Thanksgiving Road Trip 2

I left the Huntington Museum and crossed over the Ohio River to pick up Route 52 which threads along the river to Cincinnati and beyond, passing the birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant. At every intersection along the way, Black Friday shoppers queued for position while I, blissful in my dissent from the consumerist madness, pushed on. At South Point, OH, a highway sign announced that the town owns the distinction of being the southernmost place in Ohio, from which three states are visible!

Passing the town of Ironton, former heart of America's pig iron industry (so the sign says,) my eye was caught from the highway by an immense cement factory, long abandoned and in ruins. I took the nearest exit and doubled back a few miles to find it. A monument at the entrance records the numerous safety awards the plant received from the state going back to 1927.



The ruined factory was completely open, no fences, no threatening signs. Only as I had finished a long circuit through the remains of the once-thriving plant and was approaching my car did I see a small sign warning that anyone caught trespassing would be charged with a felony! Given such a magnificent wreck as this, I would probably have still taken my chances even if I had seen the sign first.





Comments

  1. http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/british_industrial_ruins/

    Great post! It reminds me of one of my favorite websites--British Industrial Ruins by a guy named Tim Edensor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for your comment and for the tip, Pete. I checked out his site. A real soul-mate I think.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I had a nice email exchange with Edensor a few years back. He expressed a lot of interest in visiting American rust belt ruins such as you depict here. Don't know if he ever made it, though.

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