Joseph Smith led a few thousand refugees to a Mississippi River swamp in 1839 and built the largest city in Illinois within five years — then it nearly emptied out overnight after his murder. The temple they built was burned, toppled by a tornado, and demolished, before getting rebuilt from scratch a hundred and fifty-four years later.

A British industrialist bet his entire fortune that private property was the root of human misery, and tried to prove it on a swampy bend of the Wabash River. It collapsed in two years — but the town now also has a roofless church by Philip Johnson and a visitor center by Richard Meier sitting on top of the wreckage.

In 1880, hundreds of young Englishmen moved to the Tennessee mountains because inheritance law back home gave everything to the oldest son and nothing to the rest. A typhoid outbreak and bad soil killed the colony within a decade — but a teenager saved what was left of it in 1966, books and all.

Jack Daniel's whiskey is made in a county where it's still illegal to buy a drink — and for over a century, the company's official history left out the enslaved man who actually taught him how to make it. Nathan "Nearest" Green wasn't publicly credited until 2016.

Twenty years before California, a deer hunter found gold here and triggered America's first major gold rush — the town's name literally means "yellow" in Cherokee, because the people losing the land already knew it was there. The federal mint that followed later became a college that's still standing on the same ground today.

In 1968, a Georgia businessman looked at his dying lumber town and decided the fix wasn't to save it as itself — it was to disguise the whole downtown as a Bavarian alpine village that had never existed there. It worked: Helen is now one of Georgia's most visited small towns, built entirely on an identity borrowed from somewhere else.

This Michigan town's most famous resident invented the bit, the unit your phone, your Wi-Fi, and the internet itself are built on. His statue stands in the city park — and it went up before the ones at MIT or Bell Labs.

This Alaska town has elected a cat as honorary mayor since 1997. It's also the real staging point for nearly every successful climb of Denali, North America's tallest peak.

A town of zero people in 1897 had eight thousand by spring 1898, run for a while by a con man who was shot dead on its own wharf — the same harbor that now sees over a million cruise passengers a year.

For twelve seasons, Murder, She Wrote's cozy Maine town was actually this California lumber port — abandoned by its own industry in 1938, saved by artists in 1959, then frozen by one of the strictest preservation laws in the state.