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Bypassed in the Midwest US

T

Tom Robbins

Active member
The rural Midwest of the United States was once vibrant and full of life with small communities supporting the surrounding farms. This began to change a few decades ago due primarily to two factors: the creation of the interstate highway system and rapid increases in the agricultural economy of scale. As a result, road traffic no longer ran through the little towns and families could no longer live on the income from 160 acres of land.

This little service station in Wyanet, Illinois hasn't pumped gas or serviced cars in many years, and is a fairly typical example remnant of better times.

original.jpg

Abandoned Service Station​
 
Asher Kelman

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Tom Robbins said:
The rural Midwest of the United States was once vibrant and full of life with small communities supporting the surrounding farms. This began to change a few decades ago due primarily to two factors: the creation of the interstate highway system and rapid increases in the agricultural economy of scale. As a result, road traffic no longer ran through the little towns and families could no longer live on the income from 160 acres of land.

This little service station in Wyanet, Illinois hasn't pumped gas or serviced cars in many years, and is a fairly typical example remnant of better times.

original.jpg

Abandoned Service Station​
Click to expand...

What you have here also devastated and collapsed the trans-Saharan trading economies when Western European ships started to sail around Western Africa from Eurupe to the "Gold Coast" making the rich trading communities impoverished and then extinct.

Highways do that and so do supermarkets and trading with China!

Progress but at a very high personal cost for those bypassed without forethought or compensation!

In the USA, thousands of steel workers in Pittsburgh, for example, were laid off due to steel being cheaper from the Far East! Then the banks foreclosed on families that had served the USA bravely in several world wars and Korea.

They were just "bipassed" to get product cheaper in the short run and empty the USA of manufacturing ability in so many spheres.

It's nostalgic to see such places frozen in time but these are also something like graveyards where hard working folk had their dreams crushed by progress. So for me it's rather sad and tragic!

Thanks for sharing. We need to be reminded of the other side of "progress"!

Asher
 
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