trash removal and drew about 12,000 residents however the
downside was workers could only rent their homes they could be evicted at any
time they couldn't hold meetings couldn't go to bars and couldn't read
books or watch performances other than those offered by the library or town
theater does anyone get the feeling george pullman was a bit of a control
freak when Pullman cut wages after an economic downturn in 1894 a workers
strike turned violent and as a result federal troops were called in to kind of
knock things down after Pullman himself died in
1897 Illinois required the company to sell the town in 1889 it was annexed to
the south side of Chicago the neighborhood went into a slow decline
and the factory was finally closed in 1957 it's taken the neighborhood a while
to recover but it was declared a national monument in 2015 so that's kind
of cool number three Lynch Kentucky the company us cold and
coke tucked away in the hills outside of Cumberland Kentucky here the small town
of Lynch it wasn't always a small town in fact it was a good-sized town for a
lot of years and everyone was working for us coal and coke this coke is a
mineral not a drink or a party drug that was extremely popular in 1980s Lynch was
built in 1917 by US coal and coke a subsidiary of US Steel this town had a
population of about 10,000 people in the 1940s had its own grocery store theater
hospital and hotel even as recently as 1980 nearly 1600 people still lived
there however in 2016 there were fewer than 700 residents this is another one
those situations where most the people living in Lynch are either retired or
have a good drive out of town for work now they do have a mind tour if that's
your thing you can take a look at Lynch's mining
past while its future continues to dwindle so there's a prime opportunity
to you know buy a house here get a nice mortgage and need some sun block though
I'm sure that homeowners insurance is dirt cheap out here number two Thompson
Springs Utah the company the coal mining company settled as a town of ranchers in
the 1880s Thompson Springs got a boost when coal mining began in a canyon north
of town in 1911 that year a rail line was branched out from the tracks that
ran by Thompson Springs to the mine itself the town was booming and everyone
had a new pickaxe and Hammer the town was served by various passenger rail
lines for much of the town's history in 1996 Amtrak moved the last of its local
services the nearby Green River which pretty much killed any reason anyone
ever would have to visit Thompson Springs I'll tell you who should visit
Thompson Springs a junk removal company this place is joke most of the yards
look like they double as a scrapyard everyone seems to have a broken-down
trailer too I don't know that's all about with the mind closing in the 1950s
Interstate 70 taking travelers away from the town in 1970
the rail service is going away in the 1990s Thompson Springs spent the last
couple decades withering and dying like a grape with no water according to the
2010 census just 39 residents remain I don't know if you'll be able to find
them amongst all that scrap metal and
number one Gillman Colorado the company the Eagle mining company
founded by judge and prospector John Clinton in 1886
you know I read a lot of history about this country and one of the most common
titles a successful person has from the 1800s is judge they all seem to be a
judge someplace one of that has anything to do with their success who knows the
town got a rail spur in 1899 and rode the silver boom like a wild horse Gilman
had its own newspaper a boarding house and a school the mines were active into
the 1970s and the town eventually got a clinic a grocery store in a bowling
alley only two lanes so no big tournaments going on there however years
of poor mining technique led to the Environmental Protection Agency to
evacuate the town completely in 1984 and declared a Superfund site in 1986 it
took 24 years to clean up the site but it's been over a decade since it's
supposed to be turned into a ski resort that project cleared an EPA hurdle in
2018 so maybe changes aren't gonna happen who knows if they do start a
resort here I'm going we'll all have a big meetup alright so that is my top ten
towns destroyed by losing a single employer I hope you guys enjoyed it hope
you got some information out of it this one's kind of interesting I kind of
liked it anyway don't forget all the links below give the video big thumbs up
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