Showing posts with label Estelline. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Estelline. Show all posts

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Small Towns in the Texas Panhandle: On the way to Amarillo (Panhandle 2019-05)

Let us continue our trip northwest on US 287 through the Texas Panhandle. West of Quanah, I came across more lonely and unoccupied farm houses. Some were reasonably close to 287 and I could walk up driveways or small roads. Others were deep in farm fields and had no access any more. Where did all the families go?

Kirkland

Farm house, Kirkland, Texas
Truck weigh station, Kirkland, Texas
Unused siding, Kirkland, Texas
Wikipedia describes Kirkland as a ghost town. I am not sure about that, but there definitely is not much happening there. The BNSF trains thunder by at high speed. The siding clearly no longer serves the unused Sunbelt CO-OP truck weighing station. The sky is bigger than ever, and the approaching storm clouds gave the scene an ominous look.

Childress

Nash Metropolitan east of Childress, Texas
Farm house, Childress, Texas
Childress, the county seat of Childress County, with a population of about 7,000, had a bit more going on. But I did not see much to photograph in town so I moved on.

Estelline

Valentine Diner, 601 Wright Street, Estelline, Texas (80mm ƒ/2.8 Planar-CB lens, green filter)
Diner interior, Estelline, Texas (Moto G5 digital file)
Estelline had sort-of a main drag parallel to US 287. This charming little diner caught my eye. While setting up the tripod, a couple of cowboys stopped their well-used pickup truck to chat. They were amused to see a city slicker with a tripod taking pictures. They said they grew rice. I wonder where? Nice guys and very polite.
Farm house in cotton fields, US 287, west of Estelline, Texas (250mm ƒ/5.6 Sonnar lens)
Farm house and shed west of Estelline, Texas (250mm ƒ/5.6 Sonnar lens, green filter)
I saw a couple of abandoned farm houses in the cotton fields. There was no way to get access by road or driveway. 

Memphis

US 287, Memphis, Texas (80 mm Planar-CB lens, yellow filter)
Memphis (Texas, not Tennessee) is the seat of Hall County. The town was platted in 1890 and has some brick streets and old commercial buildings. I will try to explore on my next drive through the
Texas Panhandle.

Clarendon

Clarendon, Texas
Farm west of Clarendon, Texas


Just sitting in the driveway, Clarendon, Texas (Moto G5 digital file)
Clarendon, the county seat of Donley County, is about 60 miles east of Amarillo. The town of 2000 is rather quiet. In 2017, on the way east, we stayed in a hotel in town and discovered that other than fast food chain shops, there were no restaurants open in the evening. Another minor adventure in travel.

This ends our adventure in the Texas Panhandle. From here, it was on to New Mexico and Arizona via I-40 and Route 66. Standby for more of the great US Southwest.

The large square black and white photographs are from Kodak Tri-X film exposed with a Hassselblad 501CM camera and 50, 80, and 250mm lenses. Praus Productions in Rochester, NY processed the film in Xtol developer. I scanned the negatives with a Minolta Scan Multi film scanner.

Saturday, March 14, 2020

Small Towns in the Texas Panhandle with Ektar 25 film (Panhandle 2019-01)

Introduction


The Texas Panhandle is the land of big skies, big farms, big men and women, enormous pickup trucks, and fading towns and farm houses. The Panhandle is the northern rectangle of the state, bordered by Oklahoma and New Mexico and northwest of the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolis. Most people drive through in a hurry, but the area offers a wealth of photographic topics. The famous Route 66 crosses the northern Panhandle (type "Route 66" in the search box to see posts on this topic).

Highway US 287 takes you from Dallas to Amarillo and passes through a number of small towns. These were bustling and active up through the mid-20th century but today are slowly fading. I drove east on US 287 in 2017, and numerous abandoned farm houses caught my eye. I promised to return and record them before they disappeared. For a trip west in September of 2019, I loaded my Hasselblad medium-format camera and Tri-X film into my camera bag, but at the last minute added my little Yashica Electro 35CC rangefinder camera with one of my remaining rolls of discontinued Kodak Ektar 25. Long-term readers may recall that I have experimented with Ektar 25 before and concluded that it is well past its prime. Of course, I ignored my own advice and decided to use it for this trip.

Future articles will include black and white photographs from many of these towns. 

In the Panhandle


For my September 2019 road trip, I took my time, stayed in seedy motels long past their prime, and enjoyed warm summery weather (and almost stepped on a rattlesnake in my sandals). A month later, an ice storm was threatening and I drove back east in a hurry to keep ahead of the sleet. We will start in Quanah, a town west of Wichita Falls and proceed northwest on US 287. Click any picture to see it enlarged to 1600 pixels wide (there is plenty of interesting detail).

Dinner at eight, Quanah, Texas

A bit fast-food-like, but OK. The staff were very friendly. Breakfast the next morning was great.

Repair shop and Cadillac, Spur 133, Quanah, Texas. The Cadillac was in surprisingly good condition.
Attack of the giant chickens, Rustic Relics, Quanah, Texas
Even the chickens in Texas are big. Rusty Relics, Quanah, Texas
Nash Metropolitan automobile, US 287 east of Childress
No lunch any more, Estelline, Texas

This cute little building in Estelline may have been a Valentine Diner. Mr. Arthur Valentine formed Valentine Manufacturing Company in Wichita, Kansas, in 1947 to build small lunch buildings. He sold many to veterans who wanted to start their own businesses in the booming post-war years. The Kansas Historical Society has an interesting history. I photographed another Valentine Diner in Chandler, Oklahoma, in 2017.

Commercial building, 704 Cleveland St., Estelline, Texas
Abandoned farmhouse near Memphis, Texas
Benitez Tire, Hedley, Texas
Taqueria Tijuana, Hedley, Texas
Lonely farmhouse near Clarendon
Abandoned house near Goodnight

The largest number of these abandoned farmhouses are between Childress and Amarillo. It is sad that the families who once lived in these homes moved out. Do they now live in towns? Did the old folks die and their kids moved to sophisticated cities? There may be more derelict houses like these on side roads, but it is possible that they typically clustered along the rail corridor, which is now followed by US 287. I will later post black and white film photographs of these lonely farmhouses.

Gas station, Claude, Texas

My last stop on Route 287 was in Claude at an odd little gas station with zinc or zinc-coated steel roof shingles. These shingles were popular early in the 20th century because they looked like clay tiles but were lighter and cheaper. I photographed this station in 2017 with a digital camera (Panhandle article no. 01).

Santa Rosa


Oops, wrong state. But the dusk light in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, was sublime. 

Rio Pecos Truck Terminal


Summary


Texas is fun for a photographer. The people are friendly and travel is easy. The roads are in good condition and there are plenty of gasoline stations along the way. But beware, other than fast food offal, the Panhandle is a rough place for food outside of Amarillo and Wichita Falls. It is even more of a coffee desert. Take a thermos and brew your own. Also, watch out for rattlesnakes.

Techical Notes


I took these photographs with a Yashica Electro 35CC camera with a fixed 35mm ƒ/1.8 Color-Yashinon DX lens. This is a handy compact camera with an excellent 6-element lens and a genuine rangefinder. “Color” was the advertising buzzword in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, it would be “digital.” I suppose some people are fooled. I scanned the film at 3,600 dpi with a Plustek 7600i film scanner using Silverfast Ai software to control the unit. I saved the scans as 16-bit TIFF files. Silverfast does not have an Ektar 25 profile, but the Royal Gold 1000 profile worked reasonably well. The colors were off, and I sometimes used the grey dropper to select a grey area on the frame as a reference. Some of the colors are slightly odd, but it suits the subject matter (and if I wanted boring perfection, I could use a digital camera or mobile phone). A few frames needed some cleaning or scratch removal; Pixelmator 3.8.8 has one of the best healing tools that I have tried. To resize for this article, I used an old version of ACDSee Pro 2.5 running under Windows XP.