o2005

In the pine forests of East Texas, there was once a stretch of land that never appeared on any map. The oil boom happened to the south of it. The railroad line passed to the north. The wagon road that cut through its center stopped drawing any interest around 1924, when the last of the … Read more

There is a hotel in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado that most people know from a single night in 1974. White walls, a red roof, and a long porch facing Longs Peak. It opened in the summer of 1909, when mountain roads were difficult and any guest who reached it had to be determined. A … Read more

In the eastern hills of Kentucky, where the ridges draw so close together they resemble the knuckles of a closed hand, there was once a county called Caldwell. In the autumn of 1856, the state land office in Frankfort placed a file on the desk of a surveyor named Ephraim Vale and asked him to … Read more

In 1911, in a fold of the West Virginia mountains that the maps of the time left mostly blank, a surveyor named Obadiah Threshmoor accepted a job that would end his career and, in a sense, his life. The place was called Cold Glin Hollow, in Mero County, and the men who cut timber for … Read more

In the southern spine of the Appalachian Mountains, there is a valley that has never appeared on a printed county map. It is absent from the surveys of 1880 and 1920, from the WPA records of the 1930s, and from every satellite overlay available today. In the state geological survey archives, the topographic contour lines … Read more

In the spring of 1913, a county sheriff in the southern Missouri Ozarks acted on a rumor he had been hearing for months. A neighbor had mentioned something strange about the Vane homestead, a place about four miles off the nearest wagon road, tucked into a hollow where the pines grew so thick that sunlight … Read more