Our Town Chapter 1: Sometimes You Find Silver

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Meribah Knight** (0:07)
Our story starts with a guy and his metal detector.

**Brian Allen** (0:13)
I got it as a Christmas present one year when I was young, 12, 13, or something like that, one of the cheap ones. But I just liked the mystery of it. There's this open field, nothing around, but here's a silver coin, like that was magical.

**Meribah Knight** (0:28)
Brian Allen grew up metal detecting in his hometown of Gainesboro, Tennessee, a teensy town in the foothills of Appalachia. People call it the Switzerland of the Cumberlands, lush rolling hills, sweeping vistas, and a lot of history.

**Brian Allen** (0:44)
I find a lot of moonshine sites, old shotgun shellheads. You can tell modern ones because they have the plastic.

**Meribah Knight** (0:50)
During the Civil War, the Confederate Army would post up by Gainesboro to seize the Union Army supplies as they floated by on the Cumberland River.

**Brian Allen** (0:58)
Horse stuff.

**Meribah Knight** (0:59)
So for the right person, Broken horseshoes. It's a treasure trove.

**Brian Allen** (1:03)
Axes. Just the mystery of just putting something together. I'm a very quiet person. If I'm talking about something I'm passionate about, then I can go.

**Meribah Knight** (1:13)
There was one piece of land that backed right up to a curve in the river.
Bryant had been eyeing it for years. Ninety-nine acres of farmland.

**Brian Allen** (1:23)
It was over by the high school. That's the one that I really wanted to hit.

**Meribah Knight** (1:28)
A place that's about to produce his biggest discovery yet.
This is the summer of 2024 Bryant goes digging through public records to get permission from the owner to metal detect. He realizes it's been sold recently to a name he doesn't recognize. Now, Gainesboro is a town of a thousand people, many of whom are related. So, it's a peculiar thing to find a name you've never heard of.

**Brian Allen** (1:56)
Because most time, you know, he would sell it to Jim Bob over the holler. So, it stays in the family. So, that intrigued me.

**Meribah Knight** (2:02)
Because if someone local didn't buy the land, then who did?

**Brian Allen** (2:06)
I have a very inquisitive mind about things. I have far-fetched ideas and some of them work out and some don't.
I think that goes back to my metal detecting. Like, yeah, 90 percent of the time, I'll go out there and find garbage. But sometimes, you find silver.

**Meribah Knight** (2:25)
So, he googles some of the details on the property record and sees that it was some real estate guy who bought the land. And that leads him to a company, one called Ridge Runner USA.
He goes to the Ridge Runner website.

**Brian Allen** (2:40)
The first thing you see when it pops up is pioneers in Appalachia.

**Meribah Knight** (2:45)
Pioneers in Appalachia. The website is spare with that single phrase over an image of an open field with a winding dirt road.
And below, an invitation to learn more. Bryant Clicks.

**Brian Allen** (3:01)
Ridge Runner is building pioneer communities in the old American heartland.

**Meribah Knight** (3:06)
Ridge Runner appears to be some kind of real estate company.

**Brian Allen** (3:10)
We see rising demand for new types of communities around a shared vision for local life in America. I'm like, hang on, like, that was when I was like, well, we got something.

**Meribah Knight** (3:23)
Bryant searches more and finds that Ridge Runner seems to be affiliated with a larger company called New Founding. That website is packed with even grander pronouncements.

**Brian Allen** (3:36)
We are forging an alliance to revitalize American civilization, bringing builders, creators, and concerned citizens together.
Build the America you want to live in. And it's like, but it's already built. I'm like, yeah, that don't sound good.

**Meribah Knight** (3:57)
From what Bryant can discern, New Founding is involved in all sorts of things. Venture capital, media, and real estate.
That's where Ridge Runner comes in. Both companies, Ridge Runner and New Founding, seem ambitious and filled with big ideas.

**Brian Allen** (4:17)
Pioneers, frontier, all the words for oppression and conquering. We're gonna convert these heathens, like it gave me that feel. Like this was their manifest destiny.

**Meribah Knight** (4:30)
Ridge Runner, New Founding, those 99 acres across from the high school. Bryant is trying to figure out what's in front of them.

**Brian Allen** (4:38)
Like, what am I missing?

**Meribah Knight** (4:40)
What was happening in his quiet hometown?
In the months following, Bryant, who is painfully shy, reveals his discovery to only one person, a co-worker. But he keeps tracking Ridge Runner, the real estate company, and finds more land getting scooped up in and around Gainesboro. Bryant had stumbled into something, the beginning of an ambitious project, to make Gainesboro a new type of town, filled with like-minded people. This tiny town would soon realize it was part of a much larger experiment, backed by people with powerful connections and plenty of money to build the America they want to live in, starting with Gainesboro. From Bloomberg News, I'm Meribah Knight, reporting along with Susan Berfield, and you're listening to Our Town. This is Chapter 1, Sometimes You Find Silver.