Sunrise over Mill Hell, and all of Kurth’s various skyways. The elevators in the foreground date to the mid-1920s, Electric Steel is behind and is a little earlier than that.
history under ground
clouds
Standing next to the now-demolished records room.
You first.
The roof was in bad shape, but too beautiful to avoid. This is the spot were I used to study medieval Latin.
Much of the circa-1950s buildings remain with few alterations, such as these long boring sheet metal ruststicks.
Looking at the Broadway from across Broadway, a beautiful Buffalo day. Note the glazed terra cotta facade–and the signs of fire damage from the first floor.
Pillars among trees… those who inherit the earth will be so confused.
This bridge over Eagle River is beautiful.
Minnesota Power’s Taconite Harbor power station, as seen through the ship loading control room windows.
Looking at the tallest part of the plant from a skeletal loading dock. 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.
Daisy Mill could accept shipments from water, rail, and truck at one time. Now everything comes and goes by rail.
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.
The Eureka Mill, historically known as Sunnyside Mill, is now the gateway to Animas Forks.
Rogers Mine is one of the most structurally sound mines in the Iron River area that isn’t part of a museum.
Showering red-hot coke fresh from the furnaces near the Coal Tower (in the back) was the Quenching Tower’s duty (front).
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 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!
One of my favorite night views of Fort Snelling’s so-called Upper Post, taken between snowstorms.
The topmost roof of the hospital is covered in antennae and includes a star that faced the rest of the complex, now demolished.
The taller of the two smokestacks on site. Note the crack around its crown.
One of the old cooperage buildings is largely unchanged from when it was built. The raised section of the building houses a crane.
One thing I like to do at Gopher is imagine the shape of the planned buildings based on the partial structures.
An abandoned house at Tilston, MB.
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.
Giant chunks of cooled slag form an island near Mud Lake.
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.
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 moon highlights the contrails over the engine house in the middle of the night. Foreground light painted.
The tallest dock structure is an equipment elevator that connects the many dock levels.
The first time I saw Buffalo Central Terminal was from a westbound Empire Builder. In the foreground you can see the rows of platforms.
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.
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 top three floors were removed from the top of the Temple Opera Block (right). If you have a sharp eye, you can see the outlines of some of the old floors on the shared wall of the Orpheum (left). For a time, the front of the building held a bus stop.
The bottom of the tailings boom is rotten. In days when the dredge, floated, gangways connected it to shore, it seemed. You can see the size of the pontoons under the boat here.
During the Cold War, the Air Force used the radar station to train bombardiers in radar-guided ordinance.
It’s a small world… look at it.
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.
The last of four radar domes on the base.
Looking from the rail shipping building through pigeon-proofing chicken wire at another manufacturing building in high Fall.
The crane on Dock 2, as seen from Dock 4 right after sunset. Notice the old light tower is warped.
The elevator tower seems to have been built with expansion of the dock in mind.
The top of the grain handler of Ogilvie’s. The flagpole serves as a lightning rod. In fact, I would not be surprised if that was its primary purpose.
The roof had structures bigger than most buildings in South Bend.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been getting reports that several Yellow Helicopters have been seen hovering above town. We are all aware of the Black Helicopters, which are World Government, and Blue Helicopters, which are Secret Police, and the Helicopters with Detailed Murals of Diving Birds of Prey, which are the helicopters that took all the children in Night Vale away a few months ago (we still don’t know what those helicopters are but they did bring all the children back unharmed, and much more well-behaved than before, so they are deemed just as safe as the other helicopters) but these new Yellow Helicopters, no one quite knows.” – Welcome to Night Vale, Ep. 32
Looking out at the town water tower (which I love) from the sugar mill (which I also love).
No matter what environmental disasters industry throws at Mother Earth, she will bounce back.
Not a wisp of smoke can be seen today.
San Luis may not be a ghost town, but it’s aspiring by all indications. Luckily, it’s close enough to Cuba, NM to hang onto life, unlike the other ghost towns down the road.
The screen and mineral stained window cross-processed the sky.
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.
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.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
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.
This ruin was once the Toltec Mine, a producing gold and silver claim that operated into the 1940s.
Some guerilla art for passing drivers on I-94 East to enjoy. Artist unknown.
The command building and a coolant tank. In the distance, rain and hail pound Wyoming dirt.
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.
The Algosteel navigating Superior Entry.
Shadows of distant power lines are carried to the concrete by street lights.
This old Jetta did more offroading than your average lifted tinted loud-exhaust pickup.
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 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.
The new concrete workhouse, as seen through chickenwire.
Delmar #4 is like two elevators in one, in capacity and design.
Grain is taken from the bottom of the silos through a conveyor in a tunnel. These blowers keep the air in the tunnel fresh.
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.
Like a railgun pointed at the Rockies… the boom would direct tailings–junk rock–outside of the dredge pond.
A panorama of the dock buildings, before the left one was demolished.
The Barker turning around before it backed into Tac Harbor to unload coal for Minnesota Power.
The copula stacks were fitted with scrubbers. Making metal is a very polluting activity.
I believe this is the push car, meaning it would push the charge in the oven out the opposite side into the train car.
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 wide view of the poor house. Look at the smokestack and elevator shaft, which show the former roofline.
Through a section of the tailings boom where mountain winds tore open the sheet metal around the conveyor, I poked my head out.
A windmill marks one corner of GOW.
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!
This building was an office and lounge for engineers. It is also demolished.
The Brown Hotel still stands, but has recently gone out of business again. One of the nice things about historic buildings in New Mexico, though, is things tend to stay around a lot longer than if they were subjected to lots of rain and snow. It will probably be reopened eventually.
Knowing that a tornado just passed nearby is less distressing when you’re surrounded by nuclear-attack-hardened buildings.
The powerplant and its dedicated water tower supplied steam for heating and mechanical work.
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.
This photo illustrates how vertical the complex is.
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.
There are 700 of these storage bunkers. Their design was to funnel explosions upward, rather than toward other buildings, to minimize secondary explosions.
Near the guard post protecting the launch pad at the Duluth BOMARC is an orange windsock.
The sun unzipped the clouds. Mist blew across the harbor.
Looking through the loading platform of Frontenac Mine toward Black Hawk. In 1900, you would see Druid Mine on the left and Aduddell on the right.
Near the old slag dump there are the remains of the pouring buckets that received the molten steel from the US Steel blast furnaces, filled to the brim with pig iron. They must be incredibly heavy!
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 front of the mill reads “Montana Flour Mills Company”
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.
Dr. Muchow’s offices stand near his ‘new’ mill, but they show evidence of vandalism.
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.
The purpose of the concentrator was to separate the gold and silver-rich ore from the waste rock. You can tell from the design that the process relies heavily on gravity.
“Five Roses” was the brand of flour that Lake of the Woods marketed. Later, this became another Manitoba Pool elevator. Notice the “POO” up top? It’s missing the ‘L’…
A great lakes freighter slowly passes SK Wheat Pool 4 with ‘The Sleeping Giant’ in the background. Arista 100.
The control room floats above the top of the dock atop a spiral staircase.
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 hospital featured a farm that once helped to sustain it. This is one of the few remaining signs of those years, near the Nurse’s Cottage.
The fantastic red elevator that is Pool #61, built 1928.
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.
A tower above Minneapolis that few people see.
This building was 99 years old when it was demolished for the coal mine.
Looking up at the most conspicuous graffiti in the city on ADM #4.
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.
The southernmost houses in Gilman are seen through the pines on the right, near the tram stop.
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.
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.
“Crunch, crunch, crunch,” said the ground. “I know,” I replied.
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.
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.
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.
It would be a shame if this building is not preserved. Word is (as of 2015) that construction may start on this section soon.
35mm Film, Expired. An abandoned swath of NAD is landlocked by soybean fields.
A rusting disconnect gangway. The smokestack is for a boiler, if I recall.
Looking at the concrete headframe from street level. Acros 100 in Pentax 67
A shot of Longmont from the highway. Fuji 35mm.
The Harrison flour mill, completed in 1897 and expanded in 1901 and 1902. The tunnel that I am standing on probably transported grain from the elevator to the mill. Medium Format.
A morning breeze pushes the last ice from the lake against Wisconsin Point.
Some sort of materials handling building, judging by the construction.
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.
The side of a launcher, with outbuildings in the background. You can see the tracks where the roof would open before launch.
…a better view of the huge tailings boom stretching outside of the tailings pond.
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.
A single cloud makes its way to Buffington Harbor and Lake Michigan from the quiet backroads of the plant.
The pitch of the roof is more typical for areas with lots of snow—not the border of Ohio and Kentucky. So, I assume this roofline accommodated some equipment inside for trains—note the tracks.
HDR matrix panorama. Looking from the grain elevators, now doomed, toward the city between the flour mill’s water tower and tile elevator’s neon sign, the old and new economies seem almost united. Yet the financial centers rise in reality to shadow the now-abandoned industry and manufacturing. The way of things, I’m told.
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.
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 from the brewhouse at the death of its sister building, across Minnehaha.
The rust garden’s brick centerpiece contrasts the muted winter Kentucky palette.
An abandoned ranch on the east side of the tracks. This was not the Colmor Cutoff they were waiting for.
The parking lot is in better condition than most of the complex. The left building is the lab.
Looking out of the Brewery Creek Drain outfall at night, after a storm had pushed piles of rocks up onto the shore.
Short-stack remains of mounts for rod and ball mills, if I was to bet. The concentrator separated junk rock (tails) from the copper and silver ore, to such a point it could be smelted.
Like a grave marker, a single post remembers where Dock 3 stood on the bay.
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.
The four buildings seen here comprise almost all of the notable remaining structures.
A switch for the yard engines, now on the edge of the property where nobody will find it.
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 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 lower door is where the rocket exhaust would flow into the blast pit during initial launch. The upper doors would vent the rocket so the erector and other equipment in the building would not be (as) damaged.
The spectacular, if precarious, view of downtown Minneapolis from the roof of ADM Annex 4. Note the great messages left by various graffiti artists who made it to the spot.
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.
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.
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.
Looking at the side of 4B from the roof of its car shed.
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.
A row of houses north of Pommenige.
The top of Dock 4 was too dangerous to explore, but this panorama gives you an idea of the view (and how rotten the wood was).
Van Dyke Cab Company and Yellow Cab served the terminal in lieu of a streetcar loop downtown, which was planned but never built.
This battlement-like tower is the first thing one sees coming to Old Taylor from Frankfort.
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.
Looking out across the elevator row from Portland Huron’s roof. Don’t you love the color of the sky?
Where equipment was scrapped.
Looking out of the brewhouse toward the river.
A shallow creek traces Illinois Gulch toward the Chain O’ Mines mill. Ball mills are laid out in the sun.
Near Howardsville, Colorado, the Animas River gets quite wide. This is near the Little Nation Mill, which is worth a stop if you’re traveling north from SIlverton. It’s also near the former Gold King Mine, which “blew” in 2015 and flooded the Animas River with toxic mine water.
In the corner of the former school grounds…
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.
Taken just after the sun set over Duluth. Don’t you love that green glow?
The concrete walls, heavy steel blast doors, and plastic roof tell me that this was one of the shell loading buildings.
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.
Originally, this part of the dock was reserved for the weather station.
Unloading boats had the option to take on fuel at Taconite Harbor. This building, among other things, pumped fuel to the dock.
A row of security lights line the roof of the power station.
SWP4-A on the left and Viterra C on the right in a 90-degree panorama.
Looking up the tallest structure left at ACME.
Peering at Stelco’s abandoned steel rod rolling mill, not demolished. The rectangular on the right in between is the boiler house that heated Stelco.
Coming to an inspirational poster near you… what should it read? ADVENTURE AWAITS? Don’t hang posters. Go outside.
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.
Don’t you love the shape of the house on the right?
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.
Wyoming has Montana’s ‘big sky’ reputation truly challenged.
A taste of Superior culture.
This tree caught my eye. Note the bench swing near it. Portra 160.
One of my favorite images from my stay… Note the snowed-over road in the distance! This is looking toward Animas Forks.
A divot to let more light and air into the building.
The gold mine is now a gravel pit.
Old boathouses near the dock.
Looking out of the labs at the company garages.
Street lights and pavement are some of the obvious signs a town used to be here.
The company headquarters. Abandoned last time I drove past it, though it is the classiest building in downtown South Bend.
“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
The Big Dipper brought its friends into view, and the best seat is 80-feet up.
On my second or third trip, the cross had broken in the wind.
A full harbor on a hot summer evening, just after twilight, as seen from atop the castle walls.
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.
Another perfect Indianan sunset alights like a bird on the tops of the vent houses and tree-packed smokestacks.
The gulls wait to eat the next load of spilled grain. Arista 100.
Looking at The Windy City from the top of the coal tower. The pond you see is the former ACME Coke coal yard.
The truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
The school (hospital) campus was expansive.
Even with a hundred people parked in front of the lakeside relic, it was invisible.
A panoramic view of the sintering plant’s gas plant (?). Everyone who visits must get a picture of these rusty smokestacks!
A gate large enough to accommodate a missile, next to the ruins of the guard shack. Wyoming is the intersection of lonely and beautiful.
Identical warehouses seem a little newer than the rest of the plant. I suspect these were added in the mid-1950s for the Korean War, during which about 200 buildings were added to the complex.