This is a post I meant to do some months back, but never got around to. And I was reminded of the subject for two reasons - first, this month's Yankee magazine had an article on "Vermont's Sleeping Roads" (the phenomenon is briefly described here). The upshot is, there are hundreds of old roads - mostly old wagon tracks used as farm-to-markets - that have kind of fallen off the maps, but still have traces out there. There's a new law coming on the books that will make these traditional "rights of way" revert to the landowner (and so the right of way goes away) in 2015 unless communities claim them.

Yankee puts its own spin (which, irritatingly, I am noticing more and more) on the story: newcomers moving into the area are aghast that people have traditionally used these as free rights-of-way for hiking and hunting. Newcomers decided they OWN the land and post it. The locals aren't happy. Those darn newcomers!

(Though as one hay farmer who regretfully decided to post his land - at least for certain activities - points out: "90% of the people are great; 10% are a nightmare" and goes on to observe that people who drop bottles and cans along the trails can mess up his haying machinery, plus, "Who wants to buy hay that has trash in it?" So I would actually lay blame not so much at the "newcomers'" feet, but at the feet of those people who - like "special snowflakes" everywhere - think the common rules of decency and politeness (like, not littering on someone else's land) don't apply to them. Though of course some of them may well be newcomers).

Anyway, the idea of abandoned roads is pretty fascinating. (And also the fact that they are using GIS - one of the things I teach - to help find and plot the roads, and then figure out what to do about them.)

And then Lynn posted a link to a site about abandoned power plants (some of them quite creepy and romantic)

So I was reminded of the link I "saved up" from back when I was reading "The Artificial River" - about the Erie Canal. Canals have always fascinated me.

See, I grew up in Northeastern Ohio. I wasn't far from the old, old site of the Ohio and Erie Canal. I learned a little of its history in school (but not all of it; I had not heard of the 1913 flood that destroyed much of the canal before I read some of the online history sites). I've seen some of the old canal sites. Deep Lock Quarry was a favorite place for school field trips, and also my parents would take me hiking there a lot.

That was where I think - as I've said before - I first really developed my interest in history, particularly the more "everyday" sort of history - what people ate, how they dressed, how they made a living. Standing on the edge of the deep lock (one of the few that held water - cold-looking, slimy, algae-filled water, which was all the more scary to me because of a childhood fear of deep water (though the lock's water was probably only 4 feet deep or so)) I would think about the people who USED to live there - who had worked and traveled and lived and died some 140 years before me - even before some of my ancestors were in this country (though I didn't know that at the time). And how I would never know for sure who they were, and how they probably never thought that so many years later a little girl would stand on the edge of the lock and look in and wonder about what life might have been like for them.

So, thinking about old canals again, and particularly the sites not too far from me, I searched around a little. And I found a fascinating site, which I spent a late-afternoon-into-evening sitting in my office looking at. It is called Abandoned Ohio (and it's done in a very evocative black-and-white theme with Gothic typeface). It has a lot of links, or you can click on the pictures for different subjects - buildings, covered bridges, canal locks. (You may need to scroll down below a picture to get the clickable links. My one complaint is that the "menu pages'" pictures are kind of large and you don't see the links below them immediately). There's a whole page on the Ohio and Erie canal itself, with some history and links to as many of the locks as could be found. Deep Lock Quarry also has a page, but they focus more on the quarry (which I also remember) than on the lock (which is what I remember more - again, I think it's that water-fear that burned it into my mind.)

And if you're in to old canal photos (this being the Internet, I'm sure there's someone out there who is), there's a really good collection - viewable online - from The University of Akron's Canal Photo site

I've often thought it would be interesting to take road trips - especially if one had a good camera or was talented with a sketchbook - to some of these "abandoned" places, and to make records of them, either photographic or artistic. (Of course, it's more complicated in a lot of cases than just getting in a car and going; for some sites you need to get permission, and probably sign waivers agreeing that you will not (a) remove artifacts from the site and (b) sue the landowner if you step through a rotted floorboard and break your leg).

I was going to say that I'm sad there's not really any "old" stuff of that sort in my town - that it's not much fun to drive out of town friends around and say, "Yeah, that's where the Papa John's Pizza franchise used to be" as our own form of Abandoned, but now that I think of it, a lot of the downtown merchants are spiffing up their buildings, removing the old ugly aluminum false fronts that were put up over the brick in the 50s or 60s, and trying to recapture the old "ghost signs" that still exist. I had someone honk at me one day because I didn't see a light was green because I was so intent on looking at an old sign that had shown up on a recently renovated building - I think the building had once been a grocery and the sign was an ad for (I think) Owl Cigars. (I should walk down there some day when I have time and photograph the sign and put it up here; it's pretty interesting).

But, the places (like Ohio) that have seen longer continuous European settlement seem to have more interesting Abandoned stuff. (Though that might just be my personal prejudice). I wonder what Abandoned stuff exists in Europe, or if (because they have more of a premium on land), a lot of it's been taken down or renovated into something useful?