Some new photos from Fort Wayne

overcast-besancon-school.jpg


Here's a new one from my archives. I shot it around 2001.

The Jefferson Township Center School has been one of my favorite subjects, which I have returned to many times over the last 20 years. It is located at Besancon, a crossroads with a few houses, a Catholic church, and this abandoned one-room schoolhouse on Old US-30 in the eastern part of Allen County, Indiana.

​
The road actually splits to go around the front and back of the schoolhouse! Back in the late 1990s, there was an old woman living in the house across the street from the schoolhouse (behind where I stood to make my photograph) who told me that she owned the schoolhouse, which her own mother had attended as a child in the early 20th Century. The schoolhouse was built in 1898.​
 
farlymac said:
It's great to see someone as supportive of the arts as Betty is. And this portrait is my personal favorite, since the pose is not so "front on".

PF

ps: The road going around the schoolhouse is just so Hoosier!
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The problem is, Betty's one of the last survivors of a vanished world. She's 91 years old. The people who have replaced her are not interested in helping talented artists from poor backgrounds. Not just in Fort Wayne, but everywhere.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
overcast-besancon-school.jpg


Here's a new one from my archives. I shot it around 2001.

The Jefferson Township Center School has been one of my favorite subjects, which I have returned to many times over the last 20 years. It is located at Besancon, a crossroads with a few houses, a Catholic church, and this abandoned one-room schoolhouse on Old US-30 in the eastern part of Allen County, Indiana.

​
The road actually splits to go around the front and back of the schoolhouse! Back in the late 1990s, there was an old woman living in the house across the street from the schoolhouse (behind where I stood to make my photograph) who told me that she owned the schoolhouse, which her own mother had attended as a child in the early 20th Century. The schoolhouse was built in 1898.​
Click to expand...

I like this one a lot, Chris. How did you develop it?
 
I thought it was one of your PMK-developed images at first, but I guess the great rendering should be attributed to the format and the skill of the artist.
 
sheepfarm23.jpg


Still scanning film from my archive. I made this photograph at the end of 2008.

This is the summer kitchen behind the house at the abandoned sheep farm on Pleasant Center Road, east of Bluffton Road, on the southern edge of Allen County, Indiana. Summer kitchens are small buildings that were once used for cooking in the summer, so that the house would not get too hot inside from the wood-burning stoves and ovens used in the 19th century.​

The old bed springs are nearly identical to those on my antique brass bed, which is over 100 years old. The painting in the frame under the window is a printed reproduction.

When I first photographed this farm eight years earlier, there was an old man living here who raised sheep in a fenced barnyard on the other side of the property.​
 
Michael Markey said:
I guess that both the summer kitchen and sheep farm have gone now ?
As always nice shots and interesting an back story ,Chris.
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Michael,

The old man who lived there died about 10 years ago, and it sat abandoned for several years. A few yrs ago, a younger farmer bought it for the land, and decided to fix up those buildings that were in good enough shape to restore. The house and summer kitchen and a few barns were saved, and couple of barns were not. The old two-seat outhouse was going to be saved, but a violent storm a few years ago destroyed it.

Here is the complete story and my other photos from the sheep farm:
http://chriscrawfordphoto.com/chris-results.php?category=44
 
Chris, thank you for all of the work that has gone into your thread(?). I spent four years of my childhood at Scott Field, now Scott Air Force Base, in southern Illinois. That was back in the late 1940's. The mood of your pictures is very much what I remember of my time there; aren't childhood impressions the strongest? In 1971 I moved with my family to Waukegan, Illinois, and taught there for 32 years. Again, a lot of your photos evoke memories of my time there.

Now I live in an old farmhouse with my wife, one dog and two cats. I'm starting to document my hometown of Dillwyn, Virginia and Buckingham County where we live. There are so many subjects here to photograph! Everything from abandoned farms to old businesses and all sorts of local history... Sometimes I feel as if I'm channeling William Eggelston.

Anyway, if you've read this far, a big Thank You again for your work. One of you many admirers.

With best regards,

Pfreddee(Stephen)

PS: Pfreddee is the dog's name...
 
corunna-kids.jpg


Another from my archives. These kids asked me to photograph them when they saw me photographing their small town. This was 6 years ago in Corunna, Indiana. The three oldest kids have probably graduated from high school by now!
 
Pfreddee said:
Chris, thank you for all of the work that has gone into your thread(?). I spent four years of my childhood at Scott Field, now Scott Air Force Base, in southern Illinois. That was back in the late 1940's. The mood of your pictures is very much what I remember of my time there; aren't childhood impressions the strongest? In 1971 I moved with my family to Waukegan, Illinois, and taught there for 32 years. Again, a lot of your photos evoke memories of my time there.

Now I live in an old farmhouse with my wife, one dog and two cats. I'm starting to document my hometown of Dillwyn, Virginia and Buckingham County where we live. There are so many subjects here to photograph! Everything from abandoned farms to old businesses and all sorts of local history... Sometimes I feel as if I'm channeling William Eggelston.

Anyway, if you've read this far, a big Thank You again for your work. One of you many admirers.

With best regards,

Pfreddee(Stephen)

PS: Pfreddee is the dog's name...
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Better not let the cats know you're using the DOG'S name as your online handle. My cat would have peed in my shoes for something like that!

You should keep photographing your town. I've studied history extensively, and history largely ignores ordinary lives of ordinary people. We're keepers of memories for our communities. I live in a fairly large city. Fort Wayne has 250,000 people and is Indiana's second largest city.

A lot has changed here over the years, and a lot of the places I have photographed are gone, and some of the people I have photographed are dead. I've never been to Virginia. Spent most of my life in Fort Wayne, and a couple years in New Mexico. I tried to photograph the real New Mexico, not the stuff the tourists and the out-of-state fine art photographers flock to. You should post some of your photos of your town on RFF, I'd like to see them.
 
mount-waynedale-4.jpg


These trailers sit in front of the huge mountain of overburden from the limestone quarry on Ardmore Avenue in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The area around the quarry is home to a number of related industries, including a cement plant, an asphalt company, and a couple of trucking companies.
 
corunna-bar3.jpg


Here is another photo that I made six years ago in the small town of Corunna, Indiana. This building on the main street through the town was once a bar, but now it sits partly hidden behind the modern bridge that carries the highway over the railroad tracks in the middle of Corunna.
 
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I photographed this unusual scene in 2011. I've seen a lot of houses with an old beat-up sofa on the front porch, but never one in the carport in the parking lot of an apartment complex!

I photographed this old sofa in the middle of the night under one of the carports at Canterbury Green Apartments on the northeast side of Fort Wayne, Indiana. I don't know why it was there, but it disappeared a few days later.
 
We had a two seat outhouse at the back of the garden. One hole was large aperture and one hole was small aperture. The small hole was supposed to be lower but it wasn't so there was a wooden box in front of it so you could get up to it. The seats were smooth and comfortable. I've used some rough cut seats that were no fun at all. Hmm? Did I say that right? Was it supposed to be fun? No comment.
 
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