Day 2 — 14 April 2017

Got up this morning and opened the curtains. Found a wind turbine immediately outside my window. They’re everywhere! And the wind was really howling again today.

After a tasty (?) Best Western breakfast, we were on the road by 8:45. Our first order of business was to backtrack 10 miles to Mullinsville to see the outsider artwork of M.T. Liggett. He is an amazing, prolific sculptor in (primarily) junk steel, with a strong right-wing political bent to his work. Most of his pieces are posted along the fence on two sides of his property, and along another fence along Highway 54 just outside of town. Most of the pieces in this secondary location were kinetic, whirling in the howling wind under a heavily overcast sky. His collected work was overwhelming, whimsical, and disturbing. His is an unusual genius. If you'd like to know more about him, check out this link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._T._Liggett  Below are several shots that cover only a tiny portion of what is there.

 

Then on to Turon to view our first elevator of the day (#8), a small one next to the track.

While traveling through Preston, I spied another elevator (#9) that looked promising. We turned off to investigate. It turned out to be an old all-steel structure on the pattern of the wooden ones.

It’s a great pleasure to be traveling through the beautiful farm country of Kansas on this pleasant, cloudy day, with the intensely green fields and endless horizons.

A forced detour off Hwy. 61 took us by Abbyville, so went there to investigate.  We found no old grain elevators but we did find a dirt street called Abby Road. At the end of Abby Road was a house that had in its yard (I kid you not) half a dozen old VW Beetles. We also found a nice railroad sign proclaiming the location.

In Partridge, sandwiched between the highway and the railroad, is a concrete elevator (#10) that has been converted into a residence. Cool!

In Hutchinson, after getting gas and splitting a bag of Doritos for lunch, Vance spotted a little Plymouth switcher at a big concrete grain elevator. This locomotive actually had a license plate (for street running?).

We made a brief stop at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson (which isn’t spherical) to see the rocket outside and the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane inside the lobby (the building was built around it). It was surprisingly enormous.

At Inman we stopped briefly to look at an unusual brick elevator (#11) disguised as an office building.

A high point of this trip was a visit to the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg, Kansas. This town is an old Swedish enclave on the Prairie and looks like a very pleasant place to live. We went to the museum to see the paintings of Birger Sandzén and woodcut prints by Herschel Logan. It was well worth the visit. Vance and I were the only visitors and we had a friendly and informative conversation with one of the curators, who knew a great deal about both artists.

While passing through Assaria we photographed another grain elevator (#12), this one somewhat larger than most of those we’ve seen before. While we were taking pictures, a fellow came charging toward us on a forklift, demanding to know what the hell we were doing there. When we explained our mission he calmed down quite a bit and finished up by telling us where to go to get his favorite brew. When we said good-bye he went back to the office in his forklift, evidently his preferred mode of transport.

We struck gold in Mentor, just down the road from Assaria, where we found two more old wooden elevators (#13, 14), one across the street from the other. The newer-looking one, we found out, was privately owned by the fellow driving the tractor in the picture and actually still in use.

Then on to Salina, where we met Richard and Harriet Nelson at their home in the country. Richard is a garden railroader who has been featured in Garden Railways magazine several times. He gave us a grand tour of all of his railway activities, including the albums of photos illustrating the construction of his railroad and buildings, then the railroad itself, and finally the individual structures, which hadn’t been put out. We spent about two hours with them.

On the periphery of downtown Salina we came across a nice old stone Missouri Pacific station.

And from there we spied a more extensive brick station still in use by the Union Pacific.

After a surprisingly good Korean meal at (evidently) Salina's only Korean restaurant, we found a place to camp out for the night and retired.