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alma r.
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
The sky’s the thing
We were looking for something. It wasn’t down this road: at the point where we ran out of pavement and huge puddles took over, it seemed like a good place to turn around. Which put me on the correct side of the car to see these clouds.
Cochran County, Texas
photographed 5.24.2014
This didn’t end well
There’d been a fire at this house; we could tell that much. Judging from the chunks of previously-molten glass and the one piece of aluminum that had melted into a silvery pancake, it was a hot fire. (Aluminum melts at 1,221 degrees, I found out later). Almost nothing remained to give us any clues about what rooms had been where (a pile of broken china might have shown us where the dining room was, but who could tell?) or how big or how old the place might have been.
It’s in a remote part of a remote county, and internet searches didn’t reveal anything about when it happened, or why, or to whom.
We hope everyone made it out.
Cochran County, Texas
photographed 5.24.2014
(This is the third photo from the Day of Driving and Photographing. You can see the first one here and the second one here.)
One Day | One Image 