There's something sad and depressing about abandoned buildings. They are unfulfilled dreams. They are plans interrupted.
And yet there's a certain beauty in nature reclaiming its rightful place, creeping vine by vine through that which could have been.
There once was a thriving cotton mill where dreams of wealth and prosperity should have brought jobs to the mountain people. In the days before air conditioning, locating a mill away from the fields that produced the cotton did make sense. The humidity and heat so important to the growing plants turned out to be damaging to the equipment and the workers confined to the inside of the factory during the heat of the day. Why not use the railroad system already in existence from earlier logging ventures on the sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains? The dream seemed foolproof enough.
Then came a hurricane and wiped away those dreams along with the railroads that supplied the raw materials. King Cotton didn't reign in the mountains. Mother Nature did.
Rumor has it that for many years after the flood, the locals didn't have to buy socks. They picked them from the bushes along the creek banks.
Just something to think about on this Saturday morning.
Catch of the day,
Gretchen
No comments:
Post a Comment