Today I prowled the back roads of Michigan's thumb in the fullness of summer. It is a place of giant changing landscapes and structures. Disappearing are the immense gambrel-roofed barns and their silos. Today they stand as obsolete reminders of when dairy farming was common.
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Gone is the family farm with the "back forty" and a Ford tractor, replaced by thousand acre fields, factory farms and mega machines. Below, a massive sugar beet piling machine sits in a sugar beet staging station outside Kinde awaiting the coming harvest.
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A corner store fades away in Pinebog. Giant retail outlets long ago devastated small retail.
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Outside Elkton a massive 21st Century windmill dwarfs a 19th Century farm.
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Now the largest structures in the thumb, displacing the long reign of the grain elevators, windmills flip peacefully in the summer breeze.
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'Our Lady of the Cornfields', the distant towers St. Agatha's of Gagetown rises above the landscape.
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Many small towns are suffering the same fate as our inner cities, declining population, high unemployment, abandoned downtowns and blight.
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St. Agatha's School is long closed, so is this meeting hall with overgrown sidewalk, behind the church.
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A nearby attraction is the immense octagon barn with its soaring cathedral-like interior vault. A masterpiece of balloon construction these barns were thought to be future of agriculture. Ironically they may be the only barns to survive due their majesty.
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Magnificent within and without, the 1924-built barn towers 70 feet above the prairie.
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Silos with the roofs gone are common. Often they are seen alone in the corn, their barns long gone, plowed under for more corn. I speculate that the cost of their removal and lack of salvage value preserves them. And so this summer day's tour ends with this iconic red with white trim barn.
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