Textile Mill Crayons

Someone had helped themselves to one of the safety posters before my visit.

In the grungy control room, I found a little slice that was never graffitied.

A big door into the fire pump room.

Presumably, in a nuclear blast the antenna would be blown flat and pop back up, allowing communication even after a near-direct hit.

The remains of the site radar beside the command building.

It seems logical that, at one time, a rock crusher was installed at the base of the mine rails shown here at the top of the Concentrator. Rocks small enough to fit between the rails would automatically bypass the crusher and continue to the work floor via the hopper below.

Behind the barge unloader (a Webster for those grain tech nerds out here) that used to extract grain from docked boats. The ladders are fun to climb, even though they get warped and wavy in places. High in the elevator would have been a crane engine that would lift the unloader, packed with a bucket conveyor, while workers would manipulate the direction of the spout with ropes manually. The buckets would rotate, scraping and elevating the grain into the silos above. It’s a rare piece of equipment for the Great Lakes.

After crushing, these machines would float lighter material to the surface of the water, where it would be skimmed and discarded. Gold and silver laden stone would sink to the bottom, where it was collected for the next stage of processing. Leica/Summilux 35/Ektar 100

The control room was used through the mid-1990s as the plant was used to stabilize the power grid.