Internet furnishes fascinating tale of a civil rights era ghosttown on demand

Last week, Redditor inkslave found himself in Cairo Illinois, an abandoned ghost-town that had fallen to utter ruin. After coming up blank on Wikipedia and Google, he asked Reddit just what happened to Cairo -- and got an immediate answer from a scholar who wrote his master's thesis on the subject:

Looking at a map of the USA, you'd think there would be a booming city at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. In the late 19th century, Cairo was a booming town, known as a railroad and river traffic hub with the untamed culture you'd expect from a northern New Orleans. Even though Cairo is in Illinois, it is the state's southern-most city and is actually further south than Richmond, Virginia. Its white-black race dynamic was as paternalistic as any in the "south," and its civil rights history was very violent. Though most people blame the violence in the 1960s and 70s for Cairo's economic decline, I found that it was really part of a general decline throughout the 20th century. The religious element in Cairo was able to ban gambling and prostitution in the late 19th century, so part of the allure of a northern New Orleans was lost and a vibrant industry was snuffed out. Then, the decline of the railroad and river traffic industries really ruined the town. In my research I found that the economic boycott in the 60s and 70s (many white business owners chose to close their businesses and move away rather than hire black employees) was really the final death knell of a town that had already been in decline since the 1920s, well before the Great Depression.

What the hell happened to Cairo, Illinois? (Reddit)

A Civil Rights Era Ghost Town (Visual News)

(via Warren Ellis)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Cairo figures in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Jim and Huck plan to land there and travel up the Ohio River. It never happens of course.

The town also figures in blues: Henry Spaulding’s “Cairo Blues,” later covered by Henry Townsend.
discontinuuity

Reddit is also planning ways to revitalize the local economy in Cairo:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectCairo/
Anonymous

I’m from Cairo, born and raised. My folks still live there. Is it a ghost town in the sense that nobody lives there? No. There’s a whole community there. A handful of businesses (a grocery store, a couple of diners, a killer bbq place) are still in operation. Multiple churches are still open. It’s the Alexander county seat, which means that there’s a county courthouse there.

That being said, the town gets closer to a ghost town every year. Each time I go down to visit my parents, another building has either been burned down by an arsonist or has just fallen down in disrepair. Not a ghost town, but certainly a ghost of what it once was.

Of course, Charles Dickens trashed Cairo long ago when he visited, so maybe it was never that great to begin with.
Anonymous

While I live in the midwest I haven’t been through Cairo but is it really a “ghost town”? According to Wikipedia the population in 2000 was above 3600. I can’t imagine that it has been abandoned during the past 10 years.

Now as far as being a town who has seen its peak and went into decline, sure, I can imagine that. There are other small towns in the midwest that you can wander through and see the old majestic buildings falling into disrepair because the town went through a heyday and then a decline.

Yes, it has fallen further than Detroit. But Detroit has a lot of infrastructure and regional activities keeping it afloat. Cairo has, well, nothing. It is just a small midwest town that happened to have an extraordinary bout of good fortune (the river boats) before it collapsed.
chgoliz

Since we’ve moved to the more general topic of racial inequality in housing….

There was a documentary a few years ago which evades my google-fu right now (but is likely to be PBS’s “The G.I. Bill: The Law That Changed America”), which listed many of the ways that the GI bill exacerbated the economic divide between blacks and whites.

For example, prior to the GI bill the only people (of any skin color) who could own a home were those who could put a minimum of 80-90% down. Ergo, not many people owned their own homes. One of the details of the GI bill was guaranteeing mortgages for veterans so that banks would lend them most of the cost of owning a home. Coupled with redlining (which had been in existence before, but became even more discriminatory when coupled with the GI bill), this meant that white families could move into all white suburbs, leaving black families “stuck” in lowered-equity urban neighborhoods. Rising equity in the white suburban homes enabled those families to afford many things: a larger home, college education for the children, funding a new business, etc.

White grand- and great-grandchildren today enjoy the fruits of a much larger nest egg thanks to the GI bill.
Anonymous

Cairo, BFE is how I had it described more than once when I was living in H’burg, (So)IL.

And when we saw it, I understood properly for the first time what BFE meant!

Some great and haunting photos of the place. It is indeed the Cairo in American Gods. One of the haunting, strange places in that book. Probably why Gaiman chose the place (if he ever saw it?).
Anonymous

I think this guy is the mayor:

http://www.scenicreflections.com/files/pyramid__head_homecoming_Wallpaper_010u.jpg
Anonymous

If you use google street view to walk through the town, its not dead. Sure its dying, but so are most towns this size in America.
- Orpheline
  
  I think ‘ghost town’ is apt. Cairo isn’t dead, but it certainly feels haunted (at least to a visitor). The ghosts of Cairo are deserted homes, empty blocks, and crumbling commercial buildings. I grew up in a similar town in central New York – larger and more populous than Cairo, but reduced in the same way when the railroads died.
  
  A city needs more than residents; it needs vitality.
adamnvillani

Reminds me a bit of Lake Providence, Louisiana. In 1986 I was 12 years old and my family drove through on a cross-country road trip. We stayed going straight instead of turning with the US highway at one point and found ourselves in a small downtown that looked like it had been the scene of a bad riot 20 years before and had never been cleaned up since.

A while later there was an article in Time magazine (this was before the widespread proliferation of the Internet, folks) about how Lake Providence had been named the poorest town in the entire United States.
foobar

Neat. Is that the Cairo in American Gods?
- Scruff
  
  Yes, that is the Cairo that was used as a setting in American Gods.
Jeff

3632 people in Cairo according to the 2000 census. Have they all left since then? Or are they all so meaningless that they can be consigned to the category of “ghosts?”
Anonymous

Uh oh, here comes more downtime.
Let the records show that boingboing broke reddit this time.
Ape Lad

Cairo is pronounced “Kay-ro” if anyone cares.
I was just thinking about this town yesterday and went looking for it on flickr. There are lots of gloomy photos of the abandoned downtown, like this one. It’s very sad. I visited the area in the mid-90s, and it wasn’t exactly bustling then.
James Loewen highlights Cairo in his book Sundown Towns: a Hidden Dimension of American Racism. There was an infamous series of lynchings there in the early 20th century.
- Anonymous
  
  FYI, most of the locals pronounce it Care-o…..Population continues to decline, but as many have mentioned not a ghosttown as a whole but the business district along Commercial near the Ohio River is what is being referenced… About 6-8 blocks of a once vibrant downtown with all but a few businesses left… Many buildings have been demolished and others to be demolished.. FYI, this year alone, American Commercial Lines moved their North Division headquarters to Cairo, River Bend Rice opened a small plant there, Nelson’s Detailing, Mack’s restaurant, Top Wash Laundromat, Helle Brothers Sawmill in North Cairo, opened, G and L Clothing built a new building, The Delta Center built a new Resale Shop, a beauty salon is opening downtown.. A new port district was created in July… Much more than meets the eye…
- MadRat
  
  I thought to myself, “A ghost town?! COOL!!” So I decided to have a look if there was any listing for Cairo on Google Maps. There was. I wanted to see if there was any images of Cairo on Google Maps. There’s a very complete street view of it. The problem is Cairo isn’t quite what I think of when I think of a ghost town. There are cars parked and driving around the roads and people still living there. Based on Street View, I’d say the analagy of Xenu and Orpheline are pretty accurate. There are some very run down parts of Cairo but the town has not been totally abandoned.
  
  The picture that Ape Lad pointed out on Flickr can be found on Street View (it’s actually on 9th street not 10th): http://is.gd/iomxm Feel free to “drive” around and see the sights.
Anonymous

I’m from a little town not far from Cairo, and we always pronounced it care-o. (But then my own little town was Vienna, pronounced Vi-anna.)

Lots of sundowntowns in the area; karma, anyone?
Anonymous

never been there, but know a great old time fiddle tune — ‘going down to Cairo’ (Kay-ro)

I think there is a whole region there called little Egypt.
between the confluence of two rivers.
dargaud

This is one of the first links that came up when I searched for images: http://www.djibnet.com/photo/1970/cairo-il-1970-201352062.html
Which makes me wonder what the comment means: “whites wouldn’t shoot at blacks if white college students were in town”
- chgoliz
  
  “Which makes me wonder what the comment means: “whites wouldn’t shoot at blacks if white college students were in town”"
  
  I don’t think anyone has answered you yet.
  
  The whites in Cairo were (apparently) media savvy enough to know that they would draw too much attention to their actions if they got up to their hijinks while white college students were around, because even if they didn’t accidentally kill one of them, the students would carry the news back to their colleges and to the big city newspapers.
  
  Students in higher education have a tendency towards liberal bias, you see.
Anonymous

Noted American Beat/Surrealist poet, jazz musician, and painter Ted Joans was born on a riverboat in Cairo, on July 4, 1928. His parents were riverboat entertainers.
Xenu

So if we replace African Americans people with organized labor, it’s basically the same as Detroit.
millie fink

“Ghost town” is pretty harsh.

Cairo is also the home of a wonderful band, the Midwest’s greatest secret–Stace England and the Salt Kings.

Stace himself calls Cairo “the most fascinating town in America”:

http://www.staceengland.com/id14.html

Their CD based on the movies of legendary filmmaker Oscar Micheaux is excellent; the show based on it, which I’ve been lucky enough to see, is even better:

http://www.staceengland.com/index.html

(“The Girl from Chicago” is even my current fave song.)

Ghost town? Hmmph.
Anonymous

Time magazine had a photo essay on the town about ten years ago. I remember seeing it while still in high school, but the images still linger in the back of my mind.
Orpheline

Except Detroit hasn’t fallen so far…

Once or twice a year I drive from South Dakota to Tennessee and pass through Cairo even though it’s a bit out of the way. It’s very surreal: beautiful buildings on the main street through town (Sycamore?), but go one street east and there are blocks of ruins, and scarcely a business open anywhere.

One of the most striking features is the floodgate at the north end of town – if it were ever used, the town would become an island until the waters subsided… Pictures are here: http://michaelminn.net/america/cairo_gate/
Anonymous

Twain wrote a number of interesting passages about Cairo over a century ago. Even in the 1880s it was dying, having fallen on hard times largely due to the Civil War and the collapse of the steamboating industry. Not even newly furbished railroads to the town could sustain it, as trade simply went around it along more vital and useful routes.

Cairo was not a large city, even by the standards of the nineteenth century. It was a town, and everywhere in the world, over time, towns arise and then slip away. People and business go where it is most convenient, profitable, or necessary. Cairo was borne from river trade, and when that trade ceased to exist, so did the town.

~D. Walker
xzzy

Definitely, the label “ghost town” is being applied a bit too liberally here.

Seeing this post I rushed off to google maps to see what was there.. and while the place is certainly run down, there’s also people still living there.

If you want a “real” ghost town, you need to head out west. Abandoned mining towns litter the rockies and are every bit as entertaining to explore as you’d expect.
ddunc23

There’s a really interesting film about Cairo by the artists Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright. There’s more info here http://www.cornerhouse.org/art/info.aspx?ID=404&page=0, and an interview and clips from the film here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvIhnYXZ5Tw, but I’m afraid I don’t know how to get hold of a copy!
awjtawjt

My family’s from there. It’s definitely not the most vibrant and hoppin place in the world, which is why the kids all left, went to WWII, and stayed in California after their service. It is rather ghostey. Is it actually a “ghost town” in the classic gray tumbleweedy sense? Well, no, it just looks like any other dreary depressed midwestern place now.

Two things – it’s right near Cave-in-Rock, where the Juggalos tried to stone Tila Tequila. So why do you think the Juggalos decided on that place? Try, “depressed town and county budgets, therefore lack of police manpower and probably more anarchic freedom…” That’s my guess.

Second, on the NORTH side of the Ohio/Mississippi confluence there’s a slave house. Slaves were kept upstairs in dark cells to breed. I toured this place as a kid, and it gave me a scare. Dreary, dank and utterly chilling. A “wooden prison” like the hold of a slave ship. But supposedly it’s closed now. http://www.prairieghosts.com/slave.html

That part of the country has some serious history.
Deidzoeb

“…the economic boycott in the 60s and 70s (many white business owners chose to close their businesses and move away rather than hire black employees) was really the final death knell of a town that had already been in decline since the 1920s…”

Another example of the way white flight (and the accompanying flight of capital) contributes to failure of some towns, not poverty and crime brought by the minorities that scare them away.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Oh no, blacks moving in! There goes the neighborhood. My property values will go down, businesses won’t settle hear, crime will rise. I better move out.” So they sell their houses cheap to get out quicker, maybe move their businesses to the suburbs, helping drive down property values. Income levels go down because richer people move out. Crime rates are affected by the lowered income levels. And companies don’t bring new jobs there because of the crime and because some of them are owned by frightened/racist whites.

Detroit hasn’t had a “death knell” just yet, but reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated over and over since the 70s (like the reported death of newspapers?). If change in total population is an indicator of the health of a city, Detroit certainly hasn’t been thriving though.
- millie fink
  
  Yep. As john powell puts it in an EXCELLENT interview:
  
  Q: But we’ve all seen communities decline after minorities move in. How do you explain that phenomenon?
  
  A: Almost every person that I know, especially every white person I know, has a story about having grown up in an area that was very nice, and then blacks moved in and the housing value going down. So the story that gets told around that is when blacks move in, housing values go down. That’s confirmed by lived experience, and it gets retold over and over, so virtually every white person knows this story.
  
  What I want to suggest is that that story is true, but not for the reasons that the story suggests. It’s not that blacks move in that causes the housing values to go down, it’s that whites leave. Instead of focusing on the white flight, they focus on the black entrance.
  
  But when whites leave, because blacks only represent about 4 percent of any housing market, it means you have a housing market in which 96 percent of the market isn’t interested, and that causes values to plummet immediately. But it’s the white flight that’s causing housing values to plummet, not blacks moving in.
  
  Now, there have been a few communities, including Oak Park, outside of Chicago, where they watched this phenomena of blacks starting to move in. Oak Park is a liberal community that fought for the civil rights movement. In the late ’60s, when blacks started to move in, the residents said, you know what, this is all the equity we have. This is all the wealth that we have. I’m concerned that housing values are going to go down. I know that same story. But it’s not because we’re afraid of living next to black people, we just don’t want to lose our wealth.
  
  So what the city did was insure the value of the houses – up to 85 percent of market value – so whites wouldn’t feel forced to leave. That was about 35-40 years ago. They haven’t paid one casualty and it remains a very vibrant, integrated community, because whites didn’t flee.
  
  So that’s the phenomenon – that white flight is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy. By leaving a neighborhood and refusing to stay where blacks are, that causes housing values to go down, rather than the black presence itself.
  
  source:
  
  http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-03-06.htm
  - Deidzoeb
    
    Thanks for the link, millie. I recall watching some documentary 5 or 10 years ago that said there are multiple places around the country that bear this out, similar to that example of Oak Park. In neighborhoods where whites left because of increasing minorities moving in, property values went down. In neighborhoods that integrated without much white flight, property values stayed the same or increased over time.
daddy_fizz

Sad to see..

Good place for Walking Dead Season 2 to shoot an episode?
Anonymous

I rode through in 1993 in the midst of a flood; I probably got out only a few hours before they closed the bridges. Cairo was poor and black, but not noticeably poorer or blacker (or any more abandoned) that many other places in the south eastern United States.

As others have noted, the term “ghost town” is poorly selected. Perhaps “decayed”?
Anonymous

Great comments! I wonder if that area was under-deeveloped because of this:
“THE GREAT NEW MADRID EARTHQUAKE OF 1811-1812 was actually a series of over 2000 shocks in five months, five of which were 8.0 or more in magnitude. Eighteen of these rang church bells on the Eastern seaboard. The very land itself was destroyed in the Missouri Bootheel, making it unfit even for farmers for many years. It was the largest burst of seismic energy east of the Rocky Mountains in the history of the United States and was several times larger than the San Francisco quake of 1906.”
http://www.scchealth.org/docs/ems/docs/prepare/newmadrid.html

As a child in Memphis I was told that the 1811 earthquake made the Mississippi River run backwards and “bells ring in Boston”, so I thought Boston was north along the Mississippi River.

Great images of the New Madrid fault: http://showme.net/~fkeller/quake/maps2.htm
aperson

Redditors, roll out!
MrJM

Caro isn’t a ghost town, it’s a zombie town.