When I find places like this – abandoned farmhouses – I don’t know anything about who lived there or why they left, of course. That leaves me to create a narrative, which is usually more or less the same: farming/ranching got too unaffordable and the family had to leave.

This farmhouse had at least two resident owls. And a brand-new KitchenAid dishwasher, still in the original box, and a stack of printed book-covers like I remember from school but that I don’t think anyone uses any more. And I wonder if Alma R signed the wall the day she left, or if that was a later addition by some visiting vandals.

Cochran County, Texas
photographed 5.31.2026