Posted on 11/18/2010 4:40:57 PM PST by decimon
The ghosts of thousands of long-forgotten villages haunt Britain, inhabitations suddenly deserted and left to ruin. As a new campaign begins to shed further light on these forgotten histories, the Magazine asks - what happened and why?
Albert Nash, blacksmith for 44 years in the village of Imber, Wiltshire, was found by his wife Martha slumped over the anvil in his forge.
He was, in her words, crying like a baby.
It was the beginning of November 1943, a day or two after Mr Nash and the rest of the villagers had been told by the War Office they had 47 days to pack their bags and leave, to make way for US forces.
Within weeks Mr Nash had died. Folklore had it that the death certificate said the cause was a broken heart.
Imber, once a Saxon settlement, is one of thousands of British ex-villages - once thriving communities that succumbed to natural or human forces, like disease, coastal erosion, industrial decline, reservoirs or war.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
:’)
On the bright side I did have an xtimes Grandmother named Underhill which made me a life long Hobbit fan.
Ghost towns! We have several within 50 miles of us, her in the Black Hills. That was mining. Also within 50 miles, we have a few others, mainly died when rail lines were abandone.
Another one was associated with an ordinance depot that was closed down in 1967. http://www.igloo-sd.com/
Our house in Oregon was less than a mile from a mining camp/ghost town, Buncom. Three to 6 miles in any of the 3 ways out of it, were other mining era ghost towns.
http://www.buncom.org/
In Nevada, we have visited some remote sites of ghost towns that had fairly large populations; one had up to 50,000 people, and was the county seat until a second devastating fire in a short period of time finished it off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton,_Nevada
http://brianbutko.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/hamilton-nv-a-lincoln-highway-ghost-town/
http://www.ghosttowngallery.com/htme/belmontmill.htm
And Idaho...had lunch here. http://www.ghosttowngallery.com/htme/silvercityid.htm
From the Oregon side, some of the road from Jordan Valley is really rotten; not so bad leaving, to get down to the west side Snake River Highway.
There was an article in National Geographic (January 2008) about an abandoned town in North Dakota. There were pictures of the decaying schoolhouse with books still on the desks.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/emptied-north-dakota/bowden-text
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/emptied-north-dakota/richards-photography
I have contacted Jim Thompson about your problems posting articles from socialist websites and i hope he zots your ass..:>)
Commenting on your article “shit happens” and then people get over it and move..
I think I will check it out on audiobook.
I started “World Without End” and didn’t like it. Actually, I couldn’t connect with the characters at all. I hate to sound so negative, really. I’m picky.
EXACTLY my reaction.
Die Englander would all be speaking German now if it weren’t for the Americans. Its nice to be appreciated.
But, what the hell, they will all be extinct in 100 years anyway from the Muslim bastards they have allowed into their Country without so much as a .22 being fired in defense of it.
Westminster will make a great Mosque.
Wasn’t the Dark Ages “dark” because they hadn’t invented color photography yet? Also, the trend of the day to use indirect lighting might have contributed to the name.
:’D
Opportunity knocking, and infant mortality due in part to overcrowding, led to my various ancestors’ one-way trips to America. Of course, I’ve got almost no cousins with my name, but an awfully large number of (known) cousins. Most of ‘em don’t know they’re related, because most people don’t know anyone older than their grandparents.
The nice part about some of the western ghost towns is, due to the dry air, they decay very slowly. Here, they just vanish, or they’re down to one structure, which is now a private home. Singapore MI, which was right on the Lake, burned down a couple of times, the second time occurred right at the end of the lumbering, so it wasn’t rebuilt. Pier Cove’s economy life ended due to a frost which destroyed their fruit tree business (that event led to the Red Haven peach, I think), but some people held on. Some years ago a friend and I wandered around the woods and found the remains of old homesteads. A few years later a developer built a posh new neighborhood on the site.
http://saugatuckdouglas.com/history.html
http://www.gangestownship.org/history.htm
Let me know how you like it...I bet you will.
Ken Follet’s “The Pillars of the Earth” was one of the best books I ever read!
Is this one as good?
One of my favorite places is Banack in Montana. It’s a gold rush ghost town. There’s just something about it.
I will say that the person who who compiled our genealogy was drunk or mad, a cousin, my father thought that she was touched. I ran across some collateral family in Upstate NY and am slowly getting some idea of what really happened.
I certainly enjoyed it as much...I’m assuming you’ve already read “World Without End”, the sequel to Pillars...if not, you’ve got another treat in store.
I’ve often wondered how Americans would react to living in a landscape that had architectural proof of its habitation for 2000 or more years before we got here.
Of course, there *were* people living here, but they didn’t leave much, since they didn’t really believe in permanent settlements. So we have a mighty tendency to think of America as a pristine landscape, without a human past, before “we” - European descendants - got here.
My own small city was created as a ferry landing by the very first Europeans to settle in NJ. It’s remained an important part of NJ history ever since then in the 1680s. None of the original buildings from the Colonial Period are left, of course. The entire town has been torn down and rebuilt so many times that it’s almost impossible to imagine the 19th century version, much less the 18th century, or Colonial Era. There was money to be made in destroying those “old” buildings, no matter how much the historical community argued otherwise.
It’s obvious when you look at the care and materials that were lavished on those earlier structures that the builders thought they were giving an enduring gift to generations to come. Their care was wasted on future generations. Nowadays most buildings are expected to have a lifetime that will probably not outlast the current owner’s children - the very materials that they are made from begin to disintegrate after a few decades. We seem to believe in using up all the resources we can, and letting the future generations shift for themselves.
Architecture is perhaps the greatest everyday reminder of the lives and struggles and successes that those before us experienced. I wish we here in the US had the same living history to walk through as do these Britons.
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