On The Road Home

This summer I headed to Edison, NE for a family reunion.  A long drive through Kansas from Kansas City to a disappearing town that my family has lived in for over 130 years.  The White family arrived in the 1870's and the Martin family in 1892.  

The thing that I had always remembered about the trip up there was the beauty of the plains and the abandonment of them.  This abandonment, and what it left behind, has always interested me...it is one of my favorite subjects to photograph.  There is something about those deserted farms that draws me to them.

When the White family moved to Edison in the 1870's they took over a homestead from a man who had been there two years and couldn't handle it.  On the land they built, first a sod house and second a two story wooden structure.  Three generations of White and Martin children were raised in that house.

In the mid-1990's, after my Great Grandmother passed, the house, which had been empty for twenty years, decayed and lonely, was torn down.  It is an incredible feeling to stand in what is now a prosperous crop, where the dooryard of the house once was, and look over the land, the creek, the railroad tracks, as generations before me have done.  To see some semblance of what John White saw when the family rolled up to that spot in their covered wagon.  But that missing house, the history of the lives lived there, are what sparked the need to photograph other farms that have fallen into disrepair, that have been abandoned, like ours.

These are those farms...