Naval Reserve Center, 181 Jefferson Street, Jackson, MS

Just west of the Mississippi State Fairgrounds, there is a distinctive blue and white building at 181 Jefferson Street. The Reserve Center, with its ship-like façade, opened in 1949 as a training facility for the Navy and Marine Corps. According to the Mississippi Heritage Trust (which has a very interesting web page: http://www.mississippiheritage.com/list07.html ), the center was designed by architect John L. Turner.

The building was last used in 2000. It belongs to the City of Jackson and appears to be deteriorating quickly. It's sad because I think the architect was very successful at linking the building's design with its purpose and evoking a sense of the sea.

Small Towns in Mississippi: Hermanville

Hermanville is a small agricultural town about six miles east of Port Gibson on MS Highway 18. The town was probably more prosperous in the past, but not much is happening here now. People hang around, stores are closed, and the shopette sells cigs and beer coolers. The surrounding area has cotton and soybean fields and timber. What can be done to revive towns like this? We can send a trillion Dollars to bail out the politically-connected investment banks in New York but yet allow small towns to rot away?




A friend and I stopped to take photographs. The locals were a bit curious and friendly. They may not get many tourists here.















Drive west on Highway 80 towards Port Gibson and you come to "The Store," a classic Mississippi juke joint. We stopped to photograph. The proprietor came by in a pickup truck full of little kids. She was very nice and said she was trying to make a living and did not allow any violence or drugs in her place. She invited us to come by some Friday night.



I took the color photographs with a Sony DSC-W7 digital camera. And I exposed the black and white frames on Kodak Panatomic-X fine-grain film using a Fuji GW690II 6x9 camera. I developed it in Rodinol 1:50. The classic thin-emulsion Panatomic-X is my all-time favorite film. Used carefully, it shows astonishing detail. I still have plenty in the freezer and plan to keep using it.

The Volkswagen Disposal Yard, Raymond, Mississippi

Raymond is a handsome little town southwest of Jackson, Mississippi. It features an elegant courthouse, historical buildings, and Hinds Junior College. But northwest of town on state Highway 467 is something just as unique: the place where old Volkswagens come to rest (maybe forever). To find it, drive west out of town on Main Street, and just after the Raymond-Bolton Road leads off to the right, look to the right and you will see a field full of mid-century examples of the people's car.



I have never seen anyone there, but a coworker said he occasionally sees a gent fixing a car. Also, every now and then a slightly less beat-up example appears on the grass near the mobile home, so there clearly is some sort of flux of parts and bodies.

Volkswagen Beetles are fun and plenty of folks have a fondness for them. But I'm not sure how many of these examples will ever go to good homes. This is a humid environment, so rust takes its toll.





Look at the Type 412 (the red body) in the third picture. I remember these things. They were introduced around 1973 and only came with automatic transmission for the US market. Volkswagen was ahead of its time with gauging the American public's ineptness to manage complex technology like a clutch pedal (or gauging its laziness). The 412s did not last long in the market.



In the fourth photograph you can see a US-made first generation Rabbit. I never knew why they changed the name from Golf, which was used in the European versions. The Rabbit was pretty crummy because it had been Americanized with a softer suspension, softer seats, and other compromises that took away the fun factor. Unreliability and a tendency to rust didn't help its reputation. But the diesels got 50 mpg in the 1980s.

Update: Please click the link to see a similar Volkswagen yard in Moab, Utah.

Update September 2020: The VW yard has fewer cars in it than before. I do not know if the repair business is still operating. While driving by, I saw only beetles, with no busses or other models.

The Mississippi River Basin Model, Jackson, MS

The Mississippi River Basin Model at the Waterways Experiment Station (WES) was the largest hydraulic model ever built. It was also the most complex attempt ever undertaken to model the river system that drains a good part of the North American continent. The purpose of the model was to test the behavior of the 1.25 million square mile Mississippi River and Tributaries Project and evaluate levees, floodways, cutoffs, and reservoirs. The ambitious project was conceived by Lt. General Eugene Reybold in the early 1940s after smaller models had proven their worth in examining the behavior of individual projects.


During World War II, many engineers and technicians were serving in the war effort and manpower was scarce. General Reybold arranged to use German prisoners of war as laborers to clear and prepare the site. A site was chosen in Clinton, Mississippi, about 35 miles east of the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg. By the end of the war, about 1,800 prisoners of the Afrika Korps were living nearby in an internment camp. I have read that many of these men were engineers and highly-trained professionals who worked on the project with enthusiasm and typical German precision and engineering prowess. (Also, this assignment may have been a bit more pleasant than cutting timber in lumber camps in Wisconsin in winter.). Some of the officers married Clinton women.

The project took 20 years to complete, with the last sections finished in 1966. WES used the model during the great flood of 1973 to predict what would happen if the Old River Control Structure in Louisiana were to fail, allowing a major portion of the of the Mississippi system's water to flow down the Atchafalaya watershed. The last use was in 1993, during the record-breaking floods of the Mississippi system in the upper Midwest. When the Corps planned to breach some of the main stem levees near Prairie du Rocher and Fort de Chartres, Illinois, the model was partially revived to examine water flow and effects of the levee breaches. The Corps finally closed the project permanently and turned the land over to the City of Jackson in 1993. The City of Jackson mowed the grass through 2006, but abandoned all maintenance after that.

The concrete portions of the model are still largely intact. You can easily visit the site by taking Springridge Road south from Interstate 20 and then turning left on McRaven Road. Turn left into Buddy Butts Park. Part of the site has a fence, but much of it has fallen down. The land is no longer clear as in the aerial photograph above, and brush and trees are slowly taking over. But, as of January 2010, you can still easily climb the observation platforms, walk around in the river basins, and pretend that you have walked from Morgan City to Sioux City.

The concrete shaping of the landscape was amazing. Imagine the survey skill required to precisely shape the terrain representing a major portion of the continent. The little pegs in the channels are friction elements.

Some of the buildings are falling down, but several of the control houses are largely intact.

Stevens paper chart recorders

The control buildings still have rows of Stevens paper chart recorders on shelves, abandoned in place just as if the technicians planned to return to work some morning. One of my coworkers was a property officer and remembers how she had to record the serial numbers on all the instruments and pumps annually. (July 2016 update: the recorders have been stolen.)

The massive pumps are still in place, slowly rusting and getting overgrown. From what I can tell, the City of Jackson does not maintain anything on the site. This is a good example of how nature takes over, a small scale experiment of the transitions speculated in the History Channel's Life After People.

I took these photographs on January 18, 2010 with an Olympus E-330 digital camera. The first three photographs in this blog are courtesy of the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, Engineer Research and Development Center, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Update May 7, 2013 (anniversary of V.E. Day): The historian of Mississippi Valley Division, Mr. Charles Camillo, generously sent me this photograph of the POWs working on one of the drainage canals. Date and photographer not recorded. 

Update July 26, 2016: For more photographs of the Basin Model, please click the links:

http://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2010/12/update-mississippi-basin-model-further.html

http://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2010/07/update-on-mississippi-basin-model-in.html

http://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2013/01/mississippi-basin-model-construction.html

http://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2015/11/mississippi-river-basin-model.html

UPDATE JULY 2017:  A volunteer organization has been formed to clean and clear the site and develop it as an education/interpretive center. Readers interested in participating in the cleanup work, please contact: 

Sarah McEwen

President, Friends of the Mississippi River Basin Model

601-376-9131

Twitter: @MSRiverBasinMod

Facebook: @FriendsofMississippiRiverBasin Model

An Introduction and some thoughts

Introduction

Deserted factories, institutions, schools, and houses always fascinated me. Who built these things, what did they do there, and what were their dreams and aspirations? Why were they abandoned? Did the structures no longer serve their intended purpose? Did politicians decide to no longer support an institution? Did a shop get closed because of urban flight and inner city decay?

Houses are especially difficult. Families once lived there, raised their children there, and went through the cycles of joy, sadness, success, and despair experienced by all families. But why are some houses left in such a state that it looks like the former residents simply walked out one night and never came back?

As a photographer, I always liked the patterns, shapes, and debris found in abandoned or unused structures. I like "complicated" scenes, and old structures offer plenty of potential for frames filled with patterns and minute detail.

I also like the sense of grandeur in many of our late-1800s and early-1900s industrial buildings. They were built with pride to last for decades or centuries. This was so different from our current "let's see how cheaply and crappily we can build it and get away with it" mentality. The sense of space, light, and shadow is unique in many of these old structures.

This photography blog will be an ongoing effort. When I photograph something interesting, I will try to post it. All comments and suggestions are welcome!

Personal note: I am Andy and live in Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA. I travel often to destinations around the world. Most of my photography is with film, and I use a number of film cameras of different formats. My dad taught me to use his Leica IIIC rangefinder camera in the 1960s, and I am still regularly using it. I started using medium format film in 1981, when I bought a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera in Houston, Texas. But you will also see some digital work on these pages. Digital cameras have come and gone. They just do not do much for me emotionally. Please keep tuned in, and I will try to keep this blog interesting.