One of my favorite night views of Fort Snelling’s so-called Upper Post, taken between snowstorms.
history under ground
clouds
Some of the earlier buildings were dressed up with brick facades.
The rear of the complex shows the more than 100 year old workhouse–still working! I do not know if the tanks are original to the 1901 elevator, but I suspect so.
2013. As part of the Head House’s facelift, it’s gotten new windows. However, you can now still see where the conveyor-way connected this building with the elevators behind it in the upper right of the image.
Looking north from the east portal of the tunnel… a beautiful place. Wilderness. Mamiya 6/Portra 160
On the left are rows of dayrooms; on the right is one of two long hallways which connect the two halves of the hospital. The large, center section of the hallway would fit chairs for patients to look out on the gardens. They called it a conservatory. This hallway would be as close as some patients would get to nature.
Looking across the catwalk attache to the elevated control room, in charge of the train dumping part of the operation.
This tree caught my eye. Note the bench swing near it. Portra 160.
Kate in the crow’s next… very shaky by the time she got to it.
The tallest dock structure is an equipment elevator that connects the many dock levels.
Through a section of the tailings boom where mountain winds tore open the sheet metal around the conveyor, I poked my head out.
One of the covered rail loading docks. All of them were overgrown and rust-clad.
On the dark side of the workhouse at sunset, you can almost see where the walls used to be. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
The back of the neon sign before it was converted to LED lighting. The image is mirrored so it can be read.
Not a wisp of smoke can be seen today.
A damaged roof channeled rain onto the adobe walls, cutting them in half. In the distance, a preserved house and the ruins of the Colmor School.
A huge steel tank, one of several left over, left over from either the Ashland Oil or Allied Chemical periods.
Looking at the headframe for Shaft 3 from the tower for Shaft 1. Below is the roof of the Dry House. It was hard to remind myself that these building have been abandoned longer than I’ve been alive.
Kate stands on top of the tailings pile that added some usable land to the side of the gulch. Somewhere nearby is the buried Santiago Tunnel.
“Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and historian.
On top of the light hoop, 160-feet up, a ship comes into port, ready to load-up. If you look really close, you can see my shadow cast on the dock below, courtesy of the full moon.
Winter skies over Allouez Bay. From a distance, it looks almost fragile.
A divot to let more light and air into the building.
The parking lot is in better condition than most of the complex. The left building is the lab.
From Main Street, looking straight up at the A Mill, only the silence makes one think that nobody’s still inside, grinding grain into Pillsbury’s Best.
Before the clouds broke, I snapped this profile of the dumping control room and its spiral staircase. These are the colors that I dream in.
These houses were built for the use of the lighthouse keepers in 1913 (left) and 1916 (right). The second house was added when the entry added a fourth light and required a second rotation. Today, there are no unbroken windows in either building.
Looking out from what little remains of the second floor at the poor house, which was in terrible condition. No roof and no floors. Soon to be ruins.
An abandoned ranch on the east side of the tracks. This was not the Colmor Cutoff they were waiting for.
This battlement-like tower is the first thing one sees coming to Old Taylor from Frankfort.
Like a railgun pointed at the Rockies… the boom would direct tailings–junk rock–outside of the dredge pond.
Don’t you love the shape of the house on the right?
Standing on a caustic tank with my head out a roof hatch, I look at the sign of the last brand to be produced here.
After a short rainfall douses the mill in downtown Fergus Falls, the river next to the brick walls swells and the sounds of water overtakes the echos of the nearby bars. Reflections are on the foundation of the former distribution and rail building.
Taken from atop a grain train at the end of Cargill B-2, looking toward Lake Superior “I”, now part of the sample complex. This area used to have another slip, but Cargill filled it on when it built the elevator on the right.
The back of the castle is barely visible through the trees that have grown thick around the walls, making it look so much older.
A shot of Longmont from the highway. Fuji 35mm.
The layout and design of the buildings reminded me strongly of a brewery or distillery. To the right you can see some of the retrofits by the first lumber company to buy the buildings, in the 1970s.
I didn’t test the rungs, but I bet the view was incredible.
Taken several years before the tornado story when the weather, and the condition of the buildings, were nice.
Before Portland-Huron Cement’s Duluth Plant was (mostly) demolished and (partly) turned into a hotel, the top of its silos gave a cinematic view of elevator row.
From the bottom of the skyway I looked back, my eyes tracing the vines from the marsh up the smokestacks to the perfect Midwestern sky.
A side view of the oven pusher from the ground. The tallest coal bunker looks tiny in the distance, though on the scale of the factory it’s practically on top of me as I’m taking the picture.
The Big Dipper brought its friends into view, and the best seat is 80-feet up.
The Algosteel navigating Superior Entry.
A row of houses north of Pommenige.
If you look carefully along the side of the slip alongside this image of Cargill B-2, you will see the remains of the crane stops when this was a Hannah coal dock.
The flour mill (rear) and its elevators. The taller elevator was moved here in 1955, when the Harrisons bought it from Federal, who declared it surplus. The smaller elevator replaced an earlier smaller warehouse in 1926. Taken shortly after dawn. This one picture made the drive worth it, for me. Medium Format.
Looking out of the labs at the company garages.
Looking up at the most conspicuous graffiti in the city on ADM #4.
A panorama of the dock buildings, before the left one was demolished.
Heavy industrial looks good in cotton candy pink.
Approaching the power station and its giant stack. The stack replaced four shorter stacks in the 1960s, helping with pollution in the downtown corridor.
When block glass shatters, it looks like ice.
The complex was so big that trains could make deliveries through the middle of it, passing below this striped skyway.
Tornadic fronts duel over the retired missile launcher.
It seems like this pipe was made to return dust to the collector in the main workhouse from the annex.
Looking up the tallest structure left at ACME.
The control room floats above the top of the dock atop a spiral staircase.
The topmost roof of the hospital is covered in antennae and includes a star that faced the rest of the complex, now demolished.
One of the old cooperage buildings is largely unchanged from when it was built. The raised section of the building houses a crane.
Looking toward Old Taylor Distillery from the roof of Old Crow.
The St. Louis County Sheriff constantly patrols the property looking for trespassers.
There are 700 of these storage bunkers. Their design was to funnel explosions upward, rather than toward other buildings, to minimize secondary explosions.
Street lights and pavement are some of the obvious signs a town used to be here.
Colleen on the roof.
A nice view of the aurora borealis (“Northern Lights”) strong enough to outshine the industrial lighting at the power plant. The lights in the foreground direct ships discharging coal for the station.
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
― Emily Dickinson
Sunrise in SEMI. The shadow of Kurth Malt is cast across ADM-Delmar #1. Clouds behind ADM-Delmar #4 light up. It’s cold and the air smells like train grease.
At first glance, I thought the center building was a hoist house because of the shape of the window. Now I think this was built as a warehouse and later used as a laboratory.
Looking toward the old power house, right below one of its arteries.
The end of Dock 5 is warped and bent from a rail accident that left some ore cars swinging like a stringy wrecking ball into the end of the superstructure and accompanying stair. The stairs are still navigable, but it wasn’t recommended by the CN workers that were with me.
Demolition about 50% complete.
A facade that tells the story of demolition and neglect. The sign on the garage door indicates that if one finds themselves there, that they enter the buildings at their own risk. If only property owners in the US took this philosophy!
A squat building with a rail scale. Taken between rain showers in late summer, when I seemed to be the only one at White Pine.
Taken just after the sun set over Duluth. Don’t you love that green glow?
The perimeter fence still holds strong, 50 years after it was put up.
A wide view of the poor house. Look at the smokestack and elevator shaft, which show the former roofline.
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.
Giant chunks of cooled slag form an island near Mud Lake.
The sun unzipped the clouds. Mist blew across the harbor.
Even with a hundred people parked in front of the lakeside relic, it was invisible.
The screen and mineral stained window cross-processed the sky.
A little cloud passes over the Five-Stack powerplant ruins, like a puff of smoke.
The fantastic red elevator that is Pool #61, built 1928.
Much of the circa-1950s buildings remain with few alterations, such as these long boring sheet metal ruststicks.
This is what the mine shops look like from the road between Gaastra, MI and Rogers Location (formerly Bates, MI). The community was renamed for the mine, probably under the heavy influence of M.A. Hanna.
35mm Film, Expired. An abandoned swath of NAD is landlocked by soybean fields.
For a short time, CN mounted flood lights atop the abandoned dock.
On my second or third trip, the cross had broken in the wind.
The valley is full of rocky peaks that stand out from the winding creeks, which only truly run after storms. It is a very beautiful place.
Soft rain on Vulcan’s ashy pyre… Both of these peaks are dead volcanos, too hard to be totally washed away by storms. As a result, they seem to rise dramatically from the flat valley.
A broken signal light that would indicate to incoming engineers and brakemen the status of the dock deck. The streetlight-style lighting is a retrofit; originally the top of the dock would be lit by strings of lights suspended by towers on each side of the deck… a poor system according to the workers at Allouez who had the same lights.
Some of the ruins are way off the beaten path… foundations of tank stands and pillars of buildings that never had walls or roofs.
One of my favorite images from my stay… Note the snowed-over road in the distance! This is looking toward Animas Forks.
A typical dwelling in San Luis. I could not tell if it was occupied, but most of the town is abandoned.
The gold mine is now a gravel pit.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
Gopher Ordnance Works, aka the U-Lands, is a landscape where roots and boughs break apart concrete and steel.
The building is winking.
Looking out of the brewhouse toward the river.
King Elevator sits in the corner of a more recently-defunct lumber mill: Great Western Timber. Perhaps in the future I will write the history of it. Arista 100 in 120.
The exterior of the factory is unassuming
A panoramic view of the sintering plant’s gas plant (?). Everyone who visits must get a picture of these rusty smokestacks!
National Mine and its rockhouse (?) as seen from Mammoth Hill. From this angle, I am fairly certain this was a crushing and sorting house. The bottom looks like it has two aerial tram doors as well.
The last of four radar domes on the base.
These concrete blocks were formed to be solid mounts for machinery. All the metal was scrapped in the late 1990s, leaving these modern ruins. Seagulls love them.
The porch of the Gustavson House with the southern San Juan range in the background. Bring your own rocking chair…
Looking at Carrie from the place where the molten steel would be cast
Looking through Workhouse A from the top of a silo.
Some sort of materials handling building, judging by the construction.
Minnesota Power’s Taconite Harbor power station, as seen through the ship loading control room windows.
There is a flipped tram car about a third of the way down the cliff.
The copula stacks were fitted with scrubbers. Making metal is a very polluting activity.
Wagons and horses were kept in the building on the left, separate from the rest of the complex in case of fire. In the distance is the boiler house, separate for the same reason.
There is no denying that the Fergus Falls asylum was a beautiful place, especially around sunset.
I was squatting overnight in one of the buildings and woke up with the sunrise. This is what I woke up to.
A full harbor on a hot summer evening, just after twilight, as seen from atop the castle walls.
This ruin was once the Toltec Mine, a producing gold and silver claim that operated into the 1940s.
Just across the North Dakota border, a rusty Milwaukee Road boxcar sits where it was shoved off the mainline. The grain elevator in the background marks the tracks, which is still used by BNSF.
A tower above Minneapolis that few people see.
A rusting disconnect gangway. The smokestack is for a boiler, if I recall.
Knowing that a tornado just passed nearby is less distressing when you’re surrounded by nuclear-attack-hardened buildings.
Unloading boats had the option to take on fuel at Taconite Harbor. This building, among other things, pumped fuel to the dock.
Originally, this part of the dock was reserved for the weather station.
Sidewalks to a boarded barracks, each making the other obsolete in the night.
A defunct UGG elevator in Killarney, not far from where the Harrisons (of Holmfield, MB and Harrison Milling) once operated a small elevator. Medium Format.
Dr. Muchow’s offices stand near his ‘new’ mill, but they show evidence of vandalism.
The Barker turning around before it backed into Tac Harbor to unload coal for Minnesota Power.
A gate large enough to accommodate a missile, next to the ruins of the guard shack. Wyoming is the intersection of lonely and beautiful.
Counter-weighted ore cars alternately filled and emptied to feed Furnace 7. Honestly, though, the corner-mounted cranes are sexier in my opinion. Note the trees growing from the stacks.
Daisy Mill could accept shipments from water, rail, and truck at one time. Now everything comes and goes by rail.
The modern shaft stands above the north side of Gilman.
A shallow creek traces Illinois Gulch toward the Chain O’ Mines mill. Ball mills are laid out in the sun.
Standing where the Final Assembly Building used to hum and staring across the former site of the Sheet Metal and Spring buildings. Today, of course, the Foundry is gone as well, so you’d be looking across Prairie Ave.
Looking from abandoned to active. The end of Dock 6 often has a crane and some shacks on it, as the chutes aren’t used anymore. Instead, conveyors are installed on the land-side of the dock that fill docked vessels, making the end of the dock little more than a breakwater and a place to park repair and recovery equipment.
The rust garden’s brick centerpiece contrasts the muted winter Kentucky palette.
A dead work truck rusts near an outbuilding. Everything is marked with a code. Modernity.
A tram that once linked the Sunnyside Mine to the mill in Eureka has been reduced to a single cable. Nearby, an open adit drips water into a tributary of the Animas River.
Looking out across the elevator row from Portland Huron’s roof. Don’t you love the color of the sky?
A buck-fifty shot for a postcard stand. Taken from the Stone Arch Bridge.
Boards on the window are like rings on a tree, if you know how to read abandonments.
The front of the mill reads “Montana Flour Mills Company”
A row of security lights line the roof of the power station.
You first.
It’s a small world… look at it.
Sometime soon, maybe in early 2016, someone will have this view from their office or condo.
The command building and a coolant tank. In the distance, rain and hail pound Wyoming dirt.
When I see this picture, I imagine that I am an ant exploring a mushroom farm.
Looking at the huge and modern Cargill B2 from the circa-1919 Lake Superior “I”. This is a rather unique perspective of Enger Tower and Skyline.
No, it’s not your Mac’s desktop, it’s a beautiful Lake Superior night. Taken from near the former Pittsburgh and Reading Anthracite Plant. You can see the frame that used to hold the lifeboat that was auctioned in 2006 to the left of the Pilot House.
The four buildings seen here comprise almost all of the notable remaining structures.
The Blacksmith Shop (right) was connected to the Bunk House (left) via this narrow walkway. This is likely due to the fire risk in each building. The left building had a cooking stove and furnace for heat and the right building had a small industrial furnace to repair mining equipment. A little walkway would mean that a fire on one side would be easier to fight from the other.
Because of the dangers of storing the materials to make explosives as well as the explosives themselves, there were earthen bunkers all across the plant like this.
This heavy door opens directly into the missile vault and was used to load and unload the missile erector.
A quick vertical panorama taken on my back at the sweet spot of a great summer sunset. On the skylight is the torch-cut catwalk that used to link the outside of the smokestacks that vented the cupolas.
This electric Wellman crane was added to extract coal from ships for the power plant that Erie built beside their dock. Now, with the advent of self-unloading boats, it’s been replaced by a funnel and conveyor belt.
I believe this is the push car, meaning it would push the charge in the oven out the opposite side into the train car.
No matter what environmental disasters industry throws at Mother Earth, she will bounce back.
SWP4-A on the left and Viterra C on the right in a 90-degree panorama.
Ava near the Memorial Building. The block glass embedded in the sidewalk here is actually a skylight for the tunnel below, which connects the Memorial Building to the steam and supply systems of the hospital.
The top of the docks are so rotten in places that you can see the lake through the boards. In the foreground you can see the controls for the chutes, which work on a clutch.
The sun sets in front of a huge concrete building—about four times the size of the power plant. Probably a corn storage bin from an ethanol operation that ran here in the 1980s.
The tailings boom is the first and last thing you see when approaching the mountaintop shipwreck.
The new concrete workhouse, as seen through chickenwire.
Looking out at the town water tower (which I love) from the sugar mill (which I also love).
The Algosteel crew strikes a pose while heading through Superior Entry toward Allouez
The roof had structures bigger than most buildings in South Bend.
The concrete walls, heavy steel blast doors, and plastic roof tell me that this was one of the shell loading buildings.
An unshielded heaframe and single pulley.
The BOMARC launch buildings are spaced on a large concrete pad that looks like a parking lot. Out of view are underground pipes for fueling and cooling the rocket motors.
This old Jetta did more offroading than your average lifted tinted loud-exhaust pickup.
As the Barker steamed past the dock and island, the sunset casts the shadow of the Taconite Harbor receiving trestle on the boat. Through the fog, you can see some of the islands that were joined into a breakwater.
The truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
Looking at The Windy City from the top of the coal tower. The pond you see is the former ACME Coke coal yard.
One thing I like to do at Gopher is imagine the shape of the planned buildings based on the partial structures.
When I first saw Ogilvie’s from the ground, I promised myself to look back when i found my way into this little pitched outcropping which seemed to have the best view of Thunder Bay I could imagine. It turns out, though, that there is no floor in that section; it is just extended machine access! Oh well. Mount McKay in the background in the last light.
Looking out from a hallway on the third floor where a ceiling and roof should be. I could not stand in the room, as the floor had collapsed into the basement, but I could put my camera out at arm’s length and fire a few pictures upward, which is how I came away with this image!
A bridge crosses the main street of the village; one that goes nowhere. Ambiguity intended.
The approach to the dock is rigidly geometric. I always thought its outline was beautiful against the lake that, by contrast, was always moving.
Summertime is when Duluth goes to the lakeside to listen to music, visit traveling fairs, and talk to neighbors about the smell of the lake. As seen from the castle walls.
Looking from the brewhouse at the death of its sister building, across Minnehaha.
A look at the Longmont Sugar Mill in May 2014.
The Osborn Block (front) and the Twohy (rear) at sunset. In the distance, you can almost make out Globe Elevators. One of my favorite photos of 2013.
The school (hospital) campus was expansive.
Looking out of the Brewery Creek Drain outfall at night, after a storm had pushed piles of rocks up onto the shore.
Looking at the concrete headframe from street level. Acros 100 in Pentax 67
The laundry building, where many of the tunnels came to an end. It looks very East Coast industrial to me.
A multi-family home with an attic bedroom. The staircase was unstable, to say the least.
Looking out upon Mill City through the lens of FLOUR, highlighted in pink and low clouds. This sign has recently been converted into LED lighting.
The moon highlights the contrails over the engine house in the middle of the night. Foreground light painted.
The blast pit carried the smoke and flame from the rocket motor away from the other base buildings.
The ghost town of Lauder, Manitoba. It’s seen better days, but I bet the TV reception on the flatlands is great.
A long exposure under the trestle-like approach to the dock, under which trains still pass regularly.
Where the trees are sprouting–below the skyways and criss-crossing pipes–are two sets of railroad tracks that turned through this narrow alleyway through the middle of the production line to drop off raw materials and pick up finished product.
I wonder what this guy is thinking, walking through the complex.
One of the last times I saw the skyway standing. ADM’s Meal Elevator is in the distance.
It would be a shame if this building is not preserved. Word is (as of 2015) that construction may start on this section soon.
2013. A perfect summer day meets a beautiful old roundhouse on the edge of town.