Hope: Named After a 17-Year-Old Boy, Forgotten Like One Too

At Mile 56.3 of the Seward Highway, a 17-mile spur road dead-ends into a town that time—and the gold rush—nearly left behind. While the rest of the world remembers the Klondike, the real story of Alaska’s first major gold strike began here, on the shores of Turnagain Arm.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox takes us down the Hope Highway to a community of 70 people that outlasted its own history. We trace the steps of Alexander King, the mysterious prospector who found the first "color" and then vanished, and Percy Hope, the 17-year-old traveler who gave the town its name before fading into obscurity.

We compare the quiet survival of Hope with the ghost of Sunrise City, which was briefly the largest city in Alaska in 1898 with 800 residents, two saloons, and a brewery—only to be swallowed by the spruce forest just a few years later. It’s a story of "sister towns," lopsided luck, and the original path of the Iditarod Trail.

If you enjoyed this detour into the birthplace of the Alaska Gold Rush, please follow the show on Spotify to ensure you never miss a stop.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: Special thanks to Chloe Jones for the evocative, rolling score. Visit her at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

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Eklutna: The Oldest Living Place No One Drives To

Twenty-six miles from the glass towers of Anchorage sits a village that has been continuously inhabited for over 800 years. While thousands of commuters blast past the Eklutna exit at 65 miles per hour every morning, they are passing a site that was already ancient when Marco Polo left Venice.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox invites you to hit the brakes at the oldest inhabited place in the metropolitan area. We explore the vibrant, painted Spirit Houses of the Eklutna cemetery—a unique architectural synthesis of Dena’ina Athabascan tradition and Russian Orthodox ritual.

We also uncover the heavy history of the 1915 influenza epidemic that silenced seven of the eight Dena'ina villages in the region, leaving Eklutna as a lone, resilient survivor. From the 1870s log church (the oldest building in the Anchorage area) to the diverted waters of Eklutna Lake, this episode is a meditation on continuity, memory, and the radical act of staying put.

If you enjoyed this look at the intersection of ancient history and modern highways, please follow the show on Spotify.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: A special thanks to Chloe Jones for the spare, haunting score that mirrors the Alaskan landscape. Discover her music at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

Ninilchik: Where Russia Never Really Left

High on a bluff overlooking Cook Inlet, five gold onion domes catch the Alaskan sun, looking like a piece of the Old World that drifted across the Pacific and simply took root. This is Ninilchik, a town that the Russian Empire retired from—and then forgot to take with it.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox explores the "pensioner settlement" established in 1847 by the Russian-American Company. While the Tsar sold Alaska to the U.S. in 1867, the people of Ninilchik remained in a state of crystalline isolation for another century. We dive into the mystery of Ninilchik Russian, a unique linguistic "time capsule" spoken nowhere else on Earth, and the haunting local legend of the Moose Lady—a folklore warning about the dangers of drifting too far into the wilderness.

Join us as we pull off the Sterling Highway to hear the stories of a community that stayed put while empires rose and fell around them.

If you enjoyed this journey into the Kenai Peninsula's hidden history, please follow the show on Spotify and join our community of road-trippers and history buffs.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: Special thanks to Chloe Jones for the evocative music that brings these landscapes to life. Hear more of her work at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

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Whittier: The Town That Was a Secret, Then a Bunker, Then Itself

Most towns have a "welcome" sign. Whittier has a schedule. To enter this town, you must drive through a single-lane, two-and-a-half-mile mountain tunnel that only opens for cars once an hour. If you miss your window, the mountain simply says "no."

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox takes us through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel and into a vertical community tucked away in a radar-invisible Alaskan fjord. Originally built as a top-secret WWII military base to provide a deep-water, ice-free port, Whittier was designed for isolation. Today, nearly the entire population lives under one roof in the 14-story Begich Towers, a former Army barracks turned civilian "city."

From the haunting, asbestos-filled ruins of the Buckner Building to the interior hallways that connect the school, post office, and police station, we explore what happens when a military fortress becomes a hometown.

If you’re fascinated by the "City Under One Roof," follow the show on Spotify for more stories from the road less traveled.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: Special thanks to Chloe Jones for the atmospheric and resonant score. Visit her at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

Connect & FollowCredits

Portage: The Town the Earth Swallowed

At Mile Marker 79 on the Seward Highway, a skeletal "ghost forest" stands frozen in the tidal mudflats. These white, salt-drowned trees are the only remaining headstones for Portage, Alaska—a town that quite literally sank into the earth.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox uncovers the story of a roadside junction where travelers once drank bourbon chilled with 1,000-year-old glacier ice. That all changed on Good Friday, 1964, when the second-largest earthquake in recorded history struck. In just four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, the ground beneath Portage liquefied, dropping the entire town eight to ten feet and handing it over to the relentless tides of Turnagain Arm.

We explore the terrifying geology of liquefaction, the irony of a town built on a recurring disaster site, and the quiet erasure of a place that infrastructure created and nature reclaimed.

If you enjoyed this deep dive into Alaska’s sunken history, please follow the show on Spotify to catch every stop on our journey through America's disappeared places.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: Special thanks to Chloe Jones for providing the atmospheric score. Discover more of her music at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

Dyea, Alaska: The Town That Lost a Race and Died of It

There is a cemetery in Southeast Alaska where almost every headstone shares the same date: April 3, 1898.

In this episode of Drive-Thru Towns, host Andrew Wilcox takes us to a flat river delta near Skagway that was once home to 8,000 people. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, Dyea was the gateway to the brutal Chilkoot Pass—the "Golden Stairs" to wealth or ruin.

We explore the "Palm Sunday Avalanche," a disaster that buried dozens of stampeders under walls of white, and the subsequent rise of the railroad that ultimately rendered the town obsolete. It wasn't the mountain that killed Dyea; it was a surveyor’s decision ten miles away.

If you enjoyed this journey into Alaska’s "ghost" geography, please follow the show on Spotify to catch every stop on our map.

• Instagram: @50statefamily

• LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

• Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

• Host: Andrew Wilcox

• Theme Music: A special thanks to Chloe Jones for the hauntingly beautiful score. Explore more of her work at chloejonesmusic.co.uk.

Drive Thru Towns — Season 2 Trailer: Alaska

Welcome to Drive Thru Towns.

Season 2 is here — and we're heading somewhere bigger, wilder, and colder than anywhere we've been before.

Alaska.

This season, we leave the moss-draped back roads of Florida behind and drive north — all the way to the edge of the continent, and sometimes beyond it. We're talking about a town the earth swallowed whole in under five minutes. A road built in eight months by soldiers whose names were literally erased from the photographs. A village everyone abandoned — and nobody can fully explain why. A bunker city carved into a mountain by a Cold War military that needed a secret. And the very top of the world, where America simply runs out of road.

Alaska has always been the place where history went to disappear. This season, we're going to find it.

This season covers:

• The earthquake ghost town of Portage — swallowed by the tides of Turnagain Arm in 1964
• Dyea — the gold rush boomtown that lost a race to its neighbor and vanished inside a single season
• Whittier — the secret WWII bunker city where most of the town still lives under one roof
• Ninilchik — a Russian colonial settlement where an Imperial-era dialect of Russian is still spoken today
• The ALCAN — the highway that connected a continent, built on a history it spent 75 years trying to erase
• Utqiagvik (Barrow) — 1,500 years of continuous habitation at the top of the world, where America ends and the dark begins
• And much more

Season 2 of Drive Thru Towns drops soon. Follow now so you don't miss the first episode.

Connect with the ShowHost: Andrew WilcoxFollow for more episodes: [Click Follow on Spotify]Instagram: @50statefamilyLinkedIn: Andrew WilcoxEmail: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

CreditsSpecial thanks to Chloe Jones for the music: chloejonesmusic.co.uk

Havana & Quincy: The Millionaires of Shade Tobacco

Welcome to Drive Thru Towns. In this episode, we travel the rolling hills of Gadsden County to explore Havana and Quincy, Florida—two towns built on the "green gold" of shade tobacco and a single, legendary investment that changed the face of the American South.

This isn't just a story about farming; it’s a masterclass in risk, vision, and the "fads" that end up defining centuries. We pull over to look at:

• The Shade Tobacco Empire: How a specific, fragile leaf grown under massive tapestries of cheesecloth turned Gadsden County into the cigar-wrapper capital of the world.

• The Coca-Cola Millionaires: The incredible true story of Pat Munroe, the Quincy banker who pressured his neighbors to buy shares of a "failing" soda company during the Great Depression—turning a small Florida town into the wealthiest per-capita community in the United States.

• The "Fad" That Lasted: A personal look at the skepticism of those who passed on the Coca-Cola stock, including the host's own family history at the Salem cemetery.

• The Architecture of Wealth: From the grand Victorian "Coca-Cola Mansions" of Quincy to the repurposed tobacco barns of Havana that now house the state's premier antique collections.

• A Landscape of Ghosts: Moving through the "Havana Curves" where the ghosts of the tobacco industry still whisper from the shadows of abandoned curing barns.

Havana and Quincy remind us that history is often made by the things we can’t see coming—and that sometimes, the best move you can make is betting on the thing everyone else calls a "fad."

Host: Andrew Wilcox

Follow for more episodes: [Click Follow on Spotify]

Instagram: @50statefamily

LinkedIn: Andrew Wilcox

Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

Special thanks to Chloe Jones for the music: chloejonesmusic.co.uk