An editorial about exploring and documenting history. This comes from a forgotten (no posts since 2020) site of a Manitoba, Canada, explorer. I couldn't find a name or anything like social media to help find who they are.

Some of you are aware that Canada has never been considered one of the best countries in the world to explore abandoned sites, due to Canada's national policy for demolition projects of derelict buildings or converting derelict properties over to new owners, often into the hands of non-profit organizations. Oftentimes, a non-profit revitalizes a derelict property preserving it into a historical monument for decades to come. Alternatively, many a non-profit just doesn't have the funding to make a complete conversion and a vast number of the buildings remain derelict at the site for decades longer.

These properties are wonderful opportunities for photographers and historians to explore. Unfortunately, for many of us, we don't know they're out there to explore. No one is going to advertise these histories, locations and so on unless you travel the country roads a lot or keep up with the sporadic media reports about these landmarks. Your only other resource is spending unlimited hours in historical archives.

I'm all for preservation of historical sites, but the renovation process often renders the historical artifacts and architectural features obsolete. Once lost, these are never recovered unless someone documents them first. The preservation and renovation leans more to a symbolic historical monument then anything tangible. We need to remember that often times those derelict sites contain histories our culture doesn't want to remember. And that's why we not only call those marginalized and abandoned but also the forgotten one's.

The kinds of explorations some of us do do NOT end up in our Canadian school system's text books. History is continually erased where those would like it to be erased. However, I ask a vital question about this erasure. How does a culture, a nation, whatever this may be learn from their past mistakes in this manner? Perhaps we're all prone to wanting to hide our mistakes, shove them in a deep, dark closet or up into a musky, damp attic until the day we throw it all away or demolish it out of sight and memory.

Sometimes we can't even do that, as in the cases of nuclear tragedies such as Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Well, as some of us know, this is when we encounter the BS campaigns, orchestrated by governments, the international media and big corporations that have an invested interest in these outcomes. And they would just like us to know they would prefer we know as little as possible. Happy, ignorant sheep continue to be consumers, and every nation needs consumers. Some of us are still waking up' and enraged that democracy seems to have very little to do with 'protecting' the people and more to do with protecting big corporation, this includes the lies and coverups to cover up all the environmental disasters throughout history due to big corporation.

This also includes the cover ups of institutionalized 'mental asylums' where those not wanted in society were suddenly labeled with a 'mental disorder'. Imagine living in a generation where parents or your husband, just thoroughly sick of you for whatever reason, you've become an emotional or financial burden, maybe your husband didn't want to suffer the public embarrassment of divorcing you? So they could just drop you off at the nearest asylum? You have to wonder if those family members slept at night considering the 'cutting edge' therapeutic technologies that went on in asylums, like lobotomies, ice baths, electric shock therapy and brutal restraints to name a few.

This is why it's so essential for some of us to document what we can before it all fades. For me, sometimes it's a fine line between truth and deception, life and death and giving honor to those who have been forgotten, most often buried in unidentified graves. Just another number. No name. Their voices muted and then demolished out of memory. Out of history. This is my passion. Follow us this year as we travel and document Manitoba's abandoned places. Sometimes haunted places. The voices of the past still speak, of our ancestors, our history, right out of their unidentified graves, if we listen closely enough.

I noticed this quote on an abandoned Blogger site today.

"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on Earth which can make them come back again." - Henri Cartier-Bresson

It applies to almost everything photographed. From a smiling child to the sun itself. Nothing stays exactly the same forever and the photographer won't be standing in the same spot, with that same angle, at that same time either. Something will be different, maybe just the weather. Maybe how the photographer feels or gets different perspective. Life is about change, but a photograph can capture what was there, while it was there.

This is what rephotography can showcase. The changes over time and other changes to our culture.

I looked at the photos of barns in this post. To me, most of them are inactive, not actually abandoned. They are still maintained, enough to not be falling down, don't look salvaged for barn boards, etc. So, they didn't really seem abandoned or derelict. Probably someone else would consider any barn not actively used to be abandoned. I guess it is all perspective. Are you someone using a barn or someone photographing it, looking at it for history, art, or industry/ agriculture or architecture?

I have not (so far) found a link to the photographer, John H. Busch or his fellow explorer, Mary Lynn Busch. There are good points in the post about exploring, history and photographing old places in Ontario. I've copied and pasted parts of the post, not in order so I can keep topics, like photographing the barns together.

Tips for Photographing Abandoned Barns

It’s interesting how you can photograph the same subject several times in one day and capture a different result each time, depending on the location of the sun, cloud cover, and location of the point of view. I learned through experience that my best colour photos are taken on cloudy days, but it is hard to exclude sunny-day shadows for good contrast.

I have shot and compiled a selection of these abandoned barns. For various reasons, it’s sometimes difficult to get the proper perspective while photographing these structures. Some are set far back from the road; there is often the presence of trees and foliage; and sometimes the time of day isn’t ideal. I believe some of my best photos of these barns were taken during the winter months, due to the absence of foliage, but ironically some of the best colours were during the summer months. Most of the barns are plain and unpainted, but a few are painted “barn red” while the odd one is white or green.

The Beginning of the End

The barns with missing boards or ones that have had part of their metal roofs blown off are the ones I refer to as doomed. Once this process begins, the barn will collapse relatively quickly. A year or two of rain on the dry hardwood beams, coupled with an entry for the wind to blow through, often speeds up the process. Gravity always seems to win in the end.

Another factor that contributes to the disappearance of these old barns is economics, including property taxes. Once the landowner realizes that the barn, which is often completely empty, is costing extra money in tax assessment, an excavator is brought in and the barn is dismantled quickly, often leaving the original farmhouse as the only building on the property.

To this day, terms such as “top plate, girt, corner post, brace, bent, mortise and tenon” still come to mind whenever I see different barns.

Source: Readers Digest: Abandoned Barns of Southwestern Ontario | Our Canada

If you were to divide urban exploration into three basic groups I think it would have to be buildings, drains/tunnels and the third would be transportation. I could be wrong and, no doubt, the whole thing is debatable. However, when I think about trying to fit in the various exploring locations and structures, that's how I sum it up.

It's all part of urban exploration. Explorers aren't just in the city looking at old buildings. Urban explorers are rooftopping, looking underground in tunnels and drains. Urban explorers are in rural areas too, looking at abandoned farms, farm equipment, old churches and so on. Urban explorers are in industrial places, looking at abandoned and derelict mines, steel plants and industrial machines they may never see anywhere else.

Airplanes, aircraft, trains, ships and boats are the transportation sort of wrecks you might think of first. There are also car wrecks, but none of these are photographed at the scene of a horrible accident. People who chase wrecks (as urban explorers) are not the ambulance chasers or reporters trying to win a spot on the front page of a newspaper.

Wreck chasers are looking for the neglected, abandoned and forgotten wreckage from the transportation industry: trucks, cars, ships, boats, planes, trains, city.

Far from looking for human pain and suffering, wreck chasers are looking at the pain of the abandoned machines, the rusted out hulks and the sadly decayed remains of the man made, mighty machines.

Myself, I have found abandoned trains, abandoned tractors and mainly abandoned vehicles: cars and trucks and one city bus.

I've seen one abandoned car, left to die after it was damaged in part of a house fire. Another was left at the site of a house which was being demolished to make way for a shopping plaza or maybe new housing so there would be someone to shop at the plazas already in the area.

The abandoned bus I found was behind a fence, far outside the city of Toronto, where the bus had originally run in it's day.

The abandoned train was on an abandoned, forgotten train track. Far out in a rural area, I found two trains, one a much older train than the other. Both had the big engine and several cars in between. Only the older one had a caboose.

If you drive on the highway between Toronto and Hamilton you may notice an old tall ship floating at a bend in the road. It was once made over into a restaurant. Sometime later vandals set it on fire. There isn't a lot left of the old ship now. But, you can get there, just off the highway, if you study the map a bit and find the exit.

I've yet to see an abandoned airplane. Likely you would find some at airports, planes which someone used to own and then didn't come back to maintain or fly any more.

Why do we assume historical places are haunted?

I would not say I don’t believe in ghosts. But, in my experience there are far less hauntings and haunted places than people would have you think.

I like to visit old buildings. Usually, living in a rural area of Ontario, I explore abandoned farms and farm houses. I like the houses in particular. I have explored at least 50 different old homes in various states of ruin and I have never had an experience which made me feel spooky, scared or consider any place to be haunted.

At most I think I once accidentally stepped on a toad in the long grass. That was gross enough. I get shudders just remembering. But, that was far from being ghost related.

Terry Boyle writes about local history and ghosts in Ontario, Canada.

I have quickly picked up each of his books as I find them. I don’t look for ghost stories but I do want to know about my own local history. (I consider all of Ontario to be at least somewhat local for me). Also, I will visit (and/ or have already seen) the places Terry Boyle has written about. I even have the photographs I’ve taken from my travels and adventures.

Maybe ghost lore and stories of haunted places come about from the loneliness of the locations and not the actual presence of anything spooky. Just the feeling that something was lost there, something has been abandoned and left to fall into ruin. Abandoned houses are sad. Old ruins are mysterious and that would be enough to make them seem haunted to anyone who wanted to find something more than just a sad, lonely and neglected place.

You can’t find the history of a place just from a visit there. I love finding a new (old) place. There is history and mystery to any old, ruined place. But, you need to research, talk to people and dig a bit to get more than photos and your own first impressions.

History is all about the story.

Terry Boyle Interview with Bookends TV