Downtown Neosho Falls
May 7th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Looks like an old gas station to me.
Two buildings, side-by-side. A tree is growing from the inside out on this second building.
Memorial Hall.
As someone who grew up in a small town, I feel such an affinity for these places. I know what it’s like to feel the town dissolve around you.
But there’s something so elemental about Neosho Falls. These buildings. And the old school. It’s like nature is trying to pull these man-made structures down. It reaches up with vines, grabs on and pulls. Unless there’s a human intervention, nature will win.
And even though I want small towns to survive, I see such beauty in this effort by nature to heal itself, to return the town to wilderness.
It’s like you are capturing a battle with these pictures. All I can think and feel is from the human perspective. How sad that these towns, vibrant and alive many years ago, have come to this.
My grandmother was born in Scammon, KS, in 1896. When my parents returned to visit the old homestead, the town was gone. Just a crossroads now (near Pittsburg in Cherokee Co.) Such a home of ghosts you have in that fair state.
EFH
There was a thing on tv recently about nature reclaiming Chernoble. It’s a big city that was abandoned after the nuclear meltdown. It happens faster than we imagine it will.
I know a lady in the South who believes that it happens so fast because when humans abandon the houses and other buildings, the spirit of the place leaves with them. I get what she is saying.
When we were looking to move, we looked at houses where we could often feel the former occupants somehow. The houses aren’t abandoned, they’re only passing from one hand to the next.
But when you go into an abandoned place, there’s an empty feeling, almost painful, that grabs your gut. Like there’s a void that needs filling.