In 1874, an inventor and a Methodist bishop started a summer training camp for Sunday school teachers on a lake in western New York. It grew into something so influential that the word "Chautauqua" became the generic name for traveling educational assemblies that toured small towns across the country for decades.

In 1892, a group of boosters in a young South Dakota railroad town needed to prove the local soil was worth settling on — so they built an entire palace out of corn. They still completely strip and rebuild its murals from scratch every single year.

In 1947, a young Army press officer wrote a press release announcing a "flying disc" near Roswell, New Mexico. His own command retracted it within a day — but the legend had already started, and the actual explanation (a classified Cold War balloon program) wasn't declassified for nearly fifty years.

In 1917, a priest named Father Flanagan borrowed $90 to house five homeless boys, taking them in regardless of race or religion. By 1934 it had grown into an actual incorporated Nebraska village with its own government — and the 1938 MGM movie about it won Spencer Tracy a Best Actor Oscar that's still on display there today.

Milton and Catherine Hershey couldn't have children of their own — so in 1918, Milton put almost his entire fortune into a trust for a school for orphaned boys, meaning an orphan charity still technically owns one of the largest chocolate companies in the world. The town he built around it has streets named Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue, lit by more than a hundred streetlamps shaped like Hershey's Kisses.

In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini both visited this tiny Spiritualist town in western New York — for completely opposite reasons. It's still active today as headquarters of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, with more than fifty certified mediums and twenty to thirty thousand visitors a year.

A penniless barge captain named Asa Packer arrived in this Pennsylvania coal town in 1833 — and went on to build one of the largest fortunes in the state, founding a railroad and a university along the way. The same coal boom produced something stranger: a gravity railroad built just to haul coal downhill, which became one of the country's first amusement rides once people realized how fun the trip down actually was.

In 1788, forty-eight Revolutionary War veterans founded the first permanent American settlement in the entire Northwest Territory — on ground already covered in 2,000-year-old earthworks. Mound Cemetery, built around one of those mounds in 1801, now holds more Revolutionary War officers' graves than any other cemetery in the country.

Pat Conroy grew up with an abusive Marine fighter pilot for a father — and turned that exact pain into bestselling novels like The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides. The same military world that shaped him is still next door to the antebellum town that raised him, and his literary center is open for tours today.

In 1972, a small-town pastor put on a Superman costume and made it legally official: this is Superman's hometown, by agreement with DC Comics itself. Most visitors never notice the working nuclear fuel plant sitting just across the river from the gift shop.