CAIRO, Illinois: EERILY EMPTY Town Is Almost Totally Abandoned, Despite Its Fascinating History

all right everyone i am in cairo illinois uh a little small city at a fascinating uh location and it has a fascinating history but sadly the town is nearly gone it's uh near ghost town now but we'll get to that in a minute i'm going to show you where i am um this is the very southern spot of illinois right here uh this is kentucky this is missouri and uh this is the ohio river and this is the mississippi it's where they meet this is the uh what from what i understand the widest spot in the mississippi but cairo is at the confluence of these two major rivers as you probably know the ohio begins in pittsburgh winds its way through that part of the country past cincinnati and louisville kentucky and then it meets the mississippi here uh i found out about cairo when i was in pittsburgh because i saw that that's where the ohio river begins so i thought well where does it where does it end i read that it ends in the mississippi or at the mississippi and i was thinking there must be some kind of town right there because that would be a fantastic location specifically in the mid to late 1800s and sure enough that's when i found out about cairo and uh it's true the town has a fascinating history but first of all i want to show you this area from the air because it's really cool looking so here's the drone shot right now [Music] i am uh walking to a spot you you saw in the drone shot uh ahead of me is the very point southern point i guess if you will of illinois it's right here now uh that is the mississippi and it flows kind of makes a turn here and goes that way this [Music] is the ohio [Music] uh [Music] quite a bit of activity here the got a push barge there pushing a big load actually got two of them that's a really big load but they are exiting the ohio river and heading into the mississippi that way is the way towards memphis and new orleans [Music] and this direction is going north uh towards minneapolis that is cairo in the distance let's see if i can do a little bit of a zoom you can see uh the part of the city there on the river i will head in there shortly i just want to just take it all in because this is a really cool place anyway cairo city full of history like i said i saw it on the map and thought town is at the confluence of two major rivers in the 1800s river travel was one of the main forms of transportation so this must have been an important city in its time and it was but sadly no more uh cairo is on the verge of becoming a ghost town i'm going to head back up to the bronco and i'm going to show you the town and my hope is that once you finish this video you will have felt like you have been there and saw this historical but now nearly dead uh town in illinois okay i'm back in the bronco uh you're looking at the ohio river and that is kentucky across the way i'm just going to show you via australian city where i'm at this is kentucky we got missouri down here and this is illinois now i'll pull out a little bit so you can i can show you where i'm at on the map uh let's take a little bit farther out okay now you can see chicago up there this is illinois at the very bottom of illinois as i told you earlier and you can see that there's kind of a little squiggle south of illinois there and of course that is where cairo is um i'm going to drive into cairo uh from the south here because the sun is behind me and it will look better there but as i drive there i'm going to tell you a little bit about the city a lot of history because of its location right here where the ohio meets the mississippi right there in that spot that you're looking at this was a major transportation hub in the mid to late 1800s railroads came here as you can well guess a lot of river traffic and the city had a booming ferry business uh because there were no bridges like that one you see right there so when people needed to cross the ohio and the mississippi cairo would charge them for a ferry ride to their destination on the other side so the city was booming growing by triple digits every year visited by a lot of people charles dickens dickens came here and this is a guy who wrote oliver twist and great expectations and after visiting here he wasn't impressed but it was the inspiration for one of his books you know i can't remember it off the top of my head uh if you've read huckleberry finn you'll know that this is the location or the destination for him and jim as they made their way up the mississippi river the post office here in cairo in the late 1800s was the third busiest in the united states so the city was growing growing rapidly but trains moved to chicago those bridges were built so no more use for a ferry and uh the city began to die not badly until the 1900s in fact in 1920 the peak population here was fifteen thousand three hundred but all that business left and the city began its downward spiral a lot of race issues uh there were lynchings in 1909 a black man was lynched here after being accused of killing a white woman um things kept simmering here at one time almost half the population was black uh i want to say late 1800s early 1900s making this city one of the highest in terms of percentage of population being black [Music] a lot of racial strife in the 60s because blacks were being treated unfairly and so they began boycotting white businesses the white businesses instead of hiring black folk just uh booked closed the shop and left and the city really began to die then that was the death now today there are well 2020 census there were 1733 people a year later in 2021 the population had dropped to 15 or fifteen a little over fifteen hundred people let me get that spit out uh an over two hundred person drop which doesn't sound like a lot but percentage to how many people are here that is a big population drop uh at this rate the city will be a complete ghost town uh in the seven to ten years so uh all right so i'm back on the road heading in into cairo i've already driven through it once from the north but uh the sun is not the right place to video in that direction so i'm gonna go in this way but uh let me prepare you for it this city is in terrible terrible shape so i'm gonna head in and give you a good look so here we go pretty bad numbers for this town i'm gonna stop somewhere and uh read them off to you but uh let me just get into town here first give you a uh first look at it i see a phone booth there i wonder if that works i'm gonna guess not all right i'm going to cut a left here and then driving it downtown from that direction but uh i mean you can already see for yourself that really bad decay hope you can see that the sun is in the wrong spot there's a house up here that has been completely or is returning to nature completely that kind of is as well now that is downtown in the distance a couple streets up i'm gonna head there right now but uh i saw this on the way in look at that nature has almost completely taken over that house there isn't that something again there's a building right on main street you can see it is just disintegrated and across the street is the carroll fire department uh this is downtown believe it or not downtown is a registered historic district i'm going to drive in now go up here and then tell you a little bit more about the city in terms of its numbers i guess that that is the chamber of commerce and it's where it actually is anyway uh let me show you where i'm at so i'm just in cairo in the south part of the city or south area of the city i'm gonna head up here take a quick look that's just amazing isn't it wow let me turn around here you can see these street lights here some of them are or some of them are broken out wow huh i'm gonna go up here there's a break in the levee wall here so i'm gonna get out and take a look [Music] [Music] yeah there's the that is the ohio river we'll get out and look at it [Music] now there's commercial activity here so you can see all these uh push barges along the river a bunch of them here look at them all looks like one is about to pull away right there so there is some industry here yeah these are places where the river actually rose at different times in history 2011 it got all the way up here but these levees uh they actually protect the city all right um a little bit about the city as far as its economic numbers you know it's losing a tremendous amount of population i've already told you that this is a poor city 36.15 percent of the city lives at or below poverty so that's over three times the national rate which is 11.4 the average income per person in this town is 18 895 the average person lives on just shy of 19 000 a year um one other thing uh the i told you i was going to start adding this to my videos and it is really striking here the average home price here forty three thousand yeah you heard me right not three four five hundred thousand like most of the rest of the country the average home here is worth forty three thousand dollars all right so here i am south of the city i'm gonna get back out on the main street there and cruise deeper into the town uh check out a few neighborhoods this is the main street i'm gonna drive down slowly immediately what do you see though always here aren't they dollar general all right so i'll just do a quick drive through the city i believe that is historic custom house it is built in the 1800s one of the historic buildings in the city it's on the national register they have quite a few historic buildings here now that is the cairo public library that is a historic building as well anyway i'll uh let's make a quick cruise through here and turn around and go back but you're already seeing for yourself um empty store fronts everywhere hi let's see almost halfway through uh there is a ford dealer here that even sells broncos i was surprised to see this it looks like it's open i see it where am i at now yeah about halfway through i'll just keep her camera on so you can see for yourself a little bit of everything there what i had read is that um that there has not been a home built here a private home in over 50 years uh grocery store closed 20 years ago hospital closed in the late 80s there's just nothing here i don't know what people do for food and groceries it's kind of a surprise that there is a car dealer here but none of those businesses that you expect grocery stores etc here yeah so i'm gonna go up here i've given you a look-see of the main street and we'll just explore some of the neighborhoods a little bit but uh let's hang on let's get to the uh the end of town here it's very close [Music] that's something isn't it i think this train ride is yeah so you can see i am exiting the town now so i'm going to go up here and i turn around but this is a pretty cool site coming into the city so i'm going to show you this i'm going to go up here turn around like i said and uh i'll show you the town coming in this way and we'll check out some of the sites and the neighborhoods i want to show you what it looks like entering the city from the north okay we've got this big payroll sign railroad going up ahead or above okay uh this is closed hot wings fried chicken lottery checks cashed ah but it's no more and across the street here is a former motel uh now you can see i'm still in the northern section of the city look at this no dumping work in pro progress okay now the doors are open that's amazing isn't it wow and i'm turning off into one of the side streets here now you can see all right there i am and holy cow but you haven't seen anything yet look at that i don't know if that house burned or the wood rotted and it is just literally disintegrating into the ground where it sits but uh holy cow this one's not much better again being reclaimed by nature wow now we've got some occupied houses here i'm seeing this for the first time just like you guys wow there's a row of houses here what there's four of them three of them are abandoned this one looks like someone may live there even though i don't see a car or anything and then we see some pretty nice houses here right here and here and really this is a nice looking street with the uh brick and the trees [Music] okay you can see i'm kind of in the middle of the city uh a couple of uh houses on the historic district here or on the national register i'm gonna get out and take a look at this one it's called river lore and that is beautiful it's not in super great shape yeah but you can tell this was some kind of a home in its day this 1865 mansion wow so it's old built by william halliday purchased by the city of cairo in 1999 to be preserved uh it is on the national register okay there you go that's a beauty uh yeah this is washington that i'm on there is another historic home there through those trees i'm going to go there now now i've been on washington street here the last few little cuts and i looked it up this is what's called millionaires row here in cairo so that's why you're seeing all these huge houses some of which are in great shape some of which are not here across the street there's some that are like that one right there and uh next door to it is magnolia house i'm gonna go right there right now but yeah how about that one big beautiful house here on millionaire's row but anyway there's magnolia house i'm going to pull up there and take a look at it ah this is magnolia manor this mansion it's one of the landmarks here built let's see my notes here it's built in 1869 and my understanding that the house it has 14 rooms but each of the walls are 10 inch thick 10 inches thick they were designed that way to help keep out the dampness so a unique home okay magnolia manor historic mansion built 1869 tours daily nine nine a.m to 4 30. i see there's the bronco over there i i wonder how many tours are actually given and i have to be perfectly honest with you guys this building is on the national registry and has been restored that is uh a matter of opinion i'm going to say because while beautiful it is not in great condition see rust on the railing here there is a hornet or wasp nests up there in the corner right in the middle of frame and these ease these overhangs are filthy that's kind of a damn shame isn't it it should be kept up more than that but you know let's not get ourselves a town losing population like this has got a hardcore shrinking of the tax base and there just probably isn't any money there's a couple more houses here whoa i guess you better go this way this one is in good shape but boy the one next door isn't huge home that just blows me away seeing these huge homes just sitting here boarded up empty that's the craziest thing and now we have residents here in these wow and there's washington street i'm heading uh towards the main street again i want to stop and get a quick look at that the lord jesus christ lives in this town there you go ah so i'm gonna head to the main street all right i'm back out on main street here uh i think i'll go across the street let's see what's over here now give you an idea or location there's that car dealership the ford dealer and we got a car wash here and then an empty building there's a church i guess that's an operation first praise wow all right i'm on the southern edge of town here big beautiful house wow heading back towards the main street whoa look at that house that's beautiful beautiful house this guy coming out then hope he doesn't mind that a lot of people will see his house you know in 10 years these houses will be completely uh completely gone yes there's a house in there yeah i just turned off main street i'm close to uh downtown kind of where i started that's just astonishing let's see i believe this is the street nope i need to go one more ah there's a house in there believe it or not it's in there god i guess does somebody live here i hope not no i don't think so yeah there's no way anybody lives in that okay so about where i'm gonna end the video ahead of you is downtown uh the entrance to downtown that i showed in the beginning of this video yeah so there's that again nicole will be in the videos moving forward i know some of you have been wondering where she is i just don't really take her to places like this i just don't want to but uh so she's getting a lot of stuff done you know around the hotel uh organizational stuff anyway we uh she will be in the videos from now on uh we are heading into kentucky next so be looking for that you

Channel: Joe & Nic's Road Trip

Views: 2,611,751

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Id: mB6VhWMp8qw

Length: 32min 22sec (1942 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022