We’d seen Old Monroe on maps for years, on the banks of the Cuivre River, so we thought we’d stop by finally. There are some extremely interesting buildings, including the one below, which I suspect might have been built as a hotel originally. The house below is your classic, and probably German immigrant-built duplex; note…
Tag: Small Towns
Front Street, New Haven, Franklin County
Perhaps it’s illogical that Front Street faces a bluff and not the Missouri River, but nonetheless, the businesses lining the side of the thoroughfare that runs parallel to the train tracks is a wholly intact row of storefronts. The town has a website promoting the downtown’s stores and events. The buildings are all occupied or…
Main Street, New Haven, Franklin County
Main Street faces the water, demonstrating that New Haven was a town founded on the river. There are still some old wood frame houses in between the street and the river. I assume they are some of the oldest buildings in town, but I do not know. There was a ferry at one point across…
Wall Street, New Haven, Franklin County
Turning from Maupin onto Wall Street in New Haven, we’re greeted by perhaps one of the most beautiful stretches of streetscape in Missouri. The architectural styles range from the mid Nineteenth Century to the early Twentieth with Greek Revival to the Arts and Crafts. Perhaps what is interesting is that due to the sheer drop…
New Haven, Franklin County
The land for New Haven was purchased by Phillip Miller in 1836 down along the river, and at the basis for the settlement was the selling of wood to riverboats that passed by. But first we’ll look up in the highlands, where streets follow the ridgelines from Highway 100. First up is the school, which…
Two Churches in the Land Between the Rivers
We looked at two churches in that flat bottomland sandwiched between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers that forms an almost peninsula-like eastern tail of St. Charles County. The first one, Trinity Lutheran Church at the intersection of Highway 94 and Church Road, dates from 1876, when it was calved off from Emmanuel Lutheran. The church…
Independence Mental Health Institute, Revisited
I thought the photos of the impressive Second Empire expanse of the Independence State Hospital were too cloudy, so we went back on a bright sunny day to get better photos. See the original post from July of 2021 for more original historical photos and plans on this Kirkbride plan institution.
Sinclair Dinosaur Sighting
It has been over a decade since I last spotted the rare Sinclair Dinosaur, brontosaurus sinclairensus, in its natural habitat of a gas station. This one is in Iowa, in an undisclosed location. Note that the owner has chained it to the canopy support to prevent theft. The one in Dutchtown, which I photographed in…
Around Buchanan County, Iowa, July 2022
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 how old it was. Another sight was a…
Railroad Machine Shops, Oelwein, Fayette County, Iowa, Revisited Again
We were able to get closer to the massive railroad machine shops that I examined back in July of 2021. I had first observed them from a distance back in the fall of 2018 (ninth photo down). They’re massive, impressive buildings, but what is even more massive, and you can see that in the fire…