On a Saturday morning, I stumbled onto an abandoned farmstead along a gravel road in Plymouth County. Window-less, door-less, this skeletal house stood above the road, disintegrating. Its sidewalks and concrete foundations were showing through the weeds. Not much was left of the barn.Much of what’s out west of us here for an hour or so is a grand open-air museum.
Maybe I’m tuned in to such things right now because I just finished The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. The savage murder at the center of the wildly complex story Wright Thompson creates—the grizzly death of a kid named Emmett Till, was and is American history writ large. Even though the murder had immense significance to the nation, the writer, Wright Thompson, knew nothing about it, had to get to college to hear it told. The old barn on a nearby country road he’d seen almost forever.
If there’s a story connected to the old place in Plymouth County I discovered, I certainly don’t know it—and probably never will. But, one of the most beguiling shots I’ve ever taken of an abandoned farm place is that house, a place where trees lent their branches right into the open windows of the living room, a house where weeds on the sunny south side grew halfway up the outer wall.
Amazingly, even shockingly, inside, in the living room, stood an old upright piano. There it was, clumsy old thing made magnificent because everything else was so trashed.
Something haunting abides in and around abandoned farm places. I know a man who was embarrassed to show me the old barn still standing on his place. When I asked him why he didn’t take the poor thing down, he told me he just couldn't gather up the will to destroy it--it was "the barn" when he was a boy, and therefore so much more than what stood there. Still haunted him, although sweetly. I get that.
Chief Black Hawk’s warriors ranged throughout northwest Illinois and southwest Wisconsin, battling white invaders, killing when and where they could because Black Hawk wanted to take back his home. By some ill-conceived treaty, Sac and Fox had lost the land they considered theirs; and Black Hawk wouldn’t suffer the homelessness white people created when they moved into the land where his ancestors were buried. All he wanted was home.
"I did not think it possible that our Great Father wished us to leave our village where we had lived so long, and where the bones of so many of our people had been laid. . . . I refused therefore to quit my village. It was here that I was born, and here lie the bones of many friends and relations. For this spot I felt a sacred reverence and never could consent to leave it without being forced therefrom."
Take a drive out west some morning, stop at some abandoned place, any of them will do, and just sit and wait for some old-time residents to step out of those creaking barn doors. Such things happen.
