20 Cities From History That Vanished (Or Nearly Did)

By morning, Babylon the empire had fallen, though Babylon the city was still standing. In 539 BCE, it was the glittering capital of the ancient world. With mighty walls encircling the city, its people must have felt untouchable. But the Euphrates River ran right through Babylon, and reportedly Cyrus the Great’s Persian army diverted its course and waded into the city through the riverbed. The Persians captured Babylon in a single night, with almost no fighting.

Most likely on August 24, 79 AD (although autumn is also hypothesized), Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the busy Roman town of Pompeii (a population of approximately 20,000) under layers of volcanic debris. Anyone left after the initial burst died of hot ash and gas in a matter of a day; estimates of deaths are about 2,000 or more. Ash also preserved Pompeii; today, visitors can enter Pompeii’s time capsule.

But Herculaneum, destroyed in the same eruption as Pompeii, has a much more violent and compelling history. Loaves of bread and wooden furniture, items that can’t normally survive centuries, turned up during excavations in the 1700s. Surges of super-heated gas rushed down Vesuvius into Herculaneum and, unlike Pompeii’s slow smothering, its townspeople, wealthier than their Pompeian neighbors, died almost instantly. The town streets were capped with solid rock, some sixty feet deep.

When England’s first attempt at an American colony went missing, it was a complete disappearance. Governor John White returned to Roanoke Island in 1590 after being away for three years to find no one. None of the 115 colonists were there. There were no bodies. There was no sign of a struggle. There was just the word Croatoan, carved into a post. Theories range from integration with nearby tribes to death at sea, but the Lost Colony remains a mystery.

On May 31, 1889 the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania suffered a catastrophic disaster. Days of rain caused the South Fork Dam upstream to fail, sending 20 million tons of water crashing into Johnstown within minutes. Within minutes 2,209 residents had been killed. Clara Barton’s young Red Cross was quickly on hand to provide one of America’s first major relief efforts.

A three-year drought left the forests surrounding Hinckley as tinder for the Great Fire of 1894. Ignited by a spark from a lumber yard, it spread quickly on September 1, 1894. Soon a roaring firestorm engulfed Hinckley in a matter of minutes. Many residents sought safety by sinking into wells or submerging themselves in lakes. At least 418 people perished in the fire, the official count for the disaster. The last body was discovered in 1898.

Galveston has never again been the largest port of Texas. On September 8, 1900, a Category 4 hurricane struck the city and sent a sixteen-foot surge of water over the island. Almost nobody was evacuated, as weather forecasting at the time was too primitive to provide advance warning. An estimated 6,000 to 12,000 people drowned and the disaster has become the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. The city was rebuilt behind a seawall.

At dawn on April 18, 1906, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake centered on the San Andreas Fault shook San Francisco to its core. The earthquake ruptured water mains and gas lines, and subsequent fires burned unimpeded for days without a source of water to extinguish the flames, destroying over 80 percent of the city. Although estimates vary, the commonly cited death toll is over 3,000 people. It remains the deadliest earthquake to have occurred in the US.

Legend has it that a woman named Julia Brown said that when she dies she’s taking the town with her. Her funeral happened on September 29, 1915 when a Category 4 hurricane made landfall and destroyed the quiet farming and lumber communities.The hurricane wiped out Frenier, where Julia Brown lived, along with the neighboring lumber-and-cabbage settlements of Ruddock and Napton. All three were destroyed in a matter of hours, and none of them was ever rebuilt. Most of their ruins today lie beneath the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

In the Italian Alps, the remains of a 14th-century church bell tower protrude eerily out of a lake, drawing tourists to its curious location. In 1950, authorities flooded the village of Graun by damming the valley to produce hydroelectric power. The resulting lake submerged about 1,290 acres, including the entirety of Graun and a portion of the neighboring village, and local families were forced to vacate their homes.

Shi Cheng (The Lion City) is an ancient town, founded in the Tang and Han dynasties, that was submerged in 1959 when the government flooded the valley to create a hydroelectric reservoir. But the waters of the resulting Qiandao Lake have acted as a preserver, keeping much of the architecture and stone carvings on the archways in a close-to-perfect state. It is now a popular site for divers, acting as a museum frozen in time.

During the early 1970s, Varosha was a glamorous resort district in Famagusta, Cyprus, filled with beachfront hotels and teeming with tourists. However, following Turkey’s 1974 invasion, the predominantly Greek Cypriot district was evacuated and sealed off, with its inhabitants never allowed to return. For decades, this time capsule from the 1970s sat behind fences, slowly falling into decay until recently when sections were controversially opened to visitors around 2020.

Inside the exclusion zone, the Ferris wheel of Pripyat still looms over its unopened playground, slowly rusting into the trees. The model Soviet Ukrainian town of approximately 50,000 was home to Chernobyl nuclear plant workers, until a reactor at the neighboring power plant exploded on April 26, 1986. After a day’s indecision, officials told the citizens they’d soon be back, and emptied out the city within hours. They never came home again.

On the night of May 4, 2007 an EF5 tornado over a mile in width hit Greensburg, Kansas, a farming town of approximately 1,400 people, destroying roughly 95 percent of the town. Virtually every building in downtown Greensburg was leveled. Eleven people were killed, but luckily timely warnings limited the loss of life. Today, it stands as one of the greenest towns in the country, and is largely powered by wind energy.

The May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake was a magnitude 7.9 tremor, that killed or left missing close to 90,000 people, and left more than 4 million people homeless. Dujiangyan was near the center of the earthquake. Rebuilding cost an estimated $150 billion because entire towns had to be rebuilt from the ground up, as buildings were crushed and lay flat. It is one of the costliest rebuilding projects in history.

The ruling junta blocked aid for days after Cyclone Nargis hit the Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar on May 2, 2008, and likely hid the true death toll to avoid the political ramifications. More than 10,000 people in the town of Bogale were killed and tens of thousands more in the delta. The storm surge pushed roughly 25 miles inland.

Few, if any, disasters have seen as many people perish in as few seconds, with the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck just west of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010 at a few minutes to 5:00 PM claiming an estimated 100,000 to over 300,000 lives. The entire city crumbled in less than a minute, its shoddily built houses and businesses little more than death traps, landmarks from the presidential palace to the central prison reduced to rubble.

It seems that a city can not only be destroyed by fire or flood, but also by paperwork. On August 22, 2011 the city of Chaohu, China was dissolved and its territory divided among three neighboring cities. The residents of Chaohu, who reportedly had no advance warning, found their hometown dissolved and its territory divided up. It’s gone from the map, but the people are still there. Fascinating!

Although Joplin has recovered significantly, the trail of destruction laid across the community is forever a part of the city’s identity. On May 22, 2011, a nearly mile wide EF5 tornado tore straight through Joplin, Missouri, leveling over 4,000 buildings, taking out one of its two hospitals, and killing 158 people, making it one of the deadliest tornadoes in America’s history. It resulted in billions of dollars worth of insurance claims.

On May 20, 2013, an EF5 tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma. Advance warnings prevented the death toll from being much higher; nonetheless, the tornado resulted in 24 fatalities (including children in an elementary school). The tornado had winds of near 210 mph and stayed on the ground for 39 minutes. It followed a 14-mile path, much of which was through Moore. Moore, Oklahoma is in Tornado Alley.

This content was created with the help of AI.