Ghost buildings

Rattlesnake carved on porch post, Fairburn, South Dakota

The photo series I am calling "Architecture of the Open Places" has topped 1000 shots, most of them taken in the past three years. The focus (so to speak) is on small structures in vast landscapes, tiny blips against endless horizons. I look for the buildings that have held on to an essential character in spite of the ravages of time, weather, and broken dreams. 

South Dakota has always been a hard place to homestead, to farm, to ranch. It is pitiless and merciless. These structures have stood up to the harshness in many ways. Wood has lost any vestiges of paint, metal shows rust in all colors, glass has aged and broken...but something is still there. 

Some entire towns out here are deserted or nearly so, having lost whatever economic driving factor they ever had. The buildings are the last witnesses. I don't know if I find them or if they find me. 

Skulls and masks carved on other porch post

Fairburn, South Dakota

Stove on abandoned hotel porch

Hotel, Fairburn, South Dakota

Church, Pringle, South Dakota

Cabin, Custer County, South Dakota

Storefronts, Ardmore, South Dakota

Cabin, Pringle, South Dakota

Shed, South Dakota

Mossie and Newt

Women's History Month challenge for March 2 — Post a photo of one of your female ancestors. Who is in the photo? When was it taken? Why did you select this photo?

Brooks family portrait, date ca. 1917

 
I cheated and posted a photo of three of my female ancestors at once. I know I've posted this one before, but it bears a little explanation.
 
I don't know everyone's name in this photo (Shirley needs to weigh in on this one), but on the far left are my great-grandfather Joseph Newton "Newt" Brooks and my great-grandmother Mary Marcella "Mossie" Walker Brooks. I believe that the tiny older lady three people down is Newt's mother, Grandma Wren. Behind her next to the post is my great-aunt Coy McLean Brooks, standing next to my great-uncle Ernest Brooks. The two little girls below them are my great-aunt Gladys Brooks Strickland (who obviously did not care for the picture-taking session), and my grandmother, Vada Vivian Brooks Johnson, Shirley's mother. Several of the rest of the women are undoubtedly Newt's sisters. Ernest, Gladys and Vada were siblings. I am not sure if their fourth sibling, Jesse, is in the picture; he died young, a victim of leukemia. If he is in there, this may be one of the very few pictures of him.
 
Judging by Vada's apparent age in the photo, and her birth year of 1909, I'm tentatively placing this photo's date at 1917, plus or minus a year or so. This was taken in either Oklahoma or Arkansas. Again, Shirley needs to provide her expertise.
 
This photo always intrigues me for its look into family dynamics. Mossie, known to us in later years as Gran Brooks, was no fragile lily. She homesteaded on her own and only gave up her homestead to get married.

Newt Brooks and his sisters. 

Mossie was a survivor. She may have been one of the last people who lived in a half-dugout in Texas, close to the present-day Muleshoe Wildlife Refuge, whose wintering sandhill cranes fly over us every fall and spring. I like to think that she loved their calls, too.

Mossie ran a boarding house in Altus, Oklahoma, after Newt's death, and many of the older recipes I've posted over the past year are hers, most notably the teacakes. Most of her recipes were never written down. More about her later in the month.

Mossie's grave in Victory Cemetery, Altus. Newt died in Homestead, Florida, and is buried there half a continent away.

P.S. Happy 175th Texas Independence Day!

Lacreek NWR

Young ferruginous hawk on his mountain

It should have been another errand- and chore-filled day up here. There is more than enough to do on both the professional and personal fronts. Weekend time is precious. We have three weeks left to complete the first phase of the move to the new building and to get ready for the big ribbon-cutting ceremony and dedication.

In theory, I should be making the most of every minute with Getting Things Done Now.

In practice, we got up early this morning, left the phones at home, and drove down to Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge for a day of meandering down the smallest backroads imaginable and looking at the wildlife, buildings and achingly beautiful vistas.

Eastern kingbird sneering at the photographer

We needed the scenery, the abundance of bird calls and the near-total absence of electronic and traffic noises. Lacreek NWR is at the northernmost range of the Sandhills, just south of the White River Badlands, a pocket wetlands habitat in the High Plains. It was a Civilian Conservation Corps project, as many refuges were, established in 1935. It is in every sense an oasis.

Original sign, as posted at the Lacreek NWR site.

We had never been there before, and we found that it soothed frazzled nerves better than anything else we might have done. The phones and the errands and the chores waited for us, for once.


Here is a selection of eye candy from the day. Enjoy.

Church on Pine Ridge Reservation.

Abandoned cabin.

Technicolor beehives.

Lacreek NWR marsh.

Great blue heron.

Common nighthawk.

Scenic, SD.

Sign with many, many interpretive possibilities, most not suitable for a family blog.

Sign at our friend Kenny's ranch. Yes, that is a pteranodon and that is also a mosasaur on top.

Sign, Martin, SD

Yellow-headed blackbird

Q: Why did the sharp-tailed grouse hens and chicks cross the road? A: Better you should ask, why did it take them 15 minutes to do so? First you get everyone lined up....

...then you get everyone crossing in random order, back and forth....

...then you finally get them in place.

Splendid summer vistas are all too rare these days. Enjoy.

Scenes from Sioux Falls II: architecture of the open spaces

House, South Dakota, surrounded by sudden spring greenery

Driving across the southern half of South Dakota, west to east and then back, is an odyssey in hard-scrabble vernacular architecture. There is no place in the state that provided an easy life, and these deserted structures are mute testaments to the harshness of prairie life. Some of them are unexpectedly beautiful, by purpose or by accident, with colors as striking as the quilts of Gee's Bend. Since starting this project, I am always taking the tiny blue highways and looking behind trees--where there are trees--and around curves--where there are curves.

Barn, South Dakota

The violent weather in the state this past weekend reminded me just how tough it was to survive through the winter and spring. Every season brought its dangers and its beauties. There was never any guarantee that this season would not be the last.

Barn after heavy rainstorm

These shots are just a tip-of-the-iceberg sampling of the lovely, lone sentinel buildings on the prairies. Every one has its story, but many of those are lost. Their whispers are wordless.

Barn

Abandoned barn

Working barn

Christ Episcopal Church, Ft. Thompson

Abandoned church

Grain elevator. If ever a shot demanded black-and-white photography, this is it.

Hilltop buildings

Cabin

House with metal roof

House and outbuilding

House

They have survived their builders, outlived their families, and even outlived their purposes. Don't drive by them too quickly--they are the last of their kind.

Catching up

Light on the drive home from Piya Wiconi

It's a cold, lovely Saturday morning with snow showers in the forecast, a perfect day to catch up on a number of deferred (OK, procrastinated) tasks and assignments. I've made tea strong enough to stand a spoon in, because I'd rather hibernate, honestly. Yesterday morning, though, stumbling awake at the usual time, I saw the thinnest rim of blue-light sunrise for the first time since the winter solstice. Spring is creeping over the horizon. Time to get things going; no time to laze.

So I will spend the day writing, with perhaps a detour to make teacakes. Baking and writing are interconnected for me, and the baking forces me to take breaks and let the subconscious work on the writing. The aroma is a magnificent bonus.

In the meantime, here are some shots from a couple of recent trips: a birding trip last Saturday to the Hammerquist Road area east of Rapid City, and a lovely drive through early morning fog and late afternoon light to the Piya Wiconi campus of Oglala Lakota College yesterday.  The light on the prairies in its endless permutations may be the most spectacular part of the scenery. The prairie architecture isn't bad, either.

FWIW: I was trying to show some of these online albums to our friend Pat last week, hoping she'd enjoy the views. Instead, she and Gene were tickled by my late-night fumble-fingered typos, spellos, grammos and punctos. By "tickled," I mean, of course, convulsed in hysterics on the floor. So I hope that nothing on here is still labeled Sputh Dakora. If it is, I'll kindly thank you to keep quiet about it. Just enjoy the views. Happy weekend from Sputh Dakora.

Cattle and sharp-tailed grouse, Hammerquist Road

Frozen pond, Hammerquist Road

Barn, Hammerquist Road

Light through the fog, Sheep Mountain Road area

Our Lady of the Sorrows, Kyle

Wild turkeys near White River Visitor Center

Tatanka Trading Post, Scenic, South Dakota

Scenic, South Dakota

Stone house in snowbank, Scenic, South Dakota

Shed, drive to Rapid City. I love the diamond pane window.