Thursday, December 31, 2009

New Years tradition ...

There are a surprising number of Montana musicians and bands that have made their mark on the state over the years ... but if you're a Montanan of a certain age it's almost guaranteed that a group called the Mission Mountain Wood Band holds a special place in your heart. I happen to be of that certain age, and so you'll likely be seeing more about M2WB here before too long.

The band was at their peak back in the late 70s and early 80s, touring nearly constantly. One of their regular stops was a place up in Gallatin Canyon called "Buck's T4"; Mission Mountain was booked at the place every New Year's Eve for a dozen years. Then the band started to break up, and there was a plane crash, and except for a couple of glorious reunion concerts Mission Mountain slowly started being forgotten.

But this year, for whatever reason, the surviving members of Mission Mountain decided to get back together, and they're touring again. And tonight they'll be playing New Year's Eve at Bucks, for the first time in 24 years. The show's been sold out for weeks, and it promises to be a blast. The 70s aren't dead yet!

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Mill Iron ...

Here's a photo of a town you've probably never heard of ... and one that really doesn't exist anymore. Mill Iron, Montana was in far northeastern Carter County, out in the middle of some surprisingly lovely countryside. The post office there was established back in 1916 at the height of the eastern Montana homestead boom, the site named in honor of a large Texas cattle ranch.

Mill Iron probably never had much more than a post office, store, and school, and this old roadhouse was about the last of the place. I imagine it closed about the time the post office was discontinued in 1990. When I went through there about four years ago, most of the equipment for a little cafe was still inside ... waiting for the revival that will never come.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

James Welch ...

I remember being introduced to the work of James Welch back in the 1980s, and being struck by the power and (especially) the bleakness of his writing. Welch was a Native American from up on the Hi-Line, and another product of the great creative writing program at the University of Montana. His novels are despairing things, capturing the desolation and hopelessness of Montana reservation life with a poignancy that other authors have largely been unable to match.

He certainly didn't paint endearing pictures of our part of the world, though. Here's a stanza from a poem of his, titled "Harlem, Montana: Just off the Reservation." It was first published in the April 1968 issue of Poetry magazine:
Harlem, your hotel is overnamed, your children
are raggedy-assed but you go on, survive
the bad food from the two cafes and peddle
your hate for the wild who bring you money.
When you die, if you die, will you remember
the three young bucks who shot the grocery up,
locked themselves in and cried for days, we're rich
help us, oh God, we're rich.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Hay in art ...

The more time I spend wandering the Internet, the more I realize that somebody's already created at least one website for pretty much every single topic known to man. This morning, for example, I stumbled across a site titled, "Hay in Art: A Collection of Great Works of Hay." It's a database of close to 6800 paintings, photos, essays, and poems on the subject of hay ... including no fewer than 177 entries from the state of Montana.

At the head of the Montana list was this 1987 lithograph by Missoula artist Monte Dolack titled, "Points of Interest." Dolack is one of Montana's best-known contemporary artists ... his work is clever and whimsical, and for decades now it's single-handedly kept a big chunk of the state's notecard and poster industry afloat. I enjoy much of it, though it's definitely become a stereotype, and it's important to remember that Montana's art community is far more diverse than that.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Christmas in July ...

When you take a lot of photos, you keep some because you like their aesthetics, and you keep some for sentimental reasons. This year's last holiday-season photo is one that falls in the latter category.

I don't know if they still do it now, but for many years a number of the national park lodges had a tradition of celebrating Christmas in the summertime ... the rationale being that since the hotels were closed in the winter, a December 25th celebration was pretty much out of the question. So back when I worked at Glacier, we celebrated Christmas every July 25th. There was a big employee dinner, and caroling, and gifts, and of course a tree.

This is the Christmas tree that graced the lobby of Lake McDonald Lodge back in July of 1981. A few days earlier, the hotel bellmen had piled into their rattletrap old stake truck and made a surreptitious run out to the National Forest for it ... and then we all put the thing up and piled on the homemade decorations. One of my favorite trees ever.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Another holiday down ...

Here's a shot in honor of those of you who are facing a long, snowy drive home this weekend, after a Christmas visit to the relatives. (I took this through the windshield a couple years ago, while sliding along I-90 near Logan ... a circumstance that accounts for the blur.)

Friday, December 25, 2009

Charlie Russell Christmas ...

As pretty much every Montanan who's ever gotten a Christmas card knows, the artist Charlie Russell did a number of Christmas-themed paintings over the years ... scenes that reveal Russell's strong sense of the Montana landscape, as well as his characteristic sense of humor. Here's a painting he did back in 1910, called "Seein' Santa."

A very happy holidays to you all.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Seasonal view ...

Today's photo is another one that that I took last week ... this old farmhouse is a few miles north of Avon. It seems to reflect the season a little bit.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Scurrying for cover ...

One of the rituals of America's holiday season is the annual installation of an always-perfect Christmas tree at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington. Since the 1970s, the tree selection process has taken on a life of its own, with states vying for the honor of supplying the tree. It's usually good for a few newspaper articles, though I tend to think the trees involved always look better standing in the forest, alive.

Montana has supplied the Capitol's Christmas tree twice, most recently in 2008. The other time was in 1989, when Montana used its statehood centennial as a hook to win the Christmas tree honor. That June, a federal landscape architect headed out to the Kootenai National Forest and selected a handsome spruce tree outside of Libby -- a town whose heritage is inexorably tied to logging. In conjunction with local volunteers, the Forest Service scheduled the tree-chopping for mid-November, a public event with lots of press coverage.

And here's how it all went down, according to the Associated Press:
Libby, Mont. (AP) -- Residents watching the cutting of a 90-foot spruce selected as the U.S. Capitol's Christmas tree went scurrying for cover when the falling tree twisted out of control and crashed across a road.

The Giant spruce toppled onto a crane mounted on a logging truck waiting to haul it away. Ten feet broke off the top when volunteers tried to move it at the Kootenai National Forest in northwestern Montana.

A crowd of about 300 was on hand for the weekend tree-cutting. [...]

U.S. Forest Service spokesman Jeannie Spooner said guy wires were attached to the first tree to lower it, but the tension on the wires apparently wasn't even.
After the mishap, the loggers headed down the road a ways, chopped down an alternate tree, and bundled it into a railroad car for shipment to Washington, so all was well. But still, the event was mainly noted for the fact that not even the Forest Service could manage to chop down a tree properly ...

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Colored lights ...

Today's photo is one that's always seemed kind of festive and holiday-like to me, even though that really isn't the subject matter at all. These are the lights in the lobby of Lake McDonald Lodge in Glacier Park ... a shot I took back in May 2005, right after the hotel had opened for the season.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Shortest day ...

Well, we've finally reached the day that I look forward to the most each year: the Winter Solstice. After today, Montana's tragically short winter days will start getting longer again, and our insanely long winter nights will start getting shorter. Now there's nowhere to go but up ... at least for the next six months.

In honor of that, and of the upcoming holiday, here's a nighttime shot I took in uptown Butte a little over two years ago. I don't know the exact time of this photograph, but it was well before the dinner hour.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

All Helena's drunk on Christmas ...

Today's quote is also from Dave Walter's Christmastime in Montana book ... it's an excerpt from a longer piece that helps rebut the nineteenth-century Helena slander I posted yesterday. This is a reminiscence written by a young Presbyterian minister who was stationed back in Helena in 1872:
The Roman Catholics had raised a large sum of money the previous year by holding a Christmas bazaar, and our ladies decided to have a similar bazaar [to raise money for a church building]. They came to me full of the idea and enthusiasm. I approved cordially, but they innocently added, "And we will have dancing and raffling, and we will make lots of money for our church."

"What!" I said. "Have a dance and raffling for a Presbyterian Church?"

"Why, certainly, they replied. "The Roman Catholics made most of their money that way last winter."

I promptly said, "That cannot be." They insisted, and at last I said, "I have a valise; it is readily packed. I will not remain in charge of a Helena church if such a bazaar is undertaken."

. . .

The following Sunday night in the Odd Fellows' Hall (where we were meeting temporarily), I faced a house full of me. . . . I knew that Christmas had been a day of dissipation for many of them. I knew that the coming New Year's Day would be even more so -- as the custom of our leading families was to keep open-house on that day, and to offer refreshments, including liquor, to their guests. With a purpose, my text that night was, "Look Not Upon the Wine When It Is Red." . . .

The next morning, as I walked up Main Street, I was conscious of an atmosphere. Some men would not speak to me; some acted as if their necks had been stiffened. On entering the store of one of my congregation, he shook a warning finger and bade me to look out for myself. I asked why.

He replied, "Because of your temperence sermon last night!" I had suddenly become famous, or rather infamous. The idea of preaching a temperance sermon in Helena -- and such a sermon! I had quoted a remark of a friend, "All Helena's Drunk on Christmas Day," in the sermon. This was taken up on the street with a vengence.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Devotees of Bacchus ...

I suppose it's the time of year when this blog needs a couple of good holiday quotes. Fortunately, the definitive compendium of Montana Christmas lore has already been published: the book Christmastime in Montana, by Dave Walter. (Dave, who passed away in 2006, was the reference librarian at the Montana Historical Society and a thoroughly wonderful guy. I think he know more historical trivia about the state than anyone else who ever lived, and he retold it with a great spirit and sense of humor. A conversation with Dave was always be a highlight of my day.)

Anyhow, today's quote is one that was reproduced in Dave's book. It was first published in the Helena Weekly Herald, and describes Christmas in our capitol city back in 1867:
The celebration of Christmas commenced here on Christmas Eve. As early as seven o'clock we saw devotees of Bacchus reclining in positions more compact than graceful, on several of the steps that obstruct our sidewalks.

The liquor, billiard, gambling, and concert saloons and hurdy-gurdy houses were filled, and they remained so for two days. At some point, nearly every saloon had its own peculiar row. Any looker-on, bearing in mind the danger from stray shots, would make up his mind (as did the son of the quarreling family) that they "had a little hell of their own, and devils enough to tend it."

Main Street was the broad aisle through which the devotees of pleasure marched to do their idol homage. As they did so, their barbaric yells resounded throughout the town. They yelled just for the sake of yelling, as some babies do.

On Christmas night the orgies reached their height, but we can give no detailed description of them for most of the participants had become so drunk as to cease to be amusing. The hurdy-gurdy house on the corner of West Main and Bridge Streets was so crowded that the heads were as close together as pacing stones. At last commotion was here created among the carousers by the firing of fire-crackers surreptitiously tossed under their feet. . . .

At the Police Court there was disappointment. The harvest seemed ripe for the reaping, but it was not brought in. Thus the Justices had to pass a gloomy Christmas with only one poor little victim to console them.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Matt Little's barn ...

I got to drive up to one of my very favorite places in the state yesterday -- the Nevada Valley, up in northern Powell County along the Big Blackfoot River. The setting is gorgeous, and man's impact on the land is still subtle and appropriate. Big cattle ranches, free-flowing streams, and the two great little towns of Helmville and Ovando.

This was my destination -- an old barn that needed to be researched and photographed. It's a few miles northwest of Helmville, in an area the was mostly settled by Irish immigrants in the late nineteenth century. The barn was built by a man named Matt Little, who started a ranch in the valley back in 1899, and stayed for close to fifty years. It's all that's left of his place today ... except of course for the land itself.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

The summer camp ...

Montana's Native American tribes -- some of them, at least -- received a fair amount of photographic attention in the early 20th century, as people realized that Indians' traditional way of life was beginning to disappear forever. Perhaps because of their historic association with the Custer battle, period images of the Crow tribe are particularly well-known, and some of them are among my favorites.

Here's a great shot from 1917 titled, "The Summer Camp." It was taken by a man named Richard A. Throssel, who had moved to the reservation in 1902 and extensively photographed the Crow and their culture. He had been made an honorary member of the tribe in 1905, receiving the Crow name, Esh Quon Dupahs, which means "Kills Inside the Camp."

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Forgotten neon ...

I took this photo a couple of years ago, a little west of Three Forks on old US 10. The motel is still in Three Forks, and it seems like I can actually remember that great old sign guarding it, back in the day.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

River bluffs ...

Just a quick photo this morning ... a late-afternoon shot I took a few weeks ago along the Yellowstone River, out in Treasure County. Who says eastern Montana is flat and boring?

Monday, December 14, 2009

Drunk as a boiled owl ...

I've mentioned the WPA's fine Montana guidebook here before, but that was only one of many literary and artistic efforts the agency undertook here during the Depression years. One relatively little-known project involved collecting Montana "folklore" ... anecdotes about the state's past obtained through both an oral history program and a review of published sources. A vast amount of material was gathered, and it's now archived at MSU.

Unfortunately, little of the material has ever been published, outside of a 1999 anthology titled An Ornery Bunch. Here's one of the stories reproduced in that volume -- it was first found in an 1889 issue of the Anaconda Standard:
On November 21st, 1889, one of Butte's judges received the surprise of his life when John Dough walked into police court and nonchalantly and soberly informed his honor that he intended to get drunk and disorderly. He said he was determined to become inebriated for a day and desired to have his trial pronto and pay whatever fines the judge wished to impose. The charges amounted to eleven dollars, one dollar, and costs, which Mr. Dough willingly paid. Upon being paid the judge told the man he could go and perform as he intended.

"Thanks, Judge," replied the potential celebrant. "Does that mean biling drunk?"

"Yes, drunk as a boiled owl."

"Does it include disorderly conduct?"

"Everything."

"Thanks," he said and walked out.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

One Hundred Stories ...

There are an awful lot of books about Montana being published nowadays ... and as always, Glacier Park is a favorite topic. The park is getting more literary attention than ever thanks to its upcoming centennial, and the results are typically mixed: some are quick and shallow coffee-table exercises designed to turn a buck, and others are wonderful labors of love.

Last week, I received my copy of a new book that definitely falls into the latter category, and though there's a bit of self-promotion involved I wanted to mention it here. The volume is titled, A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years, 100 Stories, and it's an anthology of personal reminiscences of Glacier, compiled in honor of the centennial. The list of contributors reads almost like a Glacier Who's Who, and if you've been around the park for a while you'll likely recognize a good many of the names. A number of the individual stories are really wonderful, and the entire book is a great read. Collectively, the essays are able to convey what makes Glacier such a special place to so many people ... and that's something that no other book I've seen is quite able to do.

The book is available from the Glacier Association ... and as for the self-promotion part, I'll confess to being one of the story contributors. But you should buy it for the other 99 stories.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Experiment ...

I take thousands of photos that I don't think turn out quite right, of course, and you generally won't see those here. The shot below is one that's in my "not quite" category ... but the old building is cool enough that I thought I'd post it anyway. I still need to go back and reshoot this someday, though.

This is the bank building in Buffalo, Montana, illuminated by my car's headlights. Buffalo is a very cool little place, an almost-ghost town with an evocative setting and several great old buildings. It'll be near the top of my destination list when the weather starts to warm up again.

Friday, December 11, 2009

A complaint ...

Those of you who know me in person know that I'm inclined to complain every once in a while ... and well, I want to air a complaint today.

My post about The Big Sky mentioned Montana's long history of tourism promotion slogans, and I confess I'm perfectly happy with some of the old ones -- "Land of Shining Mountains," for example, is pretty hard to beat. Nonetheless, the state tourism folks somehow feel the need to invent new slogans every once in a while. The current one being hyped by Travel Montana is "There's Nothing There," which has apparently been getting good reviews from advertising guys ... though it just makes my eyes roll.

The thing that I really want to complain about, though, is this: a big chunk of the current Montana ad campaign focuses on Yellowstone, as in the sample below. Travel Montana has been doing this for years, blithely ignoring the fact that the Yellowstone photos they use are all shot in Wyoming! In fact, roughly 96 percent of the park is in Wyoming ... making ads like this seem pretty disingenuous at best. It's embarrassing for the state, I think, and if I were a Wyomingite I'd be a little ticked off.

Besides, we don't need Yellowstone! The real Montana is way cooler, anyway.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Bigfork ...

It's always fun to look at historic photos and compare them with the way things are today ... and one of the cool things about Montana is that a lot of the times the comparisons are pretty strong. We're a land of timeless landscapes.

That's not true, of course, for many of the towns in the western third of the state, which have long since been "discovered" and thoroughly transformed by an influx of people. And there's no better example of that than the town of Bigfork, up on the northeast shore of Flathead Lake.

Here's a photo of Bigfork taken by Morton Elrod back in 1908, and now in the University of Montana archives. As best I can tell, we're on the hill just south of town, looking north ... but except for the Swan River, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything at all in that shot that's recognizable today. And that's too bad.

(Morton Elrod, by the way, was a fascinating and well-known man, Montana's leading biologist of a century ago. He taught for years at the university in Missoula, and in the summertimes organized the first naturalist programs in Glacier National Park.)

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A sense of belonging ...

Here's another quote from K. Ross Toole, the remarkable man who was almost certainly Montana's best-known historian. This is from the introduction to his 1959 volume, Montana: An Uncommon Land:
Strangely enough, Montanans have a strong sense of belonging -- a sense which grows, perhaps, out of their common necessities. They live, after all, in a place where nature can turn a face of cold inhospitality upon them in an hour's time. Without kindness, friendship, and co-operation they could not stand up in the face of it.

And perhaps Montanans feel that they belong, too, because of the kindredship of the old and the new. All around them are the old sights, old sounds, and old smells of the land itself.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Always ...

This is a shot I took way back in 1994, of what looks like an old Forest Service fire lookout tower now surrounded by trees. But it's actually a movie prop -- it was constructed in 1989 at the municipal airport up in Libby, to serve as a mock control tower during the filming of the movie Always. John Goodman had some of his best scenes up in that thing.

Always is the story of a pilot for the Forest Service, who flew tanker planes filled with water to fight forest fires. He's killed in a crash during one of the film's first scenes, and Audrey Hepburn brings him back to earth as an unwilling ghost who needs to do a good deed or two. It's an unquestionably sappy film, but I still like it, and it's got some nice northwestern Montana scenes ... along with my very favorite rendition of the song, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes."

As for the control tower, they had to move it a bit after the filming so it wouldn't interfere with airport activities, but as of a few years ago at least it was still up there ... one of the few physical reminders of Montana's long connection with Hollywood.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Pipe line barge ...

Today's photo is another shot taken by Harold Booth back in 1934, and forwarded to me by Derek and Ann Legg. The handwritten note on the back of the photo reads, "Pipe line Barge, Ft. Peck, Mont."... and that's all I know about the image. You can easily see the pipe brackets, though, and clearly someone had an awful lot of it that they needed to haul up the river somewhere.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Winter ...

Here in southwestern Montana, we're in the middle of our first really cold winter weekend, with new snow in the valleys and the wind chills well below zero. So like it or not, I suppose it's time to pull out another wintery photograph. I took this shot early last April ... we're looking up towards the headwaters of Joseph Creek, just east of Lost Trail Pass in Beaverhead County.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

The Big Sky ...

Back in the summer of 1901, a man named Alfred Guthrie moved his family to Montana so he could take a job as a high school principal. On his first day in the state, he was reported to have exclaimed, "standing under the big sky I feel free."

As you've probably guessed by now, that man was the father of the famous western novelist A.B. Guthrie, Jr. In 1947, the younger Guthrie had just finished his first book, and was struggling to come up with a title ... he showed a number of family documents to his editor, who discovered the quote above and knew he had a winner.

It wasn't long after The Big Sky was published that Montana's tourism people figured that they had a winner there, too ... and the phrase has been strongly associated with the state for over half a century now. I've always liked the slogan, though I confess I like it a little less now that the name has been appropriated by a destination resort catering to wealthy out-of-staters.

But so it goes. Here's a paragraph from the original novel, an evocative description of the sense of place that many of us feel about Montana.
Boone lay on his back and looked at a night sky shot with stars. They were sharp and bright as fresh-struck flames, like campfires that a traveler might sight on a far shore. Starlight was nearly as good as moonlight here on the upper river where blue days faded off into nights deeper than a man could believe. By day Boone could get himself on a hill and see forever, until the sky came down and shut off his eye. There was the sky above, blue as paint, and the brown earth rolling underneath, and himself between them with a free, wild feeling in his chest, as if they were the ceiling and floor of a home that was all his own.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Highway 12 ...

Depending on how you count, I suppose, there are basically four main east-west highways crossing Montana: US 2, US 12, Montana 200, and the Interstate. My least favorite of those, by far, is the freeway ... the road is a scar on the land, and when you drive on an Interstate you miss the little towns and all the other cool sights that make a roadtrip interesting and fun. All the two-lane roads are great journeys, though US 2 is probably a little less rewarding for me than the others.

For a drive that shows the vastness and emptiness and wide-ranging beauty of Montana, Highway 200 is hard to beat. I'm a particular fan, though, of US 12, which has a great mix of mountains and prairies and Badlands country, along with some of my favorite small towns. The road follows the Musselshell River for 140 miles or so, a valley that's unremarked but surprisingly lovely.

Here's a shot I took last month of US 12, heading east down the Musselshell:

Thursday, December 3, 2009

The popping machine ...

Today's quote is an excerpt from a story called, “Grandfather and the Popping Machine,” written by a Northern Cheyenne named Henry Tall Bull. It describes the day, decades ago, that his grandfather purchased his first automobile. I found this quote in the Montana history textbook currently used in many of the state's schools ... it's a little long, but it's a great read.
My grandfather, old man Raven, was one of the first Cheyennes to buy a car. He called it a popping machine because of the pop-pop-pop noise the engine made. Grandfather had always been good at handling horses, but learning to drive a car was something different. This was an adventure!

Grandfather bought his popping machine in Forsyth. The salesman at the garage cranked the engine for us. Bang! Boom! Bang! Pop-pop-pop! The car shook and the noise was awful. Grandfather held tightly to the steering wheel.

“You have to watch out when you crank it to get it started,” shouted the salesman. “Sometimes it kicks.”

Grandfather nodded. “Like horse, only kick at other end,” he said in his broken English . . .

The salesman explained to us about the foot pedals and how to shift gears and where the horn button was located. “Now,” he said, “if you’ll wait a minute I’ll get my tools and fix the brakes.”

Grandfather did what the salesman told him to do. Maybe his foot slipped off the clutch pedal, or maybe he was just anxious to go. The engine roared, and the car jerked and bucked, and suddenly we were moving! I heard a shout and looked back. The salesman was running after us, waving his tools and yelling something, but I couldn’t hear what he was trying to tell us because of all the noise . . .

We made a left turn and came to the railroad tracks. Just ahead, a big steam locomotive was coming down the track. Grandfather blew the horn and the engineer blew his whistle. The locomotive was picking up speed and getting closer. Grandfather decided that he had better stop, so he hit the brake pedal. Nothing happened! . . . Now we knew why the salesman had run after us. The brakes didn’t work! . . . Very slowly I opened my eyes and saw that, somehow, we had made it across the tracks. Behind us, the locomotive thundered past . . .

Then I looked at Grandfather, sitting tall and straight behind the wheel, his braids moving in the wind. He was steering straight down the road. His eyes twinkled with pleasure. He was getting used to driving his popping machine. Somehow I wasn’t so afraid any more . . . When the road flattened out, Grandfather sang his wolf song. This was the same song he had sung as a young warrior when he returned to camp with horses taken from the enemy.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

The Americans ...

The big story in the world of photography these days concerns the fiftieth anniversary of a landmark book called The Americans, by Robert Frank. The volume is a set of 83 of Frank's black-and-white shots of the United States in the 1950s, taken on a year-long roadtrip across the country. Most of the photos evoke strong feelings of loneliness and alienation and shallowness ... images that are powerful and insightful, but not necessarily flattering. As a result, Americans were decidedly unappreciative of the book, at least at first. The photos struck a chord with Jack Kerouac, though, who wrote an introduction for the volume and said that Frank “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world”.

Given the overriding mood of the book, it's not surprising that the four Montana images it contains were taken in Butte. Here's the best known of those: "View from Hotel Window," taken in May 1956. The shot looks eastward from the Finlen Hotel ... and of all the buildings you see here, probably no more than half a dozen still stand today.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Forgotten train ...

Today's photo is just a quick follow-up to yesterday's post ... it's a shot I took last summer of the old railway depot in White Sulphur Springs, an abandoned passenger car still sitting beside it after nearly thirty years.