Preserving the past with pictures

Published 9:10 am Saturday, August 15, 2009

While traveling the back roads of southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, Julie Bronson noticed what she calls the abundance of abandoned farmhouses and barns.

An avid photographer, Bronson said she decided to record some of them in pictures, so people wouldn’t forget the craftsmanship and pride that went into these houses former farmers and families lived in.

“It seems as if there is barely a country road that one can amble down without coming upon at least one place that the human inhabitants have vacated,” Bronson said. “Whether the home was sold to a big farmer and the last occupants retired to warmer climates or possibly they moved to town or a nursing home or maybe even passed on — whatever the case the last one to leave and shut out the lights could not have known the state in which some of these once beautiful homes would have fallen to.”

Email newsletter signup

Bronson is exhibiting some of her photographs on the top floor of City Hall through the end of the month. There are 16 photos that come from about a 25-mile radius around Bronson’s home south of Albert Lea.

She always goes out to shoot abandoned farmhouses and barns with a friend. They try to get permission to be on the property and she keeps an album of other buildings she’s photographed to show the landowners.

“We meet some really nice people doing this,” Bronson said.

To avoid overgrown areas and mosquitoes, she goes out during the cooler seasons of the year. “We live for fall and winter,” she said, adding that trekking through snowbanks is great exercise.

Bronson uses a digital camera and is a member of the Lens & Shutter Photography Club. She joined about two years ago because she wanted to learn more about photography, she said.

“It’s been very helpful,” she added.

She’s also a member of the Washington Avenue Writers Group and has been writing some text to go with her pictures.

Here is a little of what she’s written.

“I still see curtains hanging in broken windows and the jars of canned preserves sitting on shelves in the cellar. Who knew no one would ever come back to retrieve the coats left hanging on the wall or the boots sitting in the corner? Left to the elements, the houses seem to fall into a sadder state with every passing year. They hold up pretty well until vandals break in and or break out the windows. Once exposed and opened, the wildlife starts to move in. Critters make homes in the walls and cupboards. They leave their droppings in corners where the rot finally makes it through the floors. …

“Shingles slowly get ripped away by overgrown trees or the wicked winds that blow, seemingly stronger and colder over sad abandoned homes. … Wood starts to get wet and soak one board then the next then it grows mold then turns black and starts to slowly disappear.  Once weakened the weight of the wall begins to bear down on it. After many years it finally folds under the pressure.

“The trees growing up on the outside of the building up close to the walls push their way into the foundation. The walls, whether brick or fieldstone, get pushed in to the cellar making it that much easier for the load bearing walls  to fall even farther in to the now dirt-floored hole that once held the summer’s bounty.

“As recorder of these houses and other old structures, I get to be one of the few that know that under the wooden siding and lathe boards, on a select few, lurks the remnants of old log cabins. How many of the old farmhouses we see today that have been added onto actually started out life as a log cabin? Many must have been added onto and the logs covered over with siding to make them blend in with the rest of the house.  Now that the siding is pulling away we can see a house is much older than one would think from a distance.

“Many of these houses sit back in overgrown brush thick woods, barely visible to the naked eye in winter when the trees are bare of leaves and totally hidden in the summer when the trees and brush swallow them up for another season to go by with them completely hidden from site. … Once you finally get up to the house, you can plainly see the amount of love poured in to each one. It shows from the carefully pieced together stones on the foundations to the final trim work surrounding the windows.  …

“Imagine all the lives that have passed through these houses. I can hear the footsteps running up and down the steps and the giggles of little kids playing hide-and-seek in all the nooks and crannies. I can see Mom standing by the stove using her apron as a potholder taking the supper out of the oven. Just stop and think for a few minutes of all the joy and pain that these walls have heard and will forever keep to themselves.”

Included in Bronson’s photos is a barn. She took a photo of it while it still stood, then returned to take more as it burned. There is steam rising from the ground as it burned on a winter day.

With one of the photos, she’s included an original story she wrote after thinking she saw a face in the window.

There’s also an old creamery near Diamond Jo Casino, as well as a house near Myrtle that was built by a man with the intention of living there with his new bride. She left him before they married, and he never did live there, Bronson said.

Bronson’s pictures can be viewed from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.