The next town is Bonaparte, which is named after Napoleon, of course. Many people don’t realize that many Americans admired the supposedly Enlightenment-inspired French emperor due to his conflict with ancient monarchies in Europe. The beginning of the town centered around William Meek’s founding of mills (he named the town) in 1837. The building above…
Tag: Mills
Southwest Avenue Between McCausland and Ivanhoe Avenues
So far out in the country that this section doesn’t appear in Compton and Dry, this section of Southwest Avenue, formerly Old Manchester Road or Market Street Road, was developed incredibly early due to its role as a major trail and highway out west. As can be seen in this fire insurance map from 1903,…
Alton Steel, Incorporated
Sadly, Alton Steel announced its closure the last week of January, 2026. Alton Steel is an interesting story that is a twist on the standard narrative of a legacy company going out of business, leaving behind a massive ruin for decades. It is actually the employee-owned successor company to the historic Laclede Steel Company, founded…
Leaving, Youngstown
After surveying the remnants of what had once been the workplace of literally tens of thousands of Americans, I worked my way out of Youngstown, passing through the neighborhoods where they once lived. I saw St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church, which alludes to the Eastern European origins of many of the immigrants who once flooded…
Steel, Long Gone, Youngstown
As I mentioned before, the glow from the furnaces in Youngstown could be seen at night in Akron, around fifty miles away. Perhaps more than anything that fact sums up the giant crucible that was one of the greatest industrial powerhouses in America for one hundred years. And it’s all gone now, except for a…
The Gates of Hell, Cleveland
Corrigan-McKinney rose from the valley much further south from the Flats, and its presence still dominates the broad expanse along the Cuyahoga. Founded by James Corrigan, Jr. , thousands of trains must have rumbled up from the lake over the last century filled with taconite and limestone to feed the steel mill’s hungry furnaces. Note…
River Rouge
I’ll be blunt: I was deeply concerned by my visit to the famous River Rouge area, a short drive just south of Detroit. First, a bit of clarification is in order; there is the actual town of River Rouge, which is located along the banks of the Detroit River, and includes the mouth of the…
Some Final Thoughts on Paris
OK, we’re done with Paris. I did want to give some final thoughts on the French capital, and share some things that St. Louis could learn, and also be honest on some other matters. First of all, it’s sort of unfair to compare the two exactly because with any world capital, particularly a European one,…
Around Buchanan County, Iowa, July 2022
Update: New photography added in July of 2023. In a clockwise route, we explored various small towns in Buchanan County, starting in the northeast with Lamont, where we first spied this foundation above left behind but incorporated into a horse enclosure. There was also a half-flounder downtown on the main street, though I don’t know…
Interior, Wapsipinicon Mill, Independence, Iowa
The interior of the Wapsipinicon Mill is very well preserved, and shows most of the original wood machinery that ground flour and functioned as other types of milling over the life of the building. Of particular interest was a board that had once faced the interior of a grain shoot that had been worn smooth…