The Twelve Who Lived on a Road That Never Existed

The Twelve Who Lived on a Road That Never Existed

A sealed metal box hidden under an archive floor held a flawless 1912 federal census page listing twelve people on Hollow Trace Road - a street that was never surveyed, never built, and absent from every map. How did a careful county enumerator and a clerk named Connie Phillips manufacture an address that left official records and the town itself at odds for decades?

In this episode, we lay out the surviving documents and local memories: the census page, letters from county commissioners, and physician notes that linger in a single marginal line. Follow the chain from a 1912 enumerator’s desk to a soldered box pulled from the Alderton County Archive ninety-seven years later - and ask what was really placed on the record.

Person: Connie Phillips
Date: 1912
Location: Sitka Falls
Event: federal census page found in sealed metal box
Case: Hollow Trace Road absent from maps

- One sealed metal box was pulled from beneath the Alderton County Archive floor in December 2009.
- The census page lists twelve residents across three households on Hollow Trace Road with ages, occupations, and relationships fully entered.
- Connie Phillips was twenty-seven in the spring of 1912 and worked as a copy clerk under enumerator Douglas Hebb.
- Selectman Aldous Crane’s motion in January 1891 voted four to one to exclude the parcel northeast of the Renner millsite from the road-layout survey.
- A physician’s March 1912 note records a seamstress Agnes Holt bringing a patient and includes the marginal sentence: "Miss P. asked me whether I would remember her name. I told her I would."

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