Most American towns contain at least one thing that was never supposed to become a landmark. A group of ships that stopped sailing. A house that looks like a mushroom. A junkyard where the cars are no longer being sold, but are still being remembered. This week on Strange America, we are visiting three places […]

The post The American Places Built from Concrete, Stone, and Rust first appeared on WBC Radio.

In the middle of Iowa farmland, where the horizon is generally allowed to remain a horizon, there is a wall of glittering stone. It contains colored glass, petrified wood, concrete, crystals, geodes, and enough religious imagery to make ordinary architecture look like it has stopped trying. This is the Grotto of the Redemption, in West […]

The post The Iowa Grotto Built One Stone at a Time first appeared on WBC Radio.

There is a particular kind of American place that appears just beyond the edge of town. It may have a giant object on the roof, a hand-painted sign, or a building that seems to have been assembled according to rules known only to its owner. These places are easy to dismiss as roadside oddities. That […]

The post The Smallest Giants and Other American Roadside Miracles first appeared on WBC Radio.

There are places in America that begin with a plan. A town map. A budget. A committee. And then there are places that begin behind somebody’s house, with a pile of salvaged objects and a person who has decided that the past is not going to disappear on his watch. In Humboldt, Tennessee, Herbert Adams […]

The post Herbie Town: The Tennessee Backyard Where One Family Saved the Old West first appeared on WBC Radio.

There are places in America where the map seems to have made a clerical error. There are buildings that look like hotels but contain a government nobody is supposed to know about. And there are towns that disappear so completely that the land remembers them better than the people do. This is Strange America. I […]

The post Strange America — 2026-09-22 first appeared on WBC Radio.

STRANGE AMERICA. There’s more America than you think. Today, three places where the map, the record book, and ordinary life do not quite agree. We will visit an American community reached through Canada, a neighborhood buried beneath a state capital, and a vanished Illinois town founded by a formerly enslaved man who bought freedom for […]

The post Strange America — 2026-09-22 first appeared on WBC Radio.