Check out this recent post to NPR’s “Found in the Archives.”
Claud Thornton’s Traveling Crime Museum
The images were taken near Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, in March of 1941.
Claud Thornton’s Traveling Crime Museum: Images from the Library of Congress
January 11, 2011 by Jason Tomberlin
“The roadside culture of camp followers that catered to the construction workers…” reminded me that the term “hell on wheels” was coined to describe [from Wikipedia] “the itinerant collection of flimsily assembled gambling houses, dance halls, saloons, and brothels that followed the army of Union Pacific railroad workers westward as they constructed the American transcontinental railroad in the 1860s.”