Chapter 1: Sometimes You Find Silver

Our Town

In 'Our Town' Chapter 1: Sometimes You Find Silver, reporter Mara Benight investigates a quiet Tennessee town named Gainesboro, where metal detector

Key takeaways

• A small-town metal detector hobbyist uncovers signs of a large-scale, ideologically motivated real estate project in his hometown.

Main topics

• Metal detecting as a gateway to uncovering hidden social and political movements
• Rural land acquisition by secretive real estate ventures

Notable quotes

"Sometimes you find silver." – Brian Allen, reflecting on his metal detecting hobby and unexpected discovery.

Conclusion

The episode sets up a deeper investigation into how private, ideological

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walz, Katonji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more. That's all on The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 6 (0:30) Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Speaker 5 (0:33) Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Speaker 6 (0:53) And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Speaker 4 (0:57) Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (1:01) I'm Brett Coleman. And I'm Trevor Sykema. If you love football and want to understand what's really happening on the field, check out our show, NFL Pro. Every week, we break down the biggest plays, trends, and matchups using exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content you will not find anywhere else. Whether you're new to football, a fantasy football fanatic, or a diehard fan, NFL Pro will help you analyze the game like a pro. Listen to NFL Pro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (1:31) Bloomberg Speaker 2 (1:36) Audio Studios. Speaker 6 (1:38) Podcasts, radio, news. Speaker 2 (1:40) Our story starts with a guy and his metal detector. Speaker 1 (1:45) I got it as a Christmas present one year when I was young, 12, 13 or something like that. One of the cheap ones, but I just like the mystery of it. There's this open field, nothing around, but here's a silver coin. Like that was magical. Speaker 2 (2:01) Brian Allen grew up metal detecting in his hometown of Gainesboro, Tennessee, a teensy town in the foothills of Appalachia. People call it the Switzerland of the Cumberlands. lush rolling hills, sweeping vistas, and a lot of history. I Speaker 1 (2:17) find a lot of moonshine sites, old shotgun shell heads. You can tell modern ones because they have the plastic. Speaker 2 (2:23) During the Civil War, the Confederate Army would post up by Gainesboro to seize the Union Army's supplies as they floated by on the Cumberland River. Horse stuff. So for the right person, broken horseshoes. Speaker 1 (2:35) It's Speaker 2 (2:35) a treasure trove. Speaker 1 (2:36) Axes. Just the mystery of just putting something together. I'm a very quiet person. If I'm talking about something I'm passionate about, then I can go. Speaker 2 (2:46) There was one piece of land that backed right up to a curve in the river. Bryant had been eyeing it for years. 99 acres of farmland. Speaker 1 (2:56) It was over by the high school. That's the one that I really wanted to hit. Speaker 2 (3:01) A place that's about to produce his biggest discovery yet. Speaker 2 (3:06) This is the summer of 2024. Bryant goes digging through public records to get permission from the owner to metal detect. And he realizes it's been sold recently to a name he doesn't recognize. Now, Gainesboro is a town of a thousand people, many of whom are related. So it's a peculiar thing to find a name you've never heard of. Speaker 1 (3:29) Because most of the time, you know, he would sell it to Jim Bob over the holler. So it stays in the family. So that intrigued me. Because if someone local didn't buy the land, then who did? I have a very inquisitive mind about things. I have far-fetched ideas, and some of them work out and some don't. I think that goes back to my metal detecting. Like, yeah, 90 % of the time I'll go out there and find garbage, but sometimes you find silver. Speaker 2 (3:57) So he Googles some of the details on the property record and sees that it was some real estate guy who bought the land. And that leads him to a company, one called Ridge Runner USA. He goes to the Ridge Runner website. Speaker 1 (4:12) The first thing you see when it pops up is pioneers in Appalachia. Speaker 2 (4:18) Pioneers in Appalachia. The website is spare with that single phrase over an image of an open field with a winding dirt road. And below, an invitation to learn more. Bryant clicks. Speaker 1 (4:33) Ridge Runner is building pioneer communities in the old American heartland. Ridge Runner appears to be some kind of real estate company. We see rising demand for new types of communities around a shared vision for local life in America. I'm like, hang on, that was when I was like, well, you know something. Speaker 2 (4:55) Bryant searches more. and finds that Ridge Runner seems to be affiliated with a larger company called Newfounding. That website is packed with even grander pronouncements. We Speaker 1 (5:09) are forging an alliance to revitalize American civilization, bringing builders, creators, and concerned citizens together. Build the America you want to live in. And it's like, but... It's already built. I'm like, yeah, that don't sound good. Speaker 2 (5:30) From what Bryant can discern, Newfounding is involved in all sorts of things. Venture capital, media, and real estate. That's where Ridge Runner comes in. Both companies, Ridge Runner and Newfounding, seem ambitious and filled with big ideas. Speaker 1 (5:50) pioneers, frontier, all the words for oppression and conquering. We're going to convert these heathens. Like it gave me that feel. Like this was their manifest destiny. Speaker 2 (6:02) Ridge runner, new founding, those 99 acres across from the high school. Brian is trying to figure out what's in front of him. Speaker 1 (6:11) Like, what am I missing? Speaker 2 (6:12) What was happening in his quiet hometown? Speaker 2 (6:21) In the months following, Bryant, who is painfully shy, reveals his discovery to only one person, a co-worker. But he keeps tracking Ridge Runner, the real estate company, and finds more land getting scooped up in and around Gainesboro. Bryant had stumbled into something, the beginning of an ambitious project, to make Gainesboro a new type of town filled with like-minded people. This tiny town would soon realize it was part of a much larger experiment, backed by people with powerful connections and plenty of money, to build the America they want to live in, starting with Gainesboro. From Bloomberg News, I'm Maribyn Knight, reporting along with Susan Burfield, and you're listening to Our Town. This is Chapter One, Sometimes You Find Silver. Speaker 2 (7:28) A few months before Brian Allen, the metal detecting enthusiast, started snooping around about those 99 acres, a new face started turning up at the stolen coin restaurant. The coin, as it's called, is a local institution. Speaker 2 (7:44) It's owned by Cassie Kessler and her husband, who's the chef. Brian Allen goes there often, as do many day-tripping tourists. It's right on the town square. The town square, which is one square block with an old courthouse in the middle, is Gainesboro's social hub. It's where people come to gossip, to shop, to pick up a prescription. Or eat a plate of biscuits and chocolate gravy. Speaker 6 (8:11) It's a southern thing. An Speaker 2 (8:13) Appalachian special. It was in the midst of all this when Cassie saw that new face at her restaurant. A real estate guy. Speaker 3 (8:21) I had become pretty good acquaintance. He knew my first name basis, would come in. Anytime he would come in, I would sit and talk to him. Speaker 2 (8:30) Cassie is energetic, a fast, urgent talker. flitting from table to table in the coin's cozy dining room. Speaker 3 (8:37) Hi, Dave baby, how are you? Good. I just like to table touch, like to talk to people. It's a small town, like I know everybody in that restaurant. I'll show you the pictures of Speaker 6 (8:45) it. Speaker 3 (8:45) I Speaker 6 (8:46) know, I Speaker 3 (8:46) can't wait to see them. Speaker 2 (8:47) And this new face, the real estate guy, he was a great customer. Speaker 3 (8:52) Very, very personable. Speaker 2 (8:54) And seemingly interested in investing in Gainesboro. And Cassie had a hot tip. Speaker 3 (8:59) My lawyer at the time was looking to sell his spot. The Speaker 2 (9:06) building was right around the corner from the restaurant, right off the town square. A prime location and rare find. And Speaker 3 (9:13) I had mentioned it because... Some of the other buildings in town, it's very hard for them to come. They're passed down through family. Speaker 2 (9:20) Cassie had learned this about Gainesboro, that it was tight-knit. She'd moved there about five years earlier from Florida, and the town had given her a lot. Speaker 3 (9:29) I could not have been to this point in my life without the support of this town, whether it's council members, community members, business members, employees. Like, it has just been an effort from... Speaker 2 (9:45) Cassie is a recovering drug user, sober 13 years. So the idea of having this kind of welcome and support system to open a business, it meant everything to her. I Speaker 3 (9:57) was such a bad person for such a long time. And it's really nice to like take that effort that I used to be into being an addict and put it into the good stuff in the community and like helping. It just is like, I know it sounds cheesy and I say it does. It's better than being high. Like it really is. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel valuable. All the opposite feelings you get whenever you're an addict. Speaker 2 (10:21) Cassie loved helping Gainsborough grow. Because like her, it too had struggled in years past. Hollowed out by job losses and stagnant wages, nearby factories had closed. The shirt factory, Oshkosh Bagosh. Then came the opioid epidemic. But over the past decade, people like Cassie had started opening restaurants and stores that drew tourists. So when this real estate guy showed up in town and bought the building that Cassie tipped him off to, she was delighted. He bought it along with his son, who'd just moved from Texas to Gainesboro. He was becoming a regular, too. His name was Josh Abitoy. Soon he'd started coming in with other men, men who also seemed new to the town. She wasn't sure if they were colleagues or friends. As Speaker 3 (11:13) many times as they came into my restaurant or did anything, they never would talk to me. Speaker 2 (11:18) But that didn't deter Cassie from chatting Josh Abatoy up. Speaker 3 (11:24) After I'd found out that they had bought it, Josh, his father, and another gentleman were sitting at the restaurant. And I can remember, I remember it was table 10, and I was sitting there talking to them about, you know, what are you guys doing? And, oh, it's an appraisal business. Just very, like, not putting a direct stamp on it. Like, we're still trying to figure out, it's going to be a couple different things. And I was like, oh, I'm going to have to come down and check it out. Speaker 2 (11:49) All the Gainesboro business owners were close. Speaker 3 (11:52) Here in town, like, all the businesses on the square, we, like, do so many things together. We just are each other's biggest cheerleaders. But Speaker 2 (12:00) that was not the response she got from Josh Abitoy. And Speaker 3 (12:03) I can remember him looking up at me and saying, we're just gonna have to wait till it's done. We're not gonna let anybody in there till it's done. From right then, it was, like, closed off. It went from open conversation to, like, now I'm just not gonna talk about what this place is anymore. I should have been like, well, that's kind of weird. Speaker 2 (12:21) Then, a couple months after Abitoy purchased that building by the square, the town would find out why. Nothing was quite the same for Gainesboro after that. More after the break. Speaker 6 (12:37) When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Speaker 5 (13:41) Here's what you missed. And the argument is... Do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw.