Fisher Locker

A string of vehicles have found death at Packard recently. Usually they are simply driving up ramps and pushed off the rooftops, but this one seemed destined for a worse fate. Found in the far corner of the far building.

An old stoker in a power plant that was abandoned long before the mill next to it, by all indications. Sugar mills burned dry beet pulp pellets for fuel.

On first impression it might look like a funky mailbox, but trust me on this one; it’s a flour bolter chute. In flour milling, “bolting” means sifting the flour through successively smaller screens.

A shipment board for customers that may or may not exist anymore. Let’s assume any of the products made here are probably on backorder.

Part of the 1917 mill that had a little bit of roof left over it–most of this building was open to the sky. The birds loved it, but everything metal was quickly becoming too unstable to walk on.

The scale of the grain hoppers helps tell the story of how large Hamm’s was in its day.

Off the beaten path is this old LTV sign. Now it points to a ghost town and dead dock.

Lessons from the day.

Before developers saw to cut and cut the flour mills inside Pillsbury, they stood at the ready beside various purposeful chutes the traversed the floors of between sorters. These machines were belt-driven by the power of Pillsbury’s Mississippi headraces and turbines, the force of which notoriously shook the building’s foundations themselves. The wheels would change the grade of the flour, or the size of the dust produced from crushing the kernels.