This building on Old Trail Road in the Waynedale area of Fort Wayne, Indiana was a Big-A Autopro store for as long as I can remember, but it went out of business several years ago and sat empty until this summer when a temporary fireworks shop opened. After the 4th of July, the sign on the store kept announcing a closing date but the date eventually disappeared and the store remains open today. I suspect sales haven’t been good so they’re staying open till they get rid of inventory.
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For years there was a church that met in an old house at the corner of Taylor Street and Ardmore Avenue in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The church, the Emmanuel Assembly, owned a bunch of land along Taylor Street across from Portage Middle School and Lindley Elementary. These signs were posted on trees along the road:
I made these photographs several years ago when the church was still in operation. The church was torn down while I was living in New Mexico, as I discovered after moving back to Fort Wayne, but the signs remained up. Yesterday, while driving up Ardmore, I noticed that the road construction crews working along Taylor had torn out a lot of the trees along the north side of the road. The tree holding the sign in the first photo (You are on your way to Hell…) was gone! The one in the second photo (Sin has an awful cost…) is still there. I always thought those signs were funny, even as a little kid more than 20 years ago when I first saw them. I’m kind of saddened to see it gone.
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Here is the first photo from my second visit to the abandoned farm on Feighner Road in southwest Allen County, Indiana. This little shed sat right behind the farmhouse and was unadorned except for this Victorian style gingerbread decoration on the window frame. I found it interesting, as it did not match the style of the house or any other building there.
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Here is the last of the photographs that I made on those two beautiful foggy days at the beginning of February. This is at the same location on Monroeville Road in rural southeast Allen County, Indiana that I found the bulldozer in my last post. This little shed or shack and a garage closer to the road were all that remained of a farm here.
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I made this photograph way back on February 4, a very foggy day that I spent photographing rural Allen County, Indiana. This bulldozer sat on Monroeville Road in the southeast corner of the county near an abandoned garage and a small shed. The foundation of a house was barely visible in the snow, and it looked as though the bulldozer would finish with the last two buildings as soon as the weather improved.
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