Almond Joy

One of the principal businesses in McConnell was a farm implement and lumber store. This is too new to have been bought there, but I like that it’s still on the edge of town. It’s more comfortable than the emptiness beyond, that used to be a little prairie town.

A carefully kept journal of the ballast levels in the final years that the Ford sailed Lake Superior.

These monorails were on a side line to build smaller parts of the Ranger before being attached to the truck itself. Note in the upper right that there’s another conveyor above this section.

Bits and things in a pile in the corner of the smelter, the unsold chunks of industrial history that didn’t sell at an on-site auction before my visit.

Rubber dock boots still sits under the desk in the dock office, near keys to rusted locks and files of fired employees.

Without a conveyor belt, this tripper seems lost. The job of this machine was simply to take grains from the moving conveyor belt and eject it into the silos via the chutes on the sides. Note all the dust collection venting added to the machine to suck up any explosive grain dust.

Taken from the arm of the pocket loader–note the tree growing out of the conveyor belt. Often where you see old piles of taconite, trees are springing up. The byproducts of the pelletization process break down and make a really fertile mix, especially with all the iron content!

After Wilson Bros moved out, a furniture company moved in.

Fire buckets did not have flat bottoms so they could never be used for other buckety tasks, and were thus always handy in an actual fire.