Bureacratic Forces (or Paranormal Forces?)

The Bachelor's Grove Cemetery lies abandoned, disowned by government, abused by teenagers, protected by a meager staff of volunteers who struggle for any resources to support their mission

 The homesteads and town-site that comprised Bachelor's Grove, IL are lost save a few hints left for the seeking eye. The Bachelor's Grove Cemetery, however, is still a cursed plot of land that is under county ownership and cannot be missed if one travels the old Midlothian Turnpike out of the city of Chicago into southwestern Cook County. It is excised from the surrounding county park though un-acknowledged on current maps.

The Old Midlothian Turnpike, south of 143rd, is now a walking path only.

 The 'Everdon Burying Ground' as described in the earliest deeds to the land that Mr. Everdon passed to the Schmitt's (Smith's). These mention the plot on the SE quadrant of the parcel, but no state registration was ever received for the cemetery by the state board chartered to receive such forms, wrapped around the requisite check for their troubles. The surrounding area had been settled by German immigrants in the early 1800s and a nearby townsite was forming under the Bachelor's Grove banner, though history has melted clarity around how the name was derived. As progress marched on, train tracks were laid north and south of Bachelor's Grove. A power hungry county board under the guise of Manifest Destiny began to reclaim UN-perfected homesteads, and surely though slowly, the land was absorbed by the muck of Cook County interdepartmental politics.

Economic Forces

An April 1984 F4 tornado tears through Mannford, OK

 I grew up in a dead town. We all thought it was dying, but having been back once a decade or so since Old Man and Momma Jones took down the shingle and meandered us westward; I can see it was dead when the water slide closed down. Those left either never wanted to be in town anyway, or stumble around zombie-fied recalling the last time the Pirates made a run at the Oklahoma State 1A High-School championship, as a measure of persistent relevance.

They mean football, but no team had been to state in anything except marching band for decades. Held together with sludge leftovers of the oil boom, the original town site flooded by a Corps of Engineers dam on the Arkansas river west of Tulsa. The ground so polluted, in a pre-EPA America even, recourse was burial at minimum 15 feet underwater. I thought of it as a suburban experience, since Old Man Jones commuted to Tulsa. Later I met true suburbanites and learned the equine facilities in our back pasture, let alone the back pasture, disqualified me from the normal perception of suburban. Sparse population-density tends a balance that keeps most of the residential and commercial space occupied, each spring tornado season erases another swath of town, only the necessary buildings get recreated.

Inside Gary's Union Station

 This was never an economic hub, like the refinery town where my grandparents lived. Though it still had some vibrance and character when I was young, the brick-streets of Ponca City continue to deteriorate and remain underfunded now that I'm, ahem, less young. As time wears on the sheen fades, and facades begin to dull.

 The Continental Oil Company didn't hold a candle to the United States Steel Corporation's testament to civilization plotted out of northwest Indiana. Named in honor of their founder Elbert Henry Gary, a capitalist mogul of the first order, having coordinated the likes of JP Morgan, A. Carnegie, and C. Schwab to launch the steel company and the city where its labor force would flourish.

Union Station, Gary, Indiana, where the trains no longer so much as slow down

If Momma Could See Me Now

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.

From Homefront to Treehouse

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.

If That Train Had Come

 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