Took a short road trip with my wife to try and find old abandoned houses to photograph. We started by revisiting an old house near Pendleton Mo. Then we worked our way through back roads and spent the night at Mexico Mo. The next day we proceeded with our northwest progress and got a bit north of Moberly before it got too dark, then headed home.

I had a couple theories that I was using on this trip. The first was to try and stay in the flat lands. The hills would have fewer farms and the ones they did have would be poorer. This proved to be correct. The abandoned farm houses in these areas were all modest affairs if not downright shacks.

The second theory had to do with the number of farms per square mile. Without hills or rivers, the roads tend to be laid out in a grid. Often in one mile sections. Each of these sections used to support four quarter-section farms. Now days, any full time farm is going to be a full section or more likely even larger. So, by that theory, each square mile should have at least 3 vacant farm houses. Sound reasoning but twenty or thirty years too late.

We found plenty of evidence of these old houses. A lot of places still had the barns and out buildings that used to surround the house, but the house was gone or just a pile of rotting lumber. Other times you'd come to a small patch of trees were a pump or old foundation stones might still be sticking up and nothing else. Other places everything had been cleared away and you could no longer tell the difference between where the house had stood and the surrounding pasture or cropland.

Those houses were abandoned 30, 40 or 50 years ago. More than enough time for them to collapse into a pile even without any help.

But when those houses were abandoned, that's when the nearby small towns started to die. The small towns are still in process of dying. That's where we found houses to photograph. And in the future that's where I need to go for future road trips.