Every place like this has been explained by someone who left. Boomtown is written by someone who left too - but stayed close enough to know what the usual explanation gets wrong.
Before West Frankfort, Illinois, was a coal town, it was water, timber, road, orchard, fort, and flood bottom. Then coal turned it into a city almost overnight, filling its schools, theaters, churches, union halls, ballfields, restaurants, stores, and Main Street rooms with the force of underground work. Men went down. Families waited above. The town became useful.
But usefulness has a cost.
Boomtown traces West Frankfort and the Big Muddy country from Indigenous ground and French river passage through Upland South settlement, orchards, railroads, coal, disaster, immigration, civic life, race, sport, decline, memory, and the long aftermath of extraction. It is a book about mine maps and mayors, school gyms and duck blinds, King Neptune the pig and Orient No. 2, Main Street and Shit Creek - a place seen whole enough that neither contempt nor nostalgia can explain it.
This is not a simple comeback story. It is not an indictment of the people who stayed, and it is not a romance of the boom years. It is a map of what remains when a town's old usefulness has been spent: the names, rooms, roads, rituals, cemeteries, waters, storefronts, records, griefs, jokes, and acts of custody that keep a place from becoming only what happened to it.
Written with the intimacy of memoir, the reach of regional history, and the moral urgency of post-industrial witness, Boomtown asks what it means to inherit a wounded place without lying about it - and whether memory, honestly kept, can become a form of repair.
