Original subtitles

[narrator] Relics of a forsaken industrial town.

In four milliseconds, their atomic dream became

an atomic nightmare.

[narrator] A forgotten settlement, which prospered despite prejudice.

[Maisa] It's a story that just has not been told.

I consider it hallowed ground.

[narrator] And the subterranean chambers that

built the nation's monuments.

[Rodriguez McRobbie] Without this place, New York

and Washington would look radically different today.

[narrator] In eastern Idaho, a town neighbors a restricted facility

which brought humanity into a new age.

Most of what they did out there was pretty hush-hush.

We never really knew what was going on.

[Dr. Kwami] We're in Idaho's Snake River Plains this whole area has

a very eerie feel with the backdrop of a desert.

[narrator] Crumbling structures sit abandoned along

a desolate road.

[Dr. Szulgit] There are a few buildings that seem to be lived in,

but mostly the place has just fallen to decay.

[Dr. Thomas] I see what looks like an abandoned bar, so this place

had the trappings of a lively spot at some point,

but something made the people abandon it.

[Liza] We say, "You can learn more from failure than you do from

success," and we learned a tremendous amount

that terrible night.

[narrator] In Bingham County, Idaho, sits the remains of a town

built on the promise of a bright future

that never came to be.

Terry Fackrell's grandfather established his community in

southeastern Idaho over 100 years ago.

[Terry] This used to be the main highway between

Blackfoot and Arco.

Grandfather figured that people would travel through,

and he'd have an opportunity to sell them some supplies.

[narrator] The town became known as Midway, and it would faithfully

serve drivers for decades, until a historic event across

the world would change its destiny.

On December 19, 1938, German scientists discovered

the process of splitting an atom, nuclear fission.

[Dr. Szulgit] While the discovery of fission would have been largely known

just to scientists, it took the bombing of Hiroshima to

awaken the whole world to the possible power that

could be harnessed.

[Dr. Auerbach] From this devastation arose a more positive question.

What could we achieve with the power of the atom

if we harnessed it peacefully for the betterment of people,

rather than for the purposes of destruction?

In 1946, President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act.

What has been done is the greatest achievement of

organized science in history.

And what this act did was it transferred nuclear power from

military use to civilian hands.

[narrator] The government-run United States Atomic Energy Commission

made plans to build a facility where potentially dangerous

nuclear technologies could be developed and tested

away from prying eyes.

An 890-square-mile site was chosen in Idaho,

just a few miles up the road from Midway.

My grandfather decided that to change the name

would attract people and people to move into the community.

[narrator] This is Atomic City.

Atomic fever had taken the world by storm and this

town was determined to be part of it.

[Dr. Szulgit] The town pinned all of its hopes on this great dream

of nuclear power and the lab expanding and having all

these brainiacs come.

[narrator] The government's National Reactor Testing Station

opened in 1949.

Liza Raley has made it her mission to educate people

on the history of this groundbreaking facility.

What you have to imagine at the beginning of nuclear is

every time you had an idea for a different kind of reactor,

you had to build it to see if it would work.

There wasn't computer modeling, and this was the facility where

they could do that.

[narrator] The first reactor built here tested whether atomic fission

could generate electricity.

Completed in 1951, this is the Experimental Breeder Reactor,

also known as EBR-1.

What EBR-1 did is show the world what is possible.

We came out here, built this facility.

By December 21st, they made enough power to light

the entire building.

[narrator] Although still in its infancy, nuclear energy had

become a reality, and the possibilities

seemed endless.

Nuclear power just captured the 1950s imagination of America.

This is when, in comic books, you would see nuclear-powered

jet packs and cars flying up through the air.

[Dr. Kwami] Research was done into nuclear medicine, irradiated crops,

nuclear-powered cars, and even satellites.

[narrator] The military also saw unlimited possibilities

in this emerging technology.

[Liza] At the height of the Cold War, somebody told the United States

that the Soviet Union had a nuclear-powered airplane,

and it was ready to circle the Arctic Circle and bomb

an American city at a moment's notice.

And so in perfect American style, we said,

"We should get one of those."

[narrator] Here in Idaho, the US Air Force took over a section of

the National Reactor Testing Station,

where they experimented with engine prototypes to achieve

this Cold War dream.

[Dr. Szulgit] Ultimately, the project failed, because to have a nuclear

engine, you had to have shielding to

protect the pilots.

And the bigger the engine, the heavier the shielding,

the whole thing was just too weighty.

It was never really gonna take off.

[Liza] President Kennedy shut down the program in 1961 and wasted

a billion dollars, billion with a "B" dollars, in 1950s money on

this program that never came to fruition.

[narrator] Although some projects here did fail, overall,

the testing station was a huge success and continued to

prove its potential.

In July of 1955, one of the site's other reactors

produced enough electricity to light the entire city of Arco.

[Liza] In August 1955, scientists and researchers

attended the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva,

Switzerland, and they were able to stand up and say,

for the first time in the history of the world,

we have lit an entire American city with atomic power.

[narrator] But in neighboring Atomic City,

things didn't exactly take off as intended.

[Liza] Once you drove off of the federal lands,

it had the first bar.

And so people would stop in Atomic City and have a couple

of beers before they went home.

But Atomic City never really turned into the home for

nuclear researchers and nuclear engineers that it had hoped to be.

[narrator] Faced with a stagnating population, Atomic City's

school moved out of town.

Moving the school started to change the population

of the town.

Families then had to drive further, so the population

slowly started to dwindle.

[narrator] But soon, a catastrophic event at the nuclear reactor testing

station SL-1 experimental reactor would send shock waves,

not just through Atomic City, but around the whole world.

[Liza] There were three nuclear operators working in

the facility on January 3rd, 1961, and they were there to

turn the reactor on after it had been shut down for

the Christmas holidays.

[Dr. Kwami] One procedure required one of the control rods to be pulled

manually about a couple inches in order to connect it to

its drive mechanism.

[Dr. Szulgit] One of the workers lifted the rod up too far,

so the reactor went super critical in a matter of

four milliseconds, vaporizing the entirety of

the coolant water and creating this huge steam explosion.

[narrator] When the emergency team arrived at the scene, they were met

with a devastating sight.

This day would change the industry forever.

[narrator] In southeastern Idaho, on the edge of Atomic City,

a sprawling government facility transformed the future of

atomic energy.

But it was also the site of one of the nuclear industry's

darkest days, when the SL-1 reactor went prompt-critical,

and produced a huge steam explosion.

[Dr. Auerbach] Two men were killed instantly.

One of them was thrown by the explosion onto concrete

blocks that broke his ribs, which pierced his heart.

[Dr. Kwami] And the other was launched into the air by an ejecting rod

and impaled against the ceiling.

[Dr. Auerbach] The third man was still moving when the emergency response

teams arrived, but he died a few hours later.

[narrator] The bodies of the victims were highly radioactive.

[Dr. Kwami] The men had to be buried in lead coffins

under a foot of concrete.

[narrator] Atomic City was just a few miles from where

the explosion occurred.

When I was 11 years old was when the reactor blew up.

The government brought out a trailer and placed it here in

town to measure radioactivity, to determine if we were going

to be exposed, and it was here for over a year,

and we were never warned that there was any high radiation.

To our knowledge, there wasn't any here in this community.

[narrator] This dark day would go down in history as the only fatal

nuclear reactor accident on US soil,

but it would transform safety measures

in the industry.

[Liza] We learned a lot from that failure and some of the safety

conditions that are in place today from things that

we learned on that January 3, 1961.

[narrator] In the following years, more reactors were built

and tested at the National Reactor Testing Station.

But soon, one of the most significant events of

the 20th century would change everything.

The Cold War ended, and nuclear energy seemed to

fall out of favor in many ways.

It seemed like a relic of the past.

In 1993, the Clinton administration shut

down the Nuclear Power Research Program.

[narrator] Over the next few years, operations slowed down at

the testing station, and its workforce

shrunk significantly.

Meanwhile, in Atomic City, the population dwindled to just

a handful of people, and many buildings

were abandoned.

[narrator] Today, only about 20 people live in Atomic City,

but one bar remains open, and a raceway brings crowds on

summer weekends.

Meanwhile, the EBR-1 building has been turned into a museum,

and the testing station is now known as

the Idaho National Laboratory.

[Liza] The focus of the lab right now is clean energy,

and it's a very exciting time.

We went from a skeleton crew to now having over 6,000 employees

at Idaho National Lab.

[narrator] In the Bluegrass State is a site where one colonel's

crusade transformed an industry, creating

a global phenomenon.

We are in beautiful Kentucky, home to fried chicken,

horse racing, and bourbon.

[narrator] An architectural anomaly hides within a forested valley.

When you come around the corner on the road, everybody says,

"Oh, my gosh."

This place was built to be a destination.

Here in the middle of rural Kentucky is a castle.

[narrator] Around this regal mystery is a sprawling abandoned complex.

[Dr. Thomas] You have some buildings that look like medieval structures.

You have other buildings that look industrial.

But most of them are falling apart.

[narrator] These buildings redefined an industry so volatile

the government took up arms against its own people.

This is the absolute ground zero for the history of one of

America's greatest institutions.

[narrator] Will Arvin is part of a group of people who are trying to

keep the traditions of this site alive.

[Will] There's the concept of stewardship here.

Ownership really doesn't matter as much as we're preserving

history, we're bringing it back to life.

[narrator] What Will and his team are conserving arrived in America

when Europeans first appeared on the continent's shores.

Life was tough for a lot of early American colonists.

And they looked to the comforts of home, namely in the form

of whiskey.

[narrator] But the ingredients available to distill whiskey in

the New World were different from the old,

something master distiller Brett Connors is grateful for.

As they expanded into the Western territories,

they started to see a lot of corn.

And that corn became part of those recipes that

they were distilling.

The whiskey corn made was slightly sweeter than

the whiskey that was distilled in Europe.

And eventually, this new whiskey was christened "bourbon."

All bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon.

The ingredients you put into that initial fermentation has

to be a base of at least 51% corn.

Bourbon is truly an American product.

It's our only native liquor.

[narrator] But before it was officially christened bourbon,

the American whiskey industry came head to head with

its own government.

[Brett] Upon the founding of the United States,

the federal government was effectively broke.

So George Washington decided that, well, why don't we just

tax whiskey producers?

[Dr. Thomas] Big mistake.

After you've just fought a war for independence, what do

you want to do?

Go home and have a nice drink, but not if it's taxed too high.

[narrator] In Pennsylvania, some whiskey producers fought back.

They weren't very kind to those

who were sent in to collect taxes.

There's a great story about a group of gentlemen that

dressed as women to lure a tax collector off of his horse,

proceed to tar and feather him, and then steal his horse.

[narrator] Little did the rebels know their actions would force

the hand of a founding father to pick up arms once again.

[narrator] In Kentucky stands a relic of American whiskey production.

And while it played a major role in transforming

the industry, the early days of whiskey making in

the US were volatile.

In 1791, nearly a century before this complex was built,

a group of rebels were fighting a new tax on the spirit that

threatened to wipe many distilleries out.

Things quickly escalated to major incidents where gunfights

and battles broke out in the streets of America.

Some of these fights even ended in deaths.

Eventually, George Washington stepped in.

[Dr. Thomas] He mustered a militia of 12,000 men and marched on

Western Pennsylvania, intimidating the whiskey rebels

until they backed down.

[narrator] This became known as the Whiskey Rebellion, and was

the first time the American government marched on its own

citizens, forcing many to flee.

There's always a rumor that during the Whiskey Rebellion,

there was a lot of individuals and distillers that fled

Pennsylvania to come to the state of Kentucky.

[narrator] Whether any of the rebels moved here or not, these buildings'

chapter in the bourbon history book began in a time of peace.

This is the Old Taylor Distillery.

Constructed in 1887, it was the brainchild of

Colonel E.H. Taylor.

Despite his moniker as a colonel, he was not a colonel

in the US military, but a Kentucky colonel,

which is an honorific bestowed upon citizens who've reached

some level of prominence, including those who make

finger-licking good fried chicken.

[narrator] Known as the father of the modern bourbon industry,

In these buildings, Colonel Taylor transformed how

the spirit was made.

But what he implemented came from the other side of

the Atlantic Ocean.

To learn everything he could about a quality product,

Colonel Taylor traveled to Europe to visit

German breweries, Irish whiskey distilleries,

and Scottish scotch distilleries.

The two main things that he learned were about

the importance of sanitization and the use of copper in

distillation products.

[Dr. Alcock] Copper has antibacterial properties and also

its chemical composition allows sulfur to be removed from

the liquid improving the taste.

[narrator] After putting into action what he learned, this distillery was

the first to produce one million cases of straight bourbon.

Yet this isn't all it achieved.

This place took whiskey production to a whole new level.

It combines customer hospitality

with the production of good whiskey.

[narrator] Inspired by the architecture he had seen in Europe,

Colonel Taylor built this castle to make his bourbon

brand stand out and attract visitors to the distillery.

E.H. Taylor's parties here were notorious.

They were over-the-top showmanship across the board.

He would have had entire tables just filled as deep as

they could have been with his bourbons.

[narrator] By hosting these parties, Colonel Taylor was trying to

promote his product to compete with the high-end scotch in

Irish whiskey markets.

But in the late 19th century, bourbon had developed

a reputation as the bad boy of the whiskey family.

[Dr. Alcock] Colonel Taylor had a problem.

The American bourbon industry was like the Wild West.

There was no regulation.

You could buy a bottle that tasted wonderful or a bottle

that tasted like old bathwater.

With the lack of rules, many distillers were claiming

their product was straight bourbon, but it wasn't.

[narrator] Some were adding things like iodine to the spirit to give it

the appearance of an older bourbon to sell it at

a higher price.

The rushed aging processes led to some pretty suspect

whiskeys, even dangerous ones.

[Dr. Davis-Hayes] Colonel Taylor made it his life's mission to assist

customers in discerning between proper bourbon like he made

and a number of other inferior products.

[narrator] For this, Colonel Taylor relied on his contacts in Washington.

[Dr. Alcock] On the 3rd of March, 1897, after years of

petitioning by Colonel Taylor, Congress finally passed

the Bottled in Bond Act.

[Brett] It was the first food protection act in the United

States and it had nothing to do with food, that everything to

do with liquor, which is quite telling.

[Dr. Davis-Hayes] A bonded bottle is like the green beret of bourbon.

It has a real mark of quality, and it's still in use today.

[Brett] The Bottled in Bond Act was a legislative guarantee that it

had to be a minimum of four years old, bottled in glass at

100 proof, distilled by one distillery, and one distillery season.

[narrator] Although it started as a guarantee for quality

bourbon, the Bottled in Bond Act became the gold standard

for all American liquor, yet it couldn't save the industry from

the wave of change heading their way.

On January 16th, 1919, the 18th Amendment was

ratified, and the following year on January 17th,

the whole country went dry.

[narrator] During Prohibition, an unexpected tragedy struck

these buildings.

On the 19th of January, 1923, Colonel Taylor died.

[narrator] Without their champion, when America became wet again,

these buildings were passed between several bourbon brands.

Used mainly as storage, they never reached

their previous heights, and in 1972, were left abandoned.

[narrator] Today, over 50 years later, under Will's guidance,

this distillery has come alive once more, with many of

the abandoned buildings being restored to make bourbon,

but this time under a new name.

We do keep the traditions of Colonel Taylor from his day.

We host events, we have tours, we have tastings.

[narrator] Will and his team have restored around half of these buildings,

and there's hope that one day the rest will follow.

[Will] The buildings themselves here are the memories of the past.

We are keeping pieces of American history alive.

So much of Bourbon history is grounded in this location.

[narrator] In Connecticut, a set of buildings was the heart of

a forgotten community, where discrimination

didn't prevent prosperity.

[Maisa] This place is a holy grail for African-American history.

It's unfathomable that it was forgotten.

We don't know why.

[narrator] Half a mile from downtown Bridgeport, a pair of derelict

structures stick out from the surrounding

industrial architecture.

[Dr. Auerbach] These buildings are in a sad state.

The windows are boarded up. The wood is splintered.

[narrator] These are not the only sign of dilapidation around.

Across the block, there's what looks like an old church.

[narrator] These are the last remnants of a 19th-century settlement that

challenges ingrained stereotypes.

[Maisa] For us to discover that people had this kind of determination,

when we were taught that most Black people during these times

were, if not enslaved, very passive and waiting to be

rescued, this is an amazing thing.

[narrator] For Maisa Tisdale, these structures represent

a chapter in America's Black history that was almost lost.

[Maisa] The only thing that survives are these two houses and the

church across the road.

Everything else is lying under asphalt and power plants.

[narrator] The origins of these buildings go back over 200 years,

to a time when Connecticut was one of the first states

in America to enact a groundbreaking new law.

[Meigs] In 1784, Connecticut passed

something called the Gradual Abolition Act.

This was an effort to outlaw slavery, but not overnight.

[Dr. Davis-Hayes] This law stated that any enslaved child born after this

year would be emancipated at the age of 25.

[narrator] At the time, Connecticut had more enslaved people than any

other state in New England.

So 77 years before the Civil War broke out, slavery was

still a crucial cog in its economy, as Adisa Beatty knows well.

[Dr. Beatty] Slavery was profitable and not something that they really

wanted to just relinquish.

So they tried to do this gradual abolition.

This was a way for them to kind of piecemeal out of

this economically.

[narrator] But for many liberated by this law, the free America

they found wasn't welcoming, with white communities blocking

them from buying property in populated areas.

Yet in April 1821, when this land was still mosquito-ridden

marshland, a group of Black men decided to make it their own.

There wasn't a restriction on them being able to purchase this land.

[narrator] Soon, others followed, and a thriving free Black

community grew.

This is Little Liberia.

It had about 36 structures, which included businesses like

ship building. There were two churches.

There were schools.

It was a really prosperous place.

The proximity to water meant that the primary industry of

Little Liberia was fishing, and this was a real opportunity.

In those days, the only place where a Black man could make as

much money as a white man was at sea.

[narrator] While the dangers of working on the ocean provided

opportunities to Little Liberia's men,

its wealthiest residents weren't male.

[Maisa] These are the Mary and Eliza Freeman houses.

They built two separate houses side by side.

And back then, these houses would have been

brightly painted.

[Dr. Beatty] Mary and Eliza Freeman were sisters.

They were Black entrepreneurs.

They came here in the 1840s.

[narrator] But these weren't the only structures in Little Liberia

owned by Mary and Eliza.

[Meigs] The Freeman sisters just had a knack

for real estate development.

They built houses, they rented houses out.

And over time, they built a really extensive

real estate empire.

[Dr. Davis-Hayes] In a time where 95%

of Black people in America were held in bondage, Mary and Eliza

became wealthier than most of the white men around.

They had enough money to build mansions, but they still lived

in these modest homes.

[narrator] With Mary and Eliza's help, Little Liberia became a jewel

in the Black community.

And in the mid-19th century, a transportation revolution

brought a new type of visitor to its door.

[Dr. Auerbach] A railroad line opened up between Bridgeport

and New York, meaning that people from New York could easily travel to

Little Liberia.

[narrator] Having abolished slavery in 1827, New York City was

becoming a metropolis where a new, wealthy, free Black

middle class had formed.

[Dr. Beatty] Blacks who were in New York City wanted to come here.

Little Liberia became a vacation destination.

[Dr. Davis-Hayes] In 1853, a luxurious hotel was built here in Little Liberia.

Its salon had a grand piano.

It was the type of place that wealthy white Americans would

have loved to stay.

But it was built for African Americans.

[Dr. Beatty] It was a safe place and a respectable place where the men

could work during the week in New York City and then come to

Little Liberia on the weekend and be with their families.

[narrator] Yet in the years before the Civil War, not all of

Little Liberia's visitors were carefree.

Some arrived on the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was not a physical railroad, it was

a series of safe houses that could be used to help enslaved

men and women escape bondage.

[narrator] As the clandestine network moved people from south to

north, bounty hunters would often search suspected stops

along the way, trying to capture and return those

escaping slavery. But not in Little Liberia.

[Maisa] It was an Underground Railroad destination settlement.

The fact that this place was so isolated really worked.

There was a safety in numbers feeling because you were

surrounded by Black people.

So if someone had self-emancipated from slavery,

they didn't really have to hide.

[narrator] But Little Liberia would only be a stop

on the Underground Railroad for 40 years.

As the nation descended into civil war, the lives of

the residents of this community would be irreversibly changed.

[narrator] Since the early 19th century, the Bridgeport neighborhood of

Little Liberia had become a prosperous home for free

African Americans.

Yet the peaceful times here would soon be shattered when

the nation was ripped in two.

[Dr. Auerbach] On the 12th of April, 1861, the American Civil War

started with the Confederate South fighting to preserve

slavery and the Union North fighting to keep

the country whole.

[Maisa] When the Civil War came, Black men here wanted to fight

for freedom.

We know that there were at least between 300 and 400 men

who enlisted from Bridgeport.

By participating with the Union, they believed that

would open the doors to equality for them.

[narrator] However, the men from Little Liberia would not find equality

within the Union ranks.

They were provided with inferior arms and substandard

medical care, suffering higher casualty rates than

their white comrades.

This resulted in the death of more than one in five Black soldiers.

[Dr. Beatty] The Civil War

impacted Little Liberia's population.

Many of those young boys and men did not come back.

[narrator] Despite the emancipation of African Americans across

the United States, the Reconstruction era would

not be kind to this settlement.

[Maisa] We're often asked how Little Liberia ended.

I would say it didn't so much end as it became dismembered.

There was pressure on the land to be used

for industrialization.

And Connecticut passed a series of segregation laws.

Black people could not live in the same neighborhoods as

white people.

And as the new factories moved in, white people wanted to

live in Little Liberia's neighborhoods.

[narrator] Around the turn of the 20th century,

Little Liberia ceased to exist.

Its buildings were either abandoned or repurposed

for new uses.

Today, over a century later, Maisa is raising funds to

convert the Mary and Eliza Freeman houses into a museum to

celebrate an often overlooked part of history.

[Maisa] When I look at these buildings now,

they're symbols for me of hope.

As I face life as a Black woman in the United States,

I never feel alone because I always think about what these

people have accomplished.

[narrator] In upstate New York are the relics of a revolutionary

industry which built America's greatest monuments.

[Althea] There's this old world feeling of a working industry that has

slowly been forgotten right off the main highway that most

people don't even know is here.

[Meigs] We're a few miles from the Hudson River.

It's an enchanted area.

You see rolling hills, deep canyons.

Manhattan's only 80 miles away, but it absolutely feels like

we're in another world.

[Bell] This area's always been associated with mysterious,

magical and supernatural forces like the legend of Rip Van

Winkle, and there's still lots of fairy tale things going on here.

[narrator] Beneath an overgrown graveyard a set of caverns hint at

a shady past.

[Bell] What on earth created these huge caves?

Are they man-made?

I believe that this site was imperative to forming America.

[narrator] Althea Werner's family bought this land in the town of

Rosendale over 30 years ago to preserve its hidden history.

All of the lives that have been touched by the industry and who

worked here that energy is still here.

This part of upstate New York was almost totally wild before

industry arrived at the beginning of

the 19th century.

[Meigs] In 1825 some engineers were building a canal from

the Delaware River to the Hudson River in New York,

which gave access to New York City.

They made a really important discovery.

They were sitting around a campfire, and one of

the campfire stones was noted to behave a little differently.

They had the Eureka moment. That was a cement stone.

[Bell] They found a deposit of dolomite limestone, which is

all you need to make an incredibly strong cement.

[narrator] This cement would prove to be very useful to a nation in

the middle of a construction boom.

[Meigs] When you add water to this mix, these grains of chemicals want

to make new molecular bonds.

They want to connect back to each other.

So this ground-up cooked stone wants to turn back into stone.

[narrator] This huge cavern was mined to extract the limestone to be

turned into cement.

[Althea] When you come in here, you get a sense of wonderment

that is driven by the idea of how it could even be done.

[narrator] This is the Widow Jane Mine.

A.J. Snyder bought it from his aunt, and she was affectionately

known as the Widow Jane.

[Meigs] By the mid-19th century, this whole area was honeycomb

with mines, and the Widow Jane Mine was one of the biggest.

[Rodriguez McRobbie] Because they were following a seam, the miners decided

to use a technique called room and pillar, where basically

they would drill into the rock, blast it out, but they would

leave these pillars to hold up the roof of the cavern.

[Meigs] The miners called these pillars Legos, not because

they resembled the plastic bricks which had not yet been

invented, but because sometimes they would just

let go and collapse.

[narrator] Despite the danger, the mines of Rosendale

were hugely productive and would go on to

build some of the most iconic structures in America.

[narrator] In upstate New York, the limestone dug from

the mines of Rosendale would supply half of North America's

cement needs in the late 19th century.

Rosendale cement helped design the landscape of Manhattan

and New York as we know it.

[Bell] Because it hardened underwater, Rosendale Cement was used to

construct many bridges, including the most famous

bridge in the world at the time, the Brooklyn Bridge.

[Meigs] The Washington Monument,

parts of the US Capitol building,

so many of the things that we think of

when we think of America were built with Rosendale Cement.

[Rodriguez McRobbie] Cement from the Widow Jane Mine built the 27,000-ton

pedestal that the Statue of Liberty stands on.

[narrator] But as the Industrial Revolution pushed for cheaper

ways of construction, a new challenger appeared.

[Meigs] In the 20th century, demand for Rosendale cement

began to fall off.

For one thing, there was another type of cement known as

Portland cement that didn't require such pure limestone.

It could be made with a mix of cheaper, more accessible

minerals that were available across the US.

[Althea] Portland cement ended up being able to be produced faster,

and then just basically took over the industry.

[Bell] Because of the switch to Portland cement, by the end of

the 1920s, only one of the 15 Rosendale cement companies had survived.

[narrator] But in the 1930s, as the miners of Rosendale were downing

their tools, new uses were found for these huge caverns.

[Rodriguez McRobbie] A man named Herman Knaust started to buy up the abandoned

mines around Rosendale.

And he did it to grow mushrooms.

[Meigs] In fact, they say in the 1930s, if you bought a can of mushroom

soup, you were probably eating Rosendale mushrooms.

[narrator] But soon, Herman Knaust came up with an even more

profitable plan.

[Meigs] During the Cold War, Knaust realized that these

underground caves would also make fantastic fallout shelters.

Everybody was worried about nuclear war and people were

envisioning, could I live underground for a few months to

survive such an event?

[Rodriguez McRobbie] But it wasn't just individuals who wanted the safety that

these caves could potentially offer.

Tech firms, banks, and government bodies

would all follow suit.

It's said that the caves contained a five-story

building, a parking garage, and a 65-room hotel.

[narrator] Many of Rosendale's mines would eventually flood or become

high-security storage facilities.

It's been rumored that the Constitution's even spent

some time in there under safekeeping.

[narrator] As different uses were found for the mines of Rosendale,

the natural cement industry limped on.

[Bell] The last natural cement company closed in 1970,

almost a century and a half after it was first

discovered here.

[narrator] Today, this mine has been given a second life.

[Rodriguez McRobbie] The Widow Jane Mine is overseen by

the Century House Historical Society.

It's open to the public as a museum.

Although 80% of the mine is now underwater, it is in high

demand as a performance venue.

[Althea] So we have had taiko drumming, we've had poetry readings.

They're awestruck when they come in and when

the acoustics start.

[narrator] And Althea makes sure everyone who comes here understands what

the nation owes this hole in the ground in upstate New York.

Had this mine not been found, then the New York City Harbor

with Lady Liberty would not be standing quite as grand

as she does.