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.


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.


A corner store fades away in Pinebog. Giant retail outlets long ago devastated small retail.


Outside Elkton a massive 21st Century windmill dwarfs a 19th Century farm.


Now the largest structures in the thumb, displacing the long reign of the grain elevators, windmills flip peacefully in the summer breeze.


'Our Lady of the Cornfields', the distant towers St. Agatha's of Gagetown rises above the landscape.


Many small towns are suffering the same fate as our inner cities, declining population, high unemployment, abandoned downtowns and blight.


St. Agatha's School is long closed, so is this meeting hall with overgrown sidewalk, behind the church.


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.


Magnificent within and without, the 1924-built barn towers 70 feet above the prairie.


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.