If it wasn’t for the humming and crackling of the wires, I could believe I had arrived to a post apocalyptic landscape.
history under ground
power
Construction in 2014 reveals a lost stone sign.
A quick shot to show the mineshaft in context with the smelter. Did I mention the smelter’s stack is unreasonably gigantic?
The first time I saw Buffalo Central Terminal was from a westbound Empire Builder. In the foreground you can see the rows of platforms.
A bridge crosses the main street of the village; one that goes nowhere. Ambiguity intended.
The power lines follow the street, down to the mineshaft. Everything revolved around the mine, it seemed.
The ghost town of Lauder, Manitoba. It’s seen better days, but I bet the TV reception on the flatlands is great.
One of a pair of poles to hold the electric lines for the streetcars entering and exiting the tunnel.
In this ghost town where there were brick, wooden, and dirt-brick buildings, the latter fared the best by far.
The back of the Lyric, including the offices at the back of the theater.
The iconic outline of a prairie sentinel. Quintessential rural industrial architecture.
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.
Kat dancing down the trestle, which is one of the highest in the state, standing about 100 feet over the road. Mamiya 6/Portra 160
This is how the warehouse looks today.
Lights over the emergency slides. A veritable overgrown city in the background.
They remodeled, apparently.
Blending the explosive ingredients was dangerous. It is no wonder that the blending house had so many emergency slides.
The two antennae are retracted–the position they would be in if the base was under attack.
I slid into the mill through the top floor, near where the rock-grinding ball mills were left to rust. I look around, taking in the most intact gold mill I’ve ever explored. Movement attracted my eye to the ceiling, where I found something staring back, a raven was observing me with some interest. It had been a while since I have brushed up on the folklore and mythology, but I took it as a good sign. Leica/Summilux 35/Ektar 100
The the left, the nitrating line in War City. To the right, War City’s sole suburb, Charlestown, IN.
Approaching the power station and its giant stack. The stack replaced four shorter stacks in the 1960s, helping with pollution in the downtown corridor.
The tangled telegraph lines between Mitchell and the engine house keep the old pole from topping in the wind.
I included this image to illustrate the height of the headgrame and the distance between it and the hoist house. Of course, compared with the depth of the mine shaft, this distance is short.
The former express concourse, as seen in 2005.
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.
Old boathouses near the dock.
A collapsing and unstable building.
A few remnants of the control room that were not vandalized at this point; now it’s a different story, unfortunately. The tile is glazed ceramic to be permanently nonconductive.
No ambiguity here… miners, check in at this office.
Insulators to take in the AC from Great Falls and Montana Power Co.
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.
The main street of the ghost town is also the maintenance road for the BNSF line that bisects Colmor.
Ringling, MT is spread thin across the grassy land.
It’s like a piece of paper that’s been written on and rewritten, until you can’t read what the original message was.
A typical rail shop.
Milwaukee Road’s second substation at Loweth, as seen from the highway. Somewhat ironically, a new electrical substation is across the street from it today.In the background, you can make out a collapsing storage shed and some of the grades.
A shuttered house at the end of the block doesn’t even have boards on it anymore.
The ruins of the the Hubert Mine over the ruins of Nevadaville. Its ore was taken through the town to a mill below it.
The depot at the head of town seems to be being disassembled. Behind it is a dead signal where the tracks used to be; they’ve been pulled.
Ducking the steam lines overhead between the mixers and compressors, a water tower says “good morning,” right past the slack power lines. This is the sleepy uptown of the war city.
Here, the concentrated gold (and silver, and zinc, I would guess) would be loaded into trucks bound for the smelter.
Shadows of distant power lines are carried to the concrete by street lights.
Typical New Mexico ranch fencing. The power lines follow the rails between Springer and Wagon Mound.
If it weren’t for the fact there were trees growing from it, and that I cropped out the end of the rail approach, one might think this is still used occasionally.
Platforms and abandoned outbuildings, as seen in 2005.
General Mills bought Consolidated Elevator’s “D” in 1943 and renamed it “A,” though no additional elevators have followed from that firm to date. Visible on the right is the first annex, built along with the elevator in 1909.
A bird near the old schoolyard.
Mammoth Mine overlooks Central City from atop Mammoth Hill. In the distance you can make out Coeur d’Alene Mine (red), which operated from 1885 through 1940.
A little ice and snow made work at Taconite Harbor much more dangerous.
The steam plant at Nopeming is an iconic (and crooked) smokestack. Kodak Pro 400 on a Fuji GX680.
A twin-engine crew pushes full taconite cars onto Dock 6.
Modern ruins of the Gilman-Belden tram…
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.
I wish I knew the story of this popcorn-themed boxcar.
Old conveyor belts are draped over the sides of the ore chutes to cut down on the noise and wear of the dumping trains.
Looking past the Osborn along the side of the Hughitt Slip, where there have always been grain elevators for more than 100 years.
These ruins of buildings recovered acid from the explosives line to be recycled.
These wide spools sit atop the abandoned tracks that lead to the train shed, which was later repurposed into a truck shed.
This building had no identity issues. My chief regret was not spending more time documenting the ghost signs around the complex.
All electrical rooms were surrounded by walls, for obvious reasons. Now all the walls are gone, for reasons less obvious.
SFAAP’s iconic smokestacks. You’d notice if you drove past this on the highway.
The sidewalks are littered with rocks.
Looking down the Gilman-Belden tram.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
Looking toward the power station at the edge of the explosives plant.
When I saw this section, I knew the dock was abandoned.
When block glass shatters, it looks like ice.
The Osborn Block is the prettiest building you’ve never seen in the Twin Ports.
One of the smallest of the many elevators in Thunder Bay, this little elevator held corn for the glucose and starch lines.
Near Isabella, MB, frozen flooded fields expand to the horizon. Taken on a Voigtlander 25mm f/2.5 if you were wondering.
The most derelict of the old bonded warehouses. Note the barrel elevator on the side of it!
What are we to do in an emergency?
The light masts are there, but it looks like the cables that stretched across the dock with the actual lights have fallen down.
An engine on display outside the Montana Territorial Prison in Deer Lodge, MT. This was a typical electric locomotive used by The Milwaukee Road.
“Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and historian.
The turbine hall sported a beautiful Whiting gantry crane.
The perimeter fence still holds strong, 50 years after it was put up.
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.
The orange bars were secured to the tunnel walls to support electric lines for the mine carts. Lower parts of the sand mines were allowed to flood. The water was perfectly still, and made for a mud so thick it could suck off your boots.
Between all of the buildings was dense growth, especially vines.
A high-voltage tunnel sheathed in concrete dips below ground near a shell packing building that now stores fireworks.
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.