Boards on the window are like rings on a tree, if you know how to read abandonments.
history under ground
boarded-windows
Wintertime is quiet, except for the planes overhead.
A strange little staircase on the side of the orphanage puts the scale of the building in perspective. It’s big, by U.P. standards!
The front of the mill reads “Montana Flour Mills Company”
John’s wife’s face.
The bricks routinely fell from the walls, like seeds falling from trees. On a smaller scale, new walls grew from the floors.
From the street, it’s clear that almost every window and door had boards over it, but not every building had a roof. Silly priorities.
The modern shaft stands above the north side of Gilman.
Between two brick buildings is a metal one with many windows set into it. Having been in many mills of similar design, I conjecture that this was the milling building, where machines ground the corn before it was boiled.
Inside the office was a small furnace and a collection of mechanical belts. You can see “SERVICE AT COST” and “POOL 168” in the background.
Looking out of the boarded windows in the Great Western Sugar office.
Where the bricks jumped and wood followed, water runs amok.
This low brick building is interesting to me.
Zachary Taylor’s very own Scottish castle, spring-side in the Kentucky backcountry. Boarded and waiting, but in surprisingly good condition, considering the decades. I especially love the tower on the right side of the frame.
This battlement-like tower is the first thing one sees coming to Old Taylor from Frankfort.
Looking at the boarded exterior of the newer area of the orphanage from its 1914 section.
One of Martinsdale’s defunct businesses perpendicular to the depot. Recall that Martinsdale is a T-town.
The largest extant structure when I visited.
This view of BCT shows the portico where the main entrance is at the base of the office tower, and the clock.
The now-demolished Industrial Building.
Holes in the wall mark where patient beds used to be, side by side, facing out the window.
Next to the generator room is the pump room, which moved steam around the complex.
A social club/restaurant that was likely the place to be late at night.
These buildings were largely used as concentrators for the crushed rock, although I did spy some small mills inside these too.
A portrait of the second school of McConnell, built in 1937.
Disabled forklift… I think it’s a Clark.
The staircase going to the second floor balcony is gone, giving a clear view of the first floor porch.
A row of houses north of Pommenige.
On the boarded-up first floor of the house proper near the door to the chapel, the last pew sites next to a wet box of Bibles.
A hole in one of the boards casts the inverse image of a tree outside across a peeling sanatorium wall.
2015. Exterior of chapel.
Near the guard post protecting the launch pad at the Duluth BOMARC is an orange windsock.
A typical rail shop.
The corner of Clyde on Michigan Street looked like it had been sealed a long time.
Sliding fireproof doors and an old hydrant at Harlowton’s old yards.
When block glass shatters, it looks like ice.
Train-mounted snowplows pushed the snow through the fence and against the old offices.
This building seemed like a pump house or compressor house. It was full of empty concrete mounts.
Vents in the boards over the windows helps prevent mold and animals from getting too crazy inside.
There is a cool old air compressor in the corner of the powerhouse.
The school (hospital) campus was expansive.
Facade of tarps and fences on the old house. It used to have a bronze ornament on the second floor patio, but it was taken for scrap years ago.
The walls are separating on the adobe house…
Don’t you love the shape of the house on the right?
It’s like a piece of paper that’s been written on and rewritten, until you can’t read what the original message was.
This sawtooth roof collapsed months later under the weight of an early snow.
The offices for the Five Roses elevator have long been boarded. To the left you can see the Manitoba Pool Elevator slogan, “Service at Cost”, meaning they would not make profit off farmers and dues.
2007. Reception Hospital. This is the hospital where incoming (suspected) patients would be evaluated (quarantined).
Different doors for different vehicles, I would guess. White Pine Mine used tire-based vehicles, rather than track-based, making it pretty different than other mines I’ve been to.
A pink room with very heavy doors that reminds me of the rooms at some of the insane asylums that I’ve explored.
Global Trading remarked the building in the mid-60s, but far above the door is the old ‘Detroit Shipbuilding’ paint, though it’s faint nowadays.
I wonder who boarded the family house… the EPA?
A gymnasium, if I recall. The last building before the road dead-ends.
A long exposure in the wind, lit by airport lights.
In the corner of the former school grounds…
This is the crane that would be used to lower extra-heavy bits of copper ore into the fire of the furnace.
It is unclear when the ‘Superior Warehouse Company’ sign was put up, but it was likely around 1916-1917, when maps indicate it served as a dry goods warehouse, operated by Twohy-Eimon Mercantile Company. The Sivertson sign was likely added in the mid-1980s. In this image I tried to preserve the colors the bricks turn at sunset.
One of the older buildings on the site, this is an old power house that provided electricity to the plant. I spent some time walking around it and believe it was fired with coal gas but had a diesel backup installed later.
The generator room was state of the art when it was installed, allowing the complex to use motors and electric lighting ahead of its competitors.
Little crosses on the side of the church, near a broken window.
A divot to let more light and air into the building.
Looking above the altar.
From factory to skate park to restaurant. This is in the skate park stage. The buildings to the right are demolished now, and in their place are hockey rinks.
Ryan, as seen from the crane ladder.
The side of the administration building. Around the side was a sign instructing potential employees to return on set days and times.
The front of the school overlooks the town of Birtle, Manitoba. It replaced a circa-1894 building which was a little farther down the hill.
A delivery alley that cuts straight into the middle of the brewery complex.
2013. A perfect summer day meets a beautiful old roundhouse on the edge of town.
This building was 99 years old when it was demolished for the coal mine.
I’ll remember the neon glow fondly.
Pillars painted red indicated firefighting supplies. Fire was a very common enemy of early rail facilities, and many roundhouses burned down because of a combination of dry wood, hot, fire-breathing machinery and countless oil-saturated surfaces.
Trees like masks.
Looking through the boards of the boarded windows.
My favorite shot of the 17-story Art Deco office tower attached to the train station.
I revisited the mill years after my documentary. Now it is even more destroyed and surrounded by new fences.
Sidewalks to a boarded barracks, each making the other obsolete in the night.
This was the exterior wall of the roundhouse; engines would have entered on the other side and machinery would line this side, hence the big windows for natural light.
Looking down Pommenicher Straße from Gaststätte Rosarius, the monstrous machine about to devour the town bites at the ground.
For some time, Purina ran a feed service out of the elevator. Inside and outside were signs of its past presence.
The last bay was extended to fit the extra long 3-unit electric locomotives of the 1930s.
An employee lunchroom with every door and window covered in vented steel.
Looking from the rail shipping building through pigeon-proofing chicken wire at another manufacturing building in high Fall.
Outbuildings for Tilston’s Five Roses elevator.
Quincy Smelter, 2014.
In its last years, the church had a congregation of only about 100. It opened with 1.700…
Officers got houses and the honor of living near other officers. They call it Officer’s Row.
A yellow house above the mineshaft.
I really liked the bulky pillars on this outer-ring cottage.
Trees between duplexes overshadow the buildings they were planted to shield; revenge for the boards on the windows.