Robert Pence

Beautiful woods; I love walking in the woods on our farm in Spring before the mosquitoes take it over. It's marshy in spots, and two creeks flow together at one corner of it. The deer think it's their own place, and I've seen them often.

Here ya' go! Can't beat the price, and I'll bet no one would steal it!

I found a few odds and ends: old heat registers shimmed into place with 1905 newspapers, indicating when the house first got central heat; a suit coat inside the wall with a tailor's tag bearing the name of a former owner of the house, obviously a very small fellow; a wall papered with pages from a flower-seed catalog dated 1889 and later covered over; a small oil can inside a wall that was replaced during a kitchen remodeling in the 1940s (some workman probably looked all over for it); dates written on plaster under many layers of wallpaper, 1914 in one room and 1937 in another. There was more, and I put back what I could and left undisturbed what I could. I added my own odds and ends, newspapers, notes with a date, my signature, and the signatures of people who helped me unload trucks and hang drywall. Before I rehabbed this place I rented it out. Almost every person who lived here reported some kind of encounter with/awareness of a presence in the house. While I was working on it and for a while after I moved in, I experienced some disconcerting phenomena. Things seem to have reached a state of equilibrium now.

Apparently sometime between 1858-1860. The land first sold as an individual parcel in 1858 for $12, and again in 1860 for $200, and an early illustrated map of the area shows some sort of structure that appears to be in this location. An 1880 illustrated birdseye view of the city clearly shows it. From the time it was built into the 1940s, it appears to have had some sort of addition or major remodeling every 10-20 years. When I rehabbed it in the 1980s I gutted it to a shell. It was fairly easy to identify the ages of the different parts from the materials and types of construction. Some of the work, probably during the great depression, was done with salvaged materials.

I recall an article that said that the Wabash Railroad named its train for the song, and not vice versa. I haven't seen any confirmation or refutation of that elsewhere. The Wabash and PRR tracks through downtown are eleveated, and the Wabash waiting room was one storey above street level. It had lots of large windows. The interior was finished in white terra cotta tile, making for a very bright, open-feeling space. The Wabash Depot was razed about 1973, and had a fire at night after demolition began. I know of at least three demolitions by that contractor that burned after work was started. The fires expedited demolition and consumed large quantities of materials that otherwise would have had to have been hauled away and disposed of. I wouldn't want to imply anything illegal or environmentally irresponsible; the fires probably were just coincidences. Those open vistas along the Wabash and PRR rights-of-way are now completely overgrown and choked off by ailanthus altissima (stink trees/trees of heaven), the former PRR has been single-tracked, and the PRR platforms have been bulldozed.

A few 1970 photos from my personal archive:

The various roads stopped operating passenger trains one day, and Amtrak started up the next. The only major passenger-carrying roads that didn't go in with Amtrak at the outset, I think, were Southern and Rio Grande. Of the approximately 4,800 pooled pieces of "Heritage Fleet" rolling stock (cars and locomotives), only about 1,200 pieces were deemed fit for use or worthy of rehabilitating. The Broadway Limited consist that day included Penn Central locomotives and fluted stainless steel Penn Central cars, and some smooth-sided Union Pacific cars in Armour Yellow. Those continued to show up in the Broadway for quite some time. The mix-and-match consists were problematic in some cases, because despite the basic similarities, each railroad had some of its own unique features. Maintenance and on-board crews didn't always know how to operate or trouble-shoot things like temperature controls, for example. My first long-distance trip on Amtrak was to San Francisco in 1973. I went coach (never again!), and the car I rode in was former Santa Fe, still in its original livery and with its original seating. It was v-a-a-a-astly superior in comfort to anything Amtrak operates today. The seats had springs and deep padding and full leg rests, and reclined waaay back. The coach would have been quite adequate for overnight travel if not for the troop of long-unshowered Boy Scouts who boarded in the middle of the night someplace in Colorado and proceeded to remove their shoes.

Has the Belle Isle Zoo gone extinct?

First run of Amtrak's version of the Broadway Limited - May 1, 1971 The original photos are 120 Ektrachrome transparencies. The've never been projected, and the only way I've ever seen them before was to hold them up to the light. On May 1, 1971, Amtrak's much-watered-down version of the former flagship of the Pennsylvania Railroad made its first stop in Fort Wayne. I was there to document its 45-minute-late arrival with a broken-down locomotive, and the splicing on of a Penn Central freight unit to help it on its way. While I was waiting at the former PRR depot, I took a photo of the Wabash depot across the tracks and a block east. The Cannonball, last train to stop there, had made its last run the previous day. Train 40 arrives: Until I scanned these transparencies this evening, I never realized that the elderly gentleman in the brown suit, walking toward the camera, was the man who became my next-door neighbor a year later when I bought my first house.<br>

I think Toledo is in a rivalry with Fort Wayne to see who can lay out the most incentives and investment to attract carriers who will pack up and leave in a year or two. They're only a hundred miles apart, give or take. Maybe they should pool their money and effort and build a joint facility at, say, Defiance. The Fort-to-Port Highway makes it a natural choice; it would be equally inconvenient for both cities. The people who already drive from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis could continue to do so, and the people from Toledo who already drive to Detroit, likewise. :|

Was that photo taken at Lake Woebegon? :-)

Visually very appealing, and excellent photos. Upscale shopping and residential areas intimidate me because they're way outside my league, though. No matter how hard I try to "pass," I'm always sure that the locals will spot me as a commoner and set their dogs upon me.

Beautiful set. Gettysburg is such a gorgeous place if you can get past the ghosts. Maybe the answer to that is to save the battlefield for last.

Some inspiring rehabs and infill, and an excellent job of documenting them. Thanks.

But the earphones protect you from having to listen to the unpleasant sound of the approaching car that is about to painfully grind you into the asphalt!

Around here, "family" equates with "suburban," and on the rivergreenway they reflect their conditioning that the whole world is their own private two-and-a-half-acre yard. Sometimes I'll come upon a family that has stopped for a break or to gawk at something and parked their bikes obstructing the path. One well-directed kick in passing can send the whole batch down in a clattering heap. Sort a metaphor for a strike in bowling. I probably reinforce their view that the city is full of dangerous crazies and criminals and cause them to never return.

^True. The arrogance of the railroads in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they were the only option for transporting time-sensitive or perishable goods over long distances, engendered animosity whose carryover still shapes some popular attitudes toward them. They arbitrarily raised freight tarriffs without advance notice, eating up much of the profits their shippers might have made and sometimes ruining shippers whose business plans had been based on previous rates. Their extortionist practices gave impetus to government regulation to protect the public from predatory "rail barons." The safety bicycle, with two wheels of moderate diameter and propulsion via chain and sprockets instead of a very large front wheel driven directly by pedals, was invented in the 1880s and made bicycling a viable, safe mode of transport. Mass production put safety bicycles within reach of working-class people, and made it possible for hourly workers and shop clerks to live out from under the shadows of the enterprises that employed them. The League of American Wheelmen, forerunner of todays League of American Bicyclists, was formed to lobby for the creation of paved roads and streets for the comfort, convenience, and safety of bicycle riders. America's earliest paved streets preceded the advent of motor cars by several years. Bellefontaine, Ohio, lays claim to the first concrete-paved street in America, a section of Main Street on one side of the Courthouse Square paved in 1891. Main Street has since been paved over with asphalt, but Court Avenue, concrete-paved soon after main street still retains its exposed original surface.

I wonder how they propose to do that without compromising the grand space that exists now. The last two photos were taken in 1979, and they've already committed some travesties against it, since then.

Wow! Beautiful photos, and they show a part of Williamsport I never knew about. The Weightman Block is glorious in its size and elaborate style.

Then by your own argument, neither our roads or our aviation system are economically justified either. Roads have never paid for more than roughly 2/3 of their capital costs, and it's similar for aviation. ... and as I keep reminding folks, and as was touched upon earlier, railroads are for-profit entities and are taxed on their rolling stock and on real estate they use for right-of-way, yards, and other operational facilities. Highways and airports are owned by municipalities, and the land used to build them disappears from the tax rolls. Their creation results in increased costs in law enforcement, traffic management, and emergency response while eroding the property-tax base, and greater part of the increased cost of municipal services falls upon local businesses and homeowners, and farmers. The responsibility for enforcement, traffic management, and emergency response for new interstate highways falls upon the states, and in many cases the opening of a new interstate or other limited-access expressway is accompanied by the ownership and responsibility for existing state higways being relinquished to cities, towns, and counties. Those local roads seldom are abandoned or torn up, because they provide access for local residents and businesses, and their fiscal burden shifts from the states to local municipalities and their taxpayers. Promoters of new interstate highway construction win local support by extolling the 80-90% Federal and state underwriting of construction costs, but they never bring up the long-term local side-effects.

Cute little town, but the commercial district looks largely vacant.

Derrick James was in Fort Wayne for the Rally for Rail early in April, and I got a chance to speak with him briefly after the event. He's an excellent spokesman to go before the public; he's sharp, personable, and persuasive. Indiana is making some progress, but it's going to take some work to get Mitch "My Way IS The Highway" fully on board.

A lot of people's lives have been changed for the worse by combat experiences, and it's a national disgrace that they go unacknowledged and untreated. It looks like Joe was an extraordinarily intelligent guy who got derailed, and it's possible no one even tried to help him get back on track.

In the 1950s the parking lot would have been cheek-to-jowl with early 20th century working-class houses. I remember when some houses still stood across the street from the PRR depot and along the cross street on the near side of that block. The railroad right-of-way was manicured and kept free of trees and brush, and I've read that nearly forty trains a day stopped at the depot. The rest of the photos from that morning are here

Lima-built steam locomotive NKP 765 passes the former Pennsylvania Railroad depot in Fort Wayne en route to North Judson, Indiana, to run weekend excursions between North Judson and Lacrosse. 70-300mm Nikkor lens cranked all the way out and the image further cropped in Photoshop. Shot from the observation deck of the 312-foot, 1930 Art Deco Lincoln Tower.