The Tollbooth That Collected Dimes for the Dead

The Tollbooth That Collected Dimes for the Dead

Curiosity and unease meet where a sealed wooden toll booth on a shallow riverbank held two pristine pencils and a hand-lettered sign reading CROSSING FEE - TEN CENTS for thirty-eight years; someone paid ten-cent tolls there for thirty-three years and the ledger ends with a single dime and the initials K.A. - who was paying and why did it stop three days before a mysterious August fire?

In this episode, we follow the material traces left at a booth with no bridge, the county records that were surgically altered, and the people whose lives intersect that strange little structure - what connects a 1902 drowning, a 1923 county-funded toll booth, and a 1956 fire?

Location: Tallow Bend, Orrins County, east bank of the Soline River
Event: Toll booth installed in 1923; sealed and found August 9, 1994
Person: Karen Harrison, meter reader who discovered the booth
Period: Ledger entries span 1923-1956, totaling $412.30 in dimes
Case: Last ledger entry dated three days before Bernard Coss's outbuilding burned in August 1956

- The wooden booth had been sealed for thirty-eight years when discovered on August 9, 1994.
- The Soline River at the booth was twenty-two feet wide and eighteen inches deep at low water.
- The toll ledger contains thirty-three years of entries totaling $412.30, mostly in ten-cent increments.
- Thomas Pell drowned in summer 1902; the coroner’s volume covering June-October 1902 had pages removed.
- Kathleen Andrews made the final ledger entry in August 1956 with initials K.A.; Bernard Coss’s outbuilding burned three days later.

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