Interesting historical tidbits and pictures of ghost towns and abandoned spaces found alongside and removed from modern day America, ruining away. Beauty incognito.
Momma Jones always said, 'One day I'll find you in the looney bin.' As was a fashionable turn-of-phrase in the America of my 1890s youth, and this assignment proved she was right. The old State Hospital where I wound up had been a stately affair, a Georgian-Revival inspired Cottage style campus and all the interconnected blocks were a safe couple of miles from town. A veritable island on the prairie, this place fell victim to the Reagan era harkening to the 1890s sensitivities and saving a buck, don't you know, by 'empowering' the mentally ill to live outside in the real world. Which basically meant to cut the budget, and let it go at that.
Blast walls separate the buildings, their integrity compromised by peepholes
Growing up I had a tree-house. Old Man Jones was a helluva craftsman,
but he was just as shrewd. So my tree-house had solid guard-rails around a
platform, transparent walls to satisfy the ever-nurturing Momma
Jones and her watchful eye. My only respite from Lil' bubba Jones came in the ladder of rope with rough cut
oak rungs. Bubba hadn't developed the dexterity to navigate
that when it went up. As he got there, us older boys took the rungs out
and hung a single knotted strand of rope down over a sturdy branch.
Nothing like what the Military-Industrial Complex of the 1940s left for the kids in an outlet town outside the Chicago metro area.
Downtown Bachelor's Grove, the intersection of 135th &
Bachelors Grove Road, a densely populated couple of blocks and a
surrounding area of immigrants, homestead-farmers. Some more well
connected than others, but all waiting for the train tracks to be laid
through their hamlet. With beginnings sometime in the early 1800s in the southwest section of what is today Cook County, IL, pictured above was the main drag.
"Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet
every man has a "property" in his own "person." This nobody has any
right to but himself. The "labour" of his body and the "work" of his
hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of
the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his
labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby
makes it his property" - John Locke on Homesteading
Some areas are abandoned due to forces of nature, voluntarily or otherwise - Mother Nature will displace you if you won't heed the warnings and nature's alarms.Ask Harry Truman, not the president, but the last resident of Spirit Lake. That's not Spirit Lake there, that's the new lake that formed 150' of mud and volcanic ash above Harry R. Truman's last known whereabouts, at the Mt. St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake.
Frank Peters was a man of means, a self-made Chicago attorney. Befriended by the Alexian Brothers, an Augustinian Order, when he was a boy, Frank never forgot. Upon his death he left plans in motion to establish a palatial home for his beloved wife, Jeannie, ahem..Mrs. Frank Peters (as documented in 1939 records and newspapers) and their invalid daughter, Jane, with the caveat that after habitation by his immediate family the property be a donation to the Alexian Brothers, who made use of this property as a Novitiate from the early 1950s until the late 1960s according to Mr. Peters wishes.
Jeannie occupied the home from it's completion in 1939
through 1948, though Jane passed away before the home could be occupied.
The first of many unfulfilled hopes surrounding this place.
The "monastery" rests atop a knoll alongside the Red
River, overlooking a rapid named Monastery Falls for the behemoth,
remote structure riverside. It was indeed a Novitiate, a
training ground for novices, while in Alexian hands. The buildings
doubled in capacity through additions by the Alexian Order, who took
over the property in 1948 and hosted it's first class of novices in the
early 1950s. Whom needed dormitories and classrooms and dayrooms and rec rooms.
Their are pictures
of the building in it's expanded glory through the links at the end of
this article.
The lands, however, were claimed by the Menominee Indians as tribal
and through treaties and agreements with the government over the years.
The Menominee wanted to see a tribal hospital established within the
facility upon the Alexian's departure, though actions indicating the
property would be sold at market were agitating many holding such hopes.
This agitation boiled over into an armed takeover of the property in
1975 by a more assertive, dissident faction from the tribe, demanding
the property be deeded to the tribe. This band, 'The Menominee Warrior
Society' and the tribe had been victim of, yet persevered through the
failed "Termination" movement. Now this dissident faction took it upon themselves to acquire the abandoned property in hopes of conversion to a tribe hospital.
The Menominee had been adjudged one of the most viable tribes, for adoption of the US civil norms of the mid-1900s, to be included in this experimental movement. A gross miscalculation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that left the
county of Menominee markedly the poorest in the state. With a less than stellar record of fulfilling obligations from historical treaties with native tribes, the federal government harbored little faith or support amongst the people of the Menominee nation. Exercising any control over this dissident faction by tribal elders would prove difficult without substantive leverage.
The Lil Ruiner watches the road from the footsteps of history
Al Bergstein recounts photographing Marlon Brando before this fireplace, and mentions the room behind it where one was visible to the armed locals surrounding the novitate; " It was a place where you kept your head down and walked at a crouch. "
They then further
exacerbated the plight of the cash strapped Menominee Restoration Committee with the eventual ascent to the demands of the self-annointed Menominee Warrior Society and granted deed to the Novitiate and the surrounding acreage to the tribe.
Time, elements, and vandals leave the only traces of change inside
Though studies by state and federal agencies had already estimated a steep price tag to convert this building into either an educational or medical institution as the Warrior Society had seemed intent in its demand, the tribe now held the tab for accruing property taxes on a substantial piece of northern Wisconsin.
Unable to sustain the upkeep, let alone pursue upgrade whilst in the
midst of this "Restoration" effort thrust upon them, an ugly side of our history we
continue to mis-handle and re-frame today, and continues to plague
reservation communities across the nation, the building fell into disrepair and is not on tribal lands today.
The Novitiate has been left to the elements, and the inevitable spray-painting vandals. Minimally disturbed, thanks in large part to it's remote location, the remaining skeleton is built to withstand the elements of time, even as it's decorative artifacts decay under the duress of long winters, harsh swings in temperature along with significant humidity and precipitation with heavy melt and run-off cycles, as well as indifference from the system that made many promises to the people who were the rightful heirs to the land where this structure, that could have been so much more useful, now stands.
Add caption
Photo linked from Alexian Brothers online Archive for comparison
An incredible look inside the 1975 Menominee Takeover is available at Photojournalist Al Bergstein's Site
And reading from the historical Christian mission to Natives perspective is recounted here
Along with a video by a former novice who left the order but returned to find that he'd missed some interesting history, so made a documentary on the siege;
Old Man Jones surveys a miners cabin in the San Juan Mtn Range
Call it divine will, the winds of change, the ebb and flow, simple wanderlust, but one proven constant at each revelation of the fossil record is; Mankind is a migratory mammal, though we will establish roots when the location proves fertile we'll just as quickly move on when the resources are depleted, or as the progeny develop an awareness of the road onward and drift away.
Another constant are the signs left behind once mankind vacates an area. Though the Native Americans were fastidiously tidy they left tell-tale signs of their habits and habitats behind them, the Americans who followed behind have taken the task to build monuments to mankind across the landscape and create ephemera in abundance.
