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UER Forum > Archived US: Great Lakes > Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa! (Viewed 705 times)
crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa


Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
< on 12/9/2012 5:10 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
[This is my first explorationy post here. There's quite a few photos because we came across quite a bit of stuff yesterday. Please let me know if there's some other preferred method or something the community in general would rather have done another way!]

So, Friday was this beautiful, cold-cream kind of day with grey skies and a lot of silence here in eastern Iowa. My partner and I went a-ramblin' o'er hill and dale to quite fruitful ends on the abandoned stuff front. With the leaves down and the cornfields plowed, it's like the landscape just peeled open to show us things that were assuredly hidden from our usual roadways (and our unusual roadways) during the more lush days of summer.

The first site wasn't far from town, and I'm sure we've driven by it half a dozen times and not spied it up on the hill.

The view from the house (perfect morning!):


The house from its most intact side:


I did my best to capture how the house was sinking down toward the front door, where the light is pouring into the first photo. That counter is slanting down toward me at about a thirty degree angle:


(note the brown door of the under-counter cabinets through the door)
http://crows.halfl...farm-frontdoor.jpg

And here's the kitchen:




The view from the kitchen of the sinking front room:


We found an old record player in one of the outbuildings:



The second place was a mini mart a little further on. The forlorn little place is for sale. We could have gotten in to at least one of the buildings without causing damage, but it's fairly exposed and my car was right there in the entry so we didn't stick around long.










Third was way out in the gravel back roads down in the southern part of the state. She's almost idyllic, in a kind of... desolate, post-apocalyptic kind of way. Which is my favourite. Naturally.











Four was the remnants of a farm stead with no house that we could identify, down closer to the real prize at the destination that we were specifically moving toward:


I really fancy these old windmill towers with vines crawling all over them:


Here's the brick silo. I really fancy these as well:


There were a few concrete foundations with things growing in them, but they all looked farmy and none farm-housy:




Last is our jackpot for the day. Pardon the graininess of some of the pictures, the light was beginning to go by the time we got all the way down there and we were moving quickly because there was no discreet place to put the car and it sits baldly up to a well-traversed road:



The barn on the property is in better shape, but we didn't really go down there:


There were a lot of rusty hangers around:


There was a lot of debris around the front of the house, including this child-sized folding chair:


which was right next to this hole in the ground. Maybe some kind of tank opening? I don't know enough about the architecture of these old places to have any idea what this is or why it's there:


This skull was sitting right outside the front door (our guess is raccoon based on size and other remains nearby; the bone next to it in this photo I pulled out from under the sheet metal and is larger than the other probably-raccoon bones so I have no idea what it's from):


We went upstairs first:


Here's the view from one of the bedroom windows:


This is the scene that greeted us in the room at the top of the stairs:


Then back downstairs, where there's still a phone on the wall and some hanging decorative(?) corn to either side of that door, there:


Most everything in the kitchen was open:



And then, we vanished into the gloaming! Stopping to take a few snapshots of some boarded up old buildings in the small town nearby, the one person who noticed us and showed any interest all day pulled over his minivan. What we earned wandering around the ragged edges of these places that we obviously had no business interest in (granted, not trying to get inside) was a tip-off about the site of the old schoolhouse, which as it turned out had been either partially demolished or completely collapsed or some of both, but was still an interesting, if brief, view. He also gave us some local history on the dead buildings we were peering at downtown!

(Edited to fix the last photo link which I swear I fixed before...)


[last edit 12/9/2012 3:33 PM by crows - edited 1 times]

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cdevon 


Location: west county
Gender: Male




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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 1 on 12/9/2012 7:26 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
very nice sets. thanks! and i love that silo thing and the well/wind mill!


edit: whats with the record players? the farm house i just went to had 3...

[last edit 12/9/2012 7:28 AM by cdevon - edited 1 times]

When I say I'm 'clean and sober', it means I've showered and I'm headed to the liquor store.
crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa


Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 2 on 12/9/2012 3:35 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by cdevon
very nice sets. thanks! and i love that silo thing and the well/wind mill!


edit: whats with the record players? the farm house i just went to had 3...



Thanks!

It did seem out of place, in there among the broken wood and baled wire. I would have expected to see that kind of thing in the house but this was out in a little workshop shed thing a bit away.

There was a little stereo cassette player in one of the places we saw yesterday. Perhaps it is Obsolete Abandoned Music Players season?

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dammband 


Location: Atlanta, Georgia
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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 3 on 12/10/2012 2:50 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Great find.

Tenebrae 


Location: The Wild West


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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 4 on 12/10/2012 3:55 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Nice sets!
I really like the gnarled tree guarding falling-down house, and the windmill also.
The tank opening you're wondering about may be for septic waste...

crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa


Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 5 on 12/10/2012 4:45 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by Tenebrae
Nice sets!
I really like the gnarled tree guarding falling-down house, and the windmill also.
The tank opening you're wondering about may be for septic waste...


It does look a bit like it's guarding it, doesn't it.

Septic opening right outside the front? It was literally directly outside a door, not more than 4 or 5 feet from the house. Where the porch area set back a bit is, on the right side of the picture. My folks' house isn't hooked up to city sewer but our leach field is a ways out from the place, as is the septic tank pipe thingy. Granted, it's also in Anchorage and a totally different kind of ground so...

Spine house does have a basement, if that makes a difference. We did NOT go into it. No. Noooo.

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Radio2600 


Location: On the Road to Wellville


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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 6 on 12/12/2012 4:04 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 


Re:



It could be a well, a cistern (for collecting rain water) or the cesspool.

Close to the house with a solid lining, bet on it being a cistern. A ways away from the house, with a porous lining, bet on well. Cesspool or septic tank is usually close to the house with a porous lining.

The chances of it being a well is hit or miss. It depends on the county.

The State of Iowa has been on a sort of crusade for the last 20 years to eliminate all the shallow wells and drainage wells. Both can introduce pollutants in the aquifers from farm run off. IDALS is supposed to look after the filling in and sealing of drainage wells. Domestic shallow wells (like for a rural house) the jurisdiction of the county sanitarians.

In big-budget counties like Polk, Johnson, Linn, Blackhawk, Scott, etc., it's probably not a well.



In order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind.
crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa


Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 7 on 12/12/2012 4:52 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Thanks for the info! Talking to a regular of mine at work, cistern came up as well, so I'll go with that for now until I get some better lernins. It looked like a pretty significant hole, but I didn't have a flash light, and I really didn't want to just, I don't know, stick my arm down there or something. o.O

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Radio2600 


Location: On the Road to Wellville


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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 8 on 12/13/2012 1:57 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Next trip to Missouri, pick up some firecrackers.

Point the camera down the hole, drop a lit firecracker in it, hold the shutter open and you should get a good pic of the interior.

Safety tip: drop a lit firecracker in the hole BEFORE you try it with the camera so you don't incinerate your DSLR if there's some methane build up in the hole.

In order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind.
crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa


Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 9 on 12/13/2012 2:56 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Ha! Alas, the crow-creature is not that daring. It's a very exposed property. Also I like not being on fire, and... worry.

Though this now has me thinking that... maybe what my life really needs is some kind of periscope (whose life doesn't, really?) for peering into holes like that and all the pitch-black basements I'm not willing to go into. Maybe with LEDs.

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Radio2600 


Location: On the Road to Wellville


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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 10 on 12/14/2012 1:39 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Like a reverse "drainer's periscope".

BTW: Drainers use it to check for oncoming vehicles before popping a manhole cover from below.

In order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind.
crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa


Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 11 on 12/14/2012 1:43 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
That sounds highly useful. My having any kind of periscope may, however, be counter to much productivity in these endeavors because it would require things like submarine noises a lot. God, it probably really is a good thing that so far none of my wanderlust has taken me underground. Underground + periscope + D the great land submarine is probably not what needs to happen.

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Freak 


Location: Usually Alaska, now MSP.
Gender: Male


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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 12 on 12/18/2012 2:52 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Mobile
 
Seems like a bright flashlight should see down that hole. I like the 3W LED flashlights, they're getting pretty cheap these days.



Turn off the internet and go play outside.
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crows 


Location: Eastern Iowa


Il est interdit de faire smashy smash

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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 13 on 12/20/2012 6:04 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
I have started to become pretty good at actually making it out the door with my camera (with the battery charged AND the SD card in it even!!) when the intent is specifically to do this thing. Maybe soon I can graduate to other sensible things like flashlights. (My god, it could even subvert some of the "Oh, well. It's getting dark. Maybe we'd better go home. :\" And by 'home' I mean 'around the countryside staring at factories until 2 AM'.)

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iliamo1986 


Location: Central Iowa
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Re: Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa!
<Reply # 14 on 1/22/2014 1:45 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Crows, you told me to check out some of your old threads, so I am...

The house with the old stove and fridge inside is droolworthy! You have found some amazing farmhouses...I must learn where they are.

"The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes." -Simone Weil
UER Forum > Archived US: Great Lakes > Our five-site haul in eastern Iowa! (Viewed 705 times)



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