Scenes by the road less traveled. Part Two

Down the road a few miles we enter another little hamlet.  Lumberjacks used to float logs down the river that runs past it, but the community started out as a railroad junction in the late 1870s.  Later a road paralleled the rails and seems to have gone through the center of town.  In the modern era the busy highway is just close enough to disturb the silence of an abandoned main street.

Of the early rail heritage we have almost nothing, just the Ghost Carnival that I visited last year. 

This was once the busiest corner in town;

By 1910 the glory days of this place were probably already over, but it was an era when stubborn folks were still trying to create farms out of logged off timber land.  There was a lot of dynamite being used to blow up stumps back then. An old timer once told me that they had so much left over after World War One that they gave it away at the County Extention office.  You just had to sign for it!

The building above seems to have had three lives.

Little banks like this lived and died on the economic health of their towns.  They probably did OK in the teens and twenties, but the Crash of '29 must have put them under.  Next up:

The top of the sign is not very legible but does indicate that this became some sort of store.  The ghost sign says "Occident Flour  Costs More-Worth It".  Small town grocery stores hung on a little longer, folks do have to eat after all.  But in the next active incarnation the building becomes home to:

And I think this is the end of the line for the place.  You can see in some of the above pictures that there are still stacks of sheet metal and tools inside, but the door is padlocked and shows no sign of being opened in recent times.  I imagine it could have another life left in it, but some of the brickwork appears to be crumbling, and flat roofs are notoriously susceptible to the ravages of weather in our part of the world.

Next up: A jackpot of Americana