Introduction

My main interest is Industrial History. But there is a strong relationship between technologies and towns. For example, lead mining built Galena, IL. In fact, the name Galena is for the mineral "galena", the most important lead ore. Another example is that the building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal caused the discovery of dolostone (or the older term of dolomite, a stone that is similar to limestone) near what is now Lemont, IL. Lemont was built because of the construction of the I&M Canal, and it continued to prosper after the construction because of the dolostone quarries that were opened nearby. The building of the Wabash Canal in Indiana allowed several towns in central Indiana to prosper for a few decades in the 1800s. Railroads created many towns "from scratch" because steam locomotives needed to be services, crews needed to be changed, and the railroads wanted the income from selling the land. And existing towns competed with each other to entice a railroad to come through their town.

But technologies that help create towns also many times caused the town to fall on hard times. For example, the lead mines in Galena ran out of lead. There are many ghost towns in Colorado that are also examples of towns being built because of silver or gold being discovered, and then the towns died when the ore ran out. Many towns created because of a canal had a burst of prosperity and then fell on hard times because the invention of the steam locomotive made canals obsolete. Lemont's quarries were closed after the limestone quarries around Bedford Indiana started producing.

These towns that were created by a technology that later became obsolete are time capsules. During their heyday, they would create buildings with elaborate architecture, churchs with nice pipe organs, theaters for opera, etc. And then when they fell on hard times, they did not have the money to "modernize" their facilities. And now some of the towns are experiencing new prosperity as time capsules. Both the town's buildings and the antiques in those buildings attracted tourist traffic. And the quaintness of towns attracted artists and craftsmen. So the towns are now aggressively preserving their old, generally 1800s, stuff. So a purpose of this blog is to record the social history of towns that I discover while researching industrial history.

Another purpose of this blog is to be the travelogue aspect of visiting places to take pictures of bridges, dams, steel mills, oil refineries, electrical substations, glass factories, quarries, etc.

And this blog provides a better "home" for essays concerning interesting aspects of nature that I discover while driving around looking for pictures of industrial objects such as the Santa Fe Prairie I found while trying to figure out how to take pictures of the BNSF Willow Springs Intermodal Facility. (I never did get any pictures of the BNSF yard.) Also, the tow paths of many of the old canals have become trails that take one through some nice nature areas while going to take pictures of locks.