Dark Heartlands

Thousands of people showed up early in downtown Chicago on the morning of July 24, 1915, to board the boats that would take them to a day of fun on the Western Electric company picnic. Little did they know that the day would quickly turn into the worst maritime disaster ever seen on the Great Lakes.

Long before he was the distinguished Archbishop of Santa Fe who inspired Willa Cather's classic novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father John Baptist Lamy was a twenty-five year old missionary tossed into the remote central highlands of Ohio. Dark Heartlands visits the abandoned church and graveyard where this American legend first started to change his world. To see further photos of the people and sites in this story, visit host Mark Sebastian Jordan's History Knox column at Knox Pages.

On Saturday, October 10, 1931, several residents of Gallipolis, Ohio, were horrified to see the airship USS Akron crash across the river in the remote hills of West Virginia. Only thing is, it didn't. The USS Akron was in Detroit, and no wreckage was found. What happened in this strange historical anomaly, coming from the same area which was to become infamous 36 years later as the epicenter of the Mothman sightings?  Join Mark Sebastian Jordan for a trip to the Dark Heartlands...

It's virtually unknown that frontier Ohio played a decisive--and devastating--role in the life of Germany's great poet Nikolaus Lenau. Lenau was both the Lord Byron and the Edgar Allen Poe of the German-speaking nations of Europe, and his influence was tremendous. He was also an idealist, fed up with the corrupt societies he grew up in, and that's why he decided to come to frontier Ohio, to find paradise. What he instead found was the first crack in his sanity.

The debut episode of Dark Heartlands explores the tragic disaster that happened in Ashtabula, Ohio, in 1876 when a railroad bridge collapsed beneath a train in the middle of a snowstorm as it crossed a river. Storyteller Mark Sebastian Jordan explores stories of the dark history of the Midwestern United States.